Rebounding woes plague Penn

Adam Chubb looked good on the Las Vegas hardwood, in his button-down shirt and khakis.

But the Penn men's basketball big man would have looked a lot better to his team in a Quakers uniform.

Penn has been out-rebounded by an average margin of 34.5-22.8 in its four games so far. And while Chubb, who has been sidelined with a stress fracture and likely will be out for four more games, wouldn't have erased that 11.7 rebound-per-game deficit, he certainly could have helped on the boards for the Red and Blue.

Chubb is listed at 6-foot-9 (strangely, he was listed at 6-10 last year) and holds the Penn high jump record. He averaged 3.1 rebounds in 14.9 minutes per game last year.

But the Quakers know their rebounding problem won't magically disappear when their sophomore forward/center returns.

"When Chubb comes back, maybe that will help the rebounding a little," Penn junior David Klatsky said. "But everyone's got to rebound."

And that's what the Quakers aren't doing right now.

Forward Koko Archibong leads the team with 4.8 boards per game, but Ugonna Onyekwe, for all his offensive heroics (he's tied for seventh in the nation with 24 points per game) is averaging just 4.2 rebounds -- well below his career mark of 6.7.

As for the guards, well, let's just say the odds of one of them grabbing a rebound haven't been too much better than those of someone coming up with three sevens on a Vegas slot machine.

"We left Koko and Ugonna by themselves at times. That's our fault," Penn guard Tim Begley said. "Andy [Toole], Dave [Klatsky] and I -- we've got to work on that kind of stuff. We can't leave [all the rebounding to them] just because they're 6-8, 6-9."

Last year, Penn, with 6-11 Geoff Owens manning the middle, actually out-rebounded its opponents, 36.2-35.1

Now on to some more Las Vegas Thanksgiving leftovers:

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The Triple Threat: Penn is 12th in the nation with its 39 three-pointers. And the Quakers are shooting 44.3 percent from behind the arc -- putting them on pace to break their team record of 42.1 percent, set in 1986-87.

"That's a good thing and a bad thing," Klatsky said. "The good thing is, we were getting wide-open looks.... But then again, the bad thing is, if you become a team that lives and dies by the three-pointer and you don't shoot well, you're going to struggle."

Penn's leading three-point shooters this year have been Onyekwe and Schiffner, each of whom has hit more threes than he did all of last year.

Onyekwe (4-for-30 last year) is 11-for-16 from three-point range, while Schiffner (8-for-39 a year ago) is 10-for-17.

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Back to High School: The games in the Las Vegas Invitational were played at the nearby 2,000-seat Valley High School gym -- a very different atmosphere than the Palestra.

"Very much like high school, going back to high school," Archibong said. "The atmosphere, just the way the gym's set up -- it's not an arena."

A small contingent of Penn fans made the trip, as was the case for the Eastern Illinois game and, to an extent, the Iowa State game. But that wasn't the case on Thanksgiving night, when the Quakers played No. 2 Illinois.

"It was like a home game for [Illinois]," Klatsky said. "They had the whole gym packed."

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Ballroom Blitz: On Thanksgiving day, the Quakers got in a bus outside Hotel Paris, where they were staying, and drove the 25 minutes to and from the Valley High gym, utilizing their shoot-around time in the process.

That night, Penn lost to Illinois.

The next two days in the tournament, Penn coach Fran Dunphy decided to eschew its afternoon gym time.

"To spend 50 minutes in a bus didn't seem like the best use of our time," Dunphy said.

Instead, Dunphy filed his players into a ballroom at the hotel, and they walked through plays on the carpeted floor, using a trash can as one basket and a blackboard as the other.

Penn won its next two games, against Eastern Illinois and Iowa State.

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Did You Notice? Penn hit 33 of its 41 free-throws (80.5 percent) in its last two games in the Las Vegas Invite. The Quakers, 62.2 percent from the charity stripe last year, have hit 74.3 percent of their foul shots so far. The team record is 76.3 percent, set in 1970-71.... Klatsky, Penn's starting point guard in all 29 games last season, has come off the bench in all four games. He has 14 assists and four turnovers. Penn's current starting point guard, Toole, has 13 assists and 18 turnovers.... Penn forward Andrew Coates' line this season: 31 minutes, 11 personal fouls, five turnovers, four points.... Archibong is averaging 4.2 personal fouls per game.... Four Quakers are averaging in double figures -- Onyekwe (24.0 points per game), Archibong (18.0), Toole (12.2) and Schiffner (10.0).

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