Penn living and dying by the three

Harvard - 78 Penn - 75 Penn - 87 Dartmouth - 71

BOSTON -- To hear Penn men's basketball coach Fran Dunphy tell it, perimeter shooting is just like the sword.

"If you're going to live by it, sometimes you're going to die by it, and we died by it tonight," he said.

Dunphy had just watched his team drop a heartbreaking 78-75 overtime loss to Harvard. Standing outside of the visiting team's locker room at Lavietes Pavilion -- which has become a bonafide house of horrors for the Quakers in recent seasons -- the longtime coach looked tired.

To be fair, Penn didn't die solely because of its perimeter shooting on Saturday night. Penn shot 9-27 from three-point range, which, as Dunphy correctly pointed out, was not "horrendous."

But after burying Dartmouth in Friday night's 87-71 victory with 15 three-pointers -- one shy of the school record set earlier this season against Drexel -- the Quakers could not find the three when they needed it most against the Crimson.

On Friday night, Penn was able to take advantage of a Big Green squad that has standout point guard Flinder Boyd and not much else. As the Dartmouth defenders took pains to come down upon the Penn frontcourt of Ugonna Onyekwe and Koko Archibong, Quakers sharpshooters stood at the ready on the outside.

"The threes were available to us," Dunphy said.

Boyd, easily the speediest Dartmouth player, could not defeat Penn's inside-outside offensive game all by himself, and the Quakers buried open look after open look from beyond the arc. Penn guard Jeff Schiffner led the way, notching 20 points and sinking six three-pointers.

"That's how our offense runs," Schiffner said following his own personal shooting clinic.

"To defend us, you just gotta pick your poison sometimes," Dunphy added, a win in Penn's Ivy League opener under his team's belt.

Harvard's backcourt, however, was just a little bit quicker and a little bit more savvy on Saturday night, as guards Elliott Prasse-Freeman and undoubted star of the game, Patrick Harvey, were able to bunch up the inside and dart back to defend the perimeter shot.

Sometimes it wasn't much -- a hand in the face, perhaps -- but Penn hit six fewer three-pointers in one more attempt than they did at Hanover. And the Crimson were not altogether responsible for Penn's shooting woes.

"We had a couple of open looks that we probably should have buried that would have helped us a little bit," Dunphy said after the loss.

For a while in the second half, it looked like the Quakers would put the Crimson away. Down 45-37 with just under 16 minutes to go in the game, Penn embarked on a furious 14-0 run to give themselves a six-point lead.

But Harvey scored Harvard's next 15 points with his arsenal of three-pointers, layups and running floaters -- en route to a game-high 28 -- and started to make the crowd believe that he would score every time he touched the ball. Penn kept pace but seemed to lose steam, its run ending as Onyekwe sandwiched a turnaround jumper with two missed three-point attempts.

Missed three-pointers slowed the Quakers again in overtime. Point guard Andrew Toole -- whose outside shot the Quakers lost when he eventually fouled out -- opened the extra frame with a wide-open three-pointer, but fellow point guard David Klatsky missed a three on Penn's next trip down the court, which would have given the Quakers a six-point lead and control of the game.

Harvey once again took over and hit one more three-pointer and some crucial late free throws. Trailing by three with time running out, Penn's perimeter game suffered one more indignity when Klatsky's running attempt to tie the game at the buzzer hit the side of the rim and bounced harmlessly away, giving the game to Harvard.

As the Crimson celebrated and the Quakers silently shuffled off the court, it had become clear that an all-too-important aspect of Penn's game had abandoned it when it needed it most.

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