M. Hoops Brown Pre: Miller gets homecoming of his own as he visits old stomping grounds

When Temple faced Penn at the Palestra last week, Fran Dunphy's homecoming spurred an intense game with the home crowd clamoring for a victory over the Quakers' former coach.

Now the shoe's on the other foot. Glen Miller returns to Providence, R.I. tonight to face off against his former team.

Miller spent seven years at Brown, compiling a 93-97 record and making the Bears one of the Ivy League's more competitive teams.

After bolting Rhode Island to take Dunphy's vacancy in April, Miller - now looking for his 200th career win - will now return to the Pizzitola Center as the enemy.

And while Miller knows that competing against his former players will be a bittersweet experience, he is doing his best to stay focused on the game.

"It's not going to be easy going back, competing against my former players," Miller said. "But you just try to block it out."

Senior forward Stephen Danley agrees. "You'd hope that they'd be classy to start, but once the ball goes up, it's a basketball game."

Not only is it a basketball game - it's a pretty important one. The Quakers sit at 2-0 in the Ivy League, but have played two fewer league games than any other team but Princeton. Two wins this weekend would solidify Penn's spot in the driver's seat of the Ivy title race.

"It would mean a lot" to be 4-0, said senior guard Ibrahim Jaaber. "You never know what happens late in the season . so you always want to put yourself in the best position, and the only way to do that is to win the games that you should."

Jaaber also cited the recent defeat to Saint Joseph's as motivation for this weekend.

"We're coming off a loss, so we kind of want to get back on the winning track," he said.

If the Quakers are to regain their momentum, they'll have to go through a Brown team that has the capacity to present a significant challenge.

Brown is 6-13 overall and 1-3 in the Ivy League, but as Miller puts it, "They're playing good basketball, despite their record."

And the main reasons are Mark McAndrew and Damon Huffman. They are averaging 15.0 and 14.2 points respectively, and are each shooting over 40 percent from beyond the arc.

"The guys who can step back and shoot the ball from deep are the guys that are the most concerning in the system they run," Danley said. "If [McAndrew and Huffman] are open, it's going down."

Starting guard Marcus Becker has given the Bears another dimension. Aside from his 5.3 points and 3.1 rebounds per game, his 41 total steals are second in the league only to Jaaber.

The Quakers may gain an advantage through Miller's familiarity with Brown's personnel. However, first-year coach Craig Robinson has instituted a new offensive system reminiscent of Princeton's slow-paced attack. No surprise - he played under famed Tigers coach Bill Carmody.

As a result, when Miller sees Brown play for the first time since last March, he'll see familiar faces playing a very unfamiliar style.

"We know the player tendencies," he said, but "it's an entirely new system there. . That style is very difficult to play against."

Whatever useful knowledge of the players may result from Miller's homecoming, a hostile crowd certainly won't help.

Miller says of his friends in Providence: "They'll be rooting for Brown [tonight], but I'm sure they'll be rooting for us in all our other games."

Danley expects a less-than-warm reception for his coach.

"They're not going to cheer for us," he said, "any more than we cheered for coach Dunphy."

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