LEXINGTON Ky. — Tyler Bernardini gave Quakers fans the most exciting 16 minutes of the men’s basketball season thus far.
It was as if he was young again — a spry 18 years old — and nailing threes like the freshman Bernardini we've been looking for all season. But the lesson in Monday’s 86-62 loss to Kentucky was that even a keyed-in Tyler can’t take the Quakers very far, let alone past the No. 11 Wildcats.
In those 16 minutes, not only did the senior hit five of his six shots (three from deep), but Miles Cartwright hit both his three-point attempts and Jack Eggleston hit his one try.
And then: silence. Nothing, for four minutes, as Kentucky rendered 16 stellar minutes useless, and took the lead with 12 unanswered points. The Wildcats, it seemed, stepped on Penn’s Achilles heel: an uncontrollable inconsistency.
If I had a nickel for every time a Penn player or coach mentioned playing “40 minutes of basketball,” it would have paid for my hash browns — scattered, smothered and covered — at Lexington’s Waffle House.
Coach Jerome Allen, Bernardini, captain Zack Rosen and the rest of the squad all know the problem. But 11 games into the season, the first year coach has not found a solution to cure the streaky Quakers.
The symptoms first flared up in the city that never sleeps, where a comatose Penn team allowed 17 unanswered points from Manhattan, which pulled ahead late to win the game. Then again with Drexel when the Dragons opened the second half with 11 points, 10 points at Marist, another nine points later at Marist and eight against Villanova. With a chance to upset mighty Kentucky, the Red and Blue went quiet again, first allowing the Wildcats back into the game, and then letting them runaway with it.
My prescription? Zack Rosen.
The point guard proved last year that, without many viable scoring options around him, he could tally points like nobody else in the Ivy League.
Now Rosen has a viable weapon at each side — guess who was feeding Bernardini and Cartwright throughout the first half — and his scoring has dropped off a bit as a result.
For Penn to have success against anyone, from lowly Marist and Manhattan to the Kentuckys and Novas of the NCAA, Rosen must rekindle that ability to score at will that made him a unanimous all-Ivy pick last year. He needs to recognize when Penn’s opponents are starting a run, and he alone must put an end to it.
Now that he has some bona fide scorers to supplement him, Rosen and Penn’s back court can win championships. But to win games, the junior captain will, at times, need to take things into his own hands and stop the bleeding.
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