Free wins

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After the sruggles of the last few seasons (and the beginning of this one), I never thought I'd say the Penn basketball team would win a game at the free-throw line. Let alone two.

After edging past Harvard thanks to going 17-for-21 from the stripe, the Quakers hit 31-of-36 against Princeton, and again won by a very slim margin. The Red and Blue shot 64 percent in non-conference games, but miraculously have hit 73 percent in the conference slate.

Interstingly enough, while the foul calls helped the Quakers by getting them to the line, they hurt them by getting three players ejected, Andreas Schreiber and Brennan Votel against the Crimson and Brian Grandieri last night. The free-throw shooting once again bailed out a team that was missing a star player (this time Tyler Bernardini, out with a concussion).

And while this was a great game, it was painful to watch. As Rob says, these are finesse teams, and while I wasn't covering this game, from my angle it looked like they didn't play any more physically than normal. Players were gettting offensive fouls for posting up and defenders were getting whistled for holding their space. Players were getting called for actions that they would get yelled at by their coaches for not doing. Even the carrying calls were kind of absurd. The game was stopped so often that the contest had no flow, and it's not fun to see a third of the points scored on free throws. If this was a Big East game, the team managers would have to suit up.

And while I didn't see it, I've heard from multiple people that the Noah Savage technical was for hitting Eggleston in the groin, a la Chris Paul on Julius Hodge, though not as bad.