PHILADELPHIA – The University of Pennsylvania men's basketball team has had a lengthy break following arguably its best win of the young 2016-17 season, a 58-49 decision at UCF way back on December 12. The Quakers will work through the holidays with a pair of home games just two days apart, the first on Wednesday against neighborhood rival Drexel and the second on Friday against Fairfield. Both games are at The Palestra, and both will tip off at 4 p.m.

A reminder that fans in the Philadelphia viewing region can only watch Wednesday's Drexel game on Comcast SportsNet; inside the CSN Philly viewing area, the game will be blacked out on the Ivy League Digital Network.

• The Quakers lead the series between these neighboring rivals, 15-10, but the Dragons have won "The Battle of 33rd Street" the last six times dating back to the 2007-08 season.

 

• Drexel won last year's game at the DAC, 53-52 in overtime, after a two-year hiatus in the series.

• Not surprisingly, Drexel is making the shortest "road trip" in America...the distance from the DAC to The Palestra is 0.6 miles. What is surprising is that it defeats the second-place trip (from St. Francis Brooklyn to LIU Brooklyn and vice versa) by only one-tenth of a mile.

• This game pits Penn's second-year head coach, Steve Donahue, against one of his former assistant coaches, Zach Spiker. Spiker was on Donahue's staff at Cornell, helping the Big Red to three-straight Ivy League titles from 2008-10.

• The Quakers and the Stags have met just once prior to this year. That came on November 13, 2012 in Charlottesville, Va. as part of the NIT Season Tipoff. Fairfield won the game, 62-53.

• Fairfield's head coach will be a familiar face to longtime Penn basketball fans. Sydney Johnson was a three-time captain and the 1997 Ivy League Player of the Year at Princeton, and he later coached the Tigers from 2008-11, winning the Ivy title in 2011. 

0 • Games lost by Penn when leading at the half under head coach Steve Donahue; the Quakers are 4-0 in such games this year, 10-0 in the two seasons.

1 • Position of junior Matt MacDonald among Ivy League players in overall assist/turnover ratio (3.86), and freshman AJ Brodeur among Ivy players in blocked shots per game (2.2); senior Matt Howard is second among Ivy players in offensive boards per game, at 2.4.

5 • Players who have led Penn in scoring in a game so far this season: Brodeur, Howard, Jackson Donahue, Caleb Wood and Sam Jones.

15.0 • Assist/turnover ratio over the last five games for MacDonald (15/1); for the season he has 27 assists and seven turnovers, a 3.86 ratio.

7 • Consecutive double-figure scoring games for the freshman Brodeur, who has eight overall this season.

11 • Penn players on the current roster who have had at least one double-figure scoring game during their career, including seven this season already.

78.8 • Percentage of points from a year ago that returned to Penn's lineup for the 2016-17 season (1,506 out of 1,911).

• The host Knights entered the contest 7-1 overall and had won four in a row before the Quakers pulled out the win.

• For the second time in as many games, Penn had just nine turnovers (after not hitting single digits in any of the first seven contests).

• By contrast, UCF had just six assists, one shy of an opponent high in the year-plus Steve Donahue coaching era at Penn.

• Junior Sam Jones made his first start of the season and finished with a team-high 15 points (from five three-pointers).

• Matched up most of the night with UCF's 7-foot-6 center, Tacko Fall, freshman AJ Brodeur finished with 10 points, six rebounds, four blocked shots, three assists and three steals; he would be named Ivy League Rookie of the Week the following Monday.