PHILADELPHIA – The University of Pennsylvania men's basketball team rode a wave of positivity Saturday against Columbia, getting out early on the Lions and never looking back in taking an 84-72 win over the Lions.
Senior guard
Clark Slajchert scored his 1,000th collegiate point early in the game, lending an air of merriment to the festivities as the Quakers built up a double-digit lead by halftime and never let Columbia get closer than 11 over the final nine minutes of the contest.
Penn improved to 11-16 overall and 3-9 in Ivy League play while Columbia is now 13-12 overall and 4-8 in conference action.
About Slajchert's 1,000th
*Slajchert was the main attraction on Saturday night, scoring 22 points on a night when 12 would have been enough to get him to 1,000.
*The 1,000th came, predictably, on a floater in the lane just ahead of the under-4 media timeout. With the bucket, he became the 43rd player in program history to reach the mark and the fourth in the Donahue era (Darien Nelson-Henry, AJ Brodeur,
Jordan Dingle).
*Slajchert reached the milestone in his 73rd game wearing the Red and Blue, tied for 18th fastest to the mark with a pair of former Ivy League Players of the Year, Michael Jordan and Ugonna Onyekwe.
*Slajchert scored in double digits for the 50th time in his collegiate career—he has done so in all but one game he's played this season—and had his 16th 20-point game at Penn.
Quaker Notemeal
*Penn shot a scorching 55.6 percent (35-63) from the field on Saturday night—best against a D1 opponent this season—and was a staggering 64 percent (16-25) in the second half.
*Penn was 10-of-23 (43.5 pct) from three-point land, making it four games in a row the Quakers have hit a double-digit number of treys in a game (50 in that span).
*Actually, Slajchert was not even Penn's leading scorer on Saturday night. That honor went to junior
Nick Spinoso, who finished with 23 which is a career high.
*Spinoso missed out on his seventh double-double of the season by one rebound and added five assists, two blocked shots and a steal.
*Freshman
Tyler Perkins scored 13 points on Saturday, his team-leading 20th double-figure scoring game this season. The last freshman with that many such games was the program's all-time leading scorer, AJ Brodeur, who hit double digits 22 times as a freshman in 2016-17.
*Perkins now has 381 points on the season and needs four to tie Brodeur's freshman scoring record of 385.
*Sophomore
Cam Thrower scored eight points, knocking down two treys and adding four rebounds. He has scored 51 points across Penn's last four games (12.8 ppg).
*Juniors
George Smith and
Reese McMullen both had six-point nights, McMullen also dishing out four assists and grabbing four boards.
*Freshmen
Sam Brown and
Augustus Gerhart had three points each, and Gerhart also had three rebounds.
*With Perkins (381) and Brown (260), Penn has two freshmen surpassing the 250-point mark in the same season for the first time in program history.
*Columbia was led by Geronimo Rubio De La Rosa who had 15 points, Zavian McLean who scored 14, and Blair Thompson who added 13.
How It Happened
Columbia got out to the quick start on Saturday night, the Lions scoring eight of the first 10 points over the first three minutes of the contest. The lead was still 13-7 when Penn made its first run of the night, Spinoso jump-starting things with a pair of buckets and then Slajchert and Thrower draining treys on back-to-back possessions. That gave the Quakers a 17-15 lead.
Columbia responded with six straight points to go back up by four, and that lead held until a six-point Penn run that was punctuated by Slajchert's 1,000th-point basket just ahead of the under-4 media timeout.
The milestone bucket seemed to spur the Quakers. Columbia's Jake Tavroff scored the first point out of the stoppage on a free throw to make it 30-28, but then Penn ripped off the next five points, 11 of 13, and 16 of 22 to take a double-digit lead into the locker room, 46-34. Slajchert had 18 at the half, while Spinoso was already up to 13.
Columbia again started quickly in the second half, scoring eight of the first 11 points (a Perkins triple Penn's only answer during the run). That got the Lions within seven, at 49-42, and the teams traded points to 55-48 with 15:30 left.
Penn simply answered everything Columbia threw at them the rest of the night. A Spinoso hook got the margin to nine, and it hovered between eight and 11 for the next seven minutes until Spinoso followed his own miss and somehow pushed the ball off the backboard into the basket to extend the lead to 13.
The advantage then hovered in the low double digits for another several minutes, before a 7-0 run proved to be the knockout blow in the final few minutes as Slajchert sandwiched four points—two on a jumper, two on free throws—around another Perkins triple. That made the score 84-67 with less than two minutes to play and the Quakers closed it out from there.
Up Next
Penn will close out the 2023-24 season next Saturday, hosting Princeton at The Palestra at 6 p.m.
For the latest on Penn men's basketball, follow @PennMBB on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram, and on the web at PennAthletics.com.
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