PHILADELPHIA – The University of Pennsylvania men's basketball team played its 250th game with archrival Princeton on Saturday night at The Palestra, and the teams made it historic by scoring the most combined points in a game in the series as the Tigers escaped with a 105-83 victory.
 
It wasn't just raining outside on Saturday night—the Tigers missed their first three-pointer but then rained down 12 of their next 18 to blow out to a 15-point halftime lead. Penn could never get within single digits in the second half. For the game, Princeton knocked down 17 treys on just 27 attempts (63.0 percent).
 
Penn's season ends at 11-18 overall and 3-11 in Ivy League play. Princeton improved to 24-3 overall and won the Ivy title outright at 12-2. The Tigers will be the top seed for next weekend's Ivy League Tournament at Columbia, while the Quakers miss Ivy Madness for the first time in program history. As a result, Yale is now the only Ancient Eight program to advance to every ILT to date.
 
Quaker Notemeal
*Here's a crazy stat: Penn lost by 22 in a game where the Quakers shot 56.4 percent from the field (31-55); that's a season high against a Division I opponent, besting the 55.6-percent performance they had just a week ago in a win over Columbia.
 
*Crazy stat #2: Penn's 83 points were tied for the third-most scored by the Quakers in a game in this series and most since an 85-62 win at The Palestra on December 13, 1969.
 
*In addition, Penn turned it over just four times—tied not just for a season low (set on February 16 against Yale) but a low in the Steve Donahue coaching era.
 
*In his final game wearing the Red and Blue, senior Clark Slajchert posted his tenth 20-point game of the season and the 17th of his career with an even 20. He had the last bucket of the night, a three-pointer, before getting subbed out so he could be saluted by the crowd of 4,488.
 
*Slajchert ended his three-year career with 1,030 career points (42nd on Penn's all-time scoring list) and 51 double-figure scoring games; he hit double digits in every game he played this season except Monmouth, when he fell just shy with nine.
 
*Slajchert also had six assists on Saturday night, one shy of his season/career high.
 
*Freshman Tyler Perkins scored 17 points and tied for team-high honors with six rebounds; he had more double-figure scoring games this season than any other Penn player (21).
 
*Perkins' 17 points give him 398 for the season, most by a freshman in program history; the previous mark of 385 was set by the program's all-time scoring leader, AJ Brodeur, in 2016-17.
 
*Junior Nick Spinoso also had 17 points on Saturday night, his 15th double-figure scoring game this season and 33rd at Penn; he joined Perkins by grabbing six boards.
 
*Freshman Sam Brown had 10 points, his 16th double-figure game this season; he ends the season with 273 points, marking the first time in program history two freshmen had more than 250 in the same season.
 
*Junior Ed Holland III was nearly Penn's fifth double-figure scorer, as he ended up with nine in just under eight minutes of action. He was 3-of-4 both from the field and at the foul line.
 
*Freshman Augustus Gerhart finished the night with six points and two rebounds, going 2-of-2 from the field and at the foul line.
 
*Princeton—which shot 58.1 percent overall and committed just three turnovers, fewer than Penn—got 32 points, nine rebounds and four assists from sophomore Caden Pierce, while Zach Martini had 23 points and was 7-of-9 from beyond the arc. Sophomore Xaivian Lee had 13 points, nine boards and five assists, while junior Matt Allocco had 11 points and a team-high six assists.

How It Happened
The first few minutes of Saturday's game set the tone for how things would go. Knowing that a win would give them the Ivy title outright on their archrival's floor, the Tigers blew out to a 15-4 lead as Allocco, Pierce and Lee drained back-to-back-to-back three-pointers. It was 15-8 when the teams played an extraordinary four-minute stretch where the Quakers scored two at a time and Princeton answered each time with a three. When Blake Peters buried a trey with 8:12 to play—the Tigers' sixth in a row and ninth in the game's first 12 minutes—the lead was 33-18 and The Palestra was in full buzz at the level of play.
 
Junior George Smith briefly turned the tables, hitting a three for the Quakers, but after Pierce and Spinoso traded buckets the Tigers rattled off the next eight points as Pierce and Peters again dialed long distance to spur the run. The lead was 18 at that point, 43-25, with more than four minutes still left in the half. It was still 15 at the break, 49-34.
 
The second half was a role reversal for Princeton, which muscled its way inside most of the period and took 24 of its 32 shots inside the arc (making 19 of them, a 59.4-percent clip). Penn also had success on offense, shooting 65.2 percent from the field in the period, but the Quakers took nine fewer shots than the Tigers and also took just eight treys, making three of them.
 
The result was that Penn could only get as close as 11 points on two separate occasions in the period. The first came with 11:32 left when Holland sandwiched an and-1 in the lane and his ensuing free throw around the under-12 media timeout to make the score 70-59. Pierce and Perkins then traded buckets to 72-61.
 
Up Next
The 2023-24 season has come to an end.
 
For the latest on Penn men's basketball, follow @PennMBB on X (formerly Twitter) and Instagram, and on the web at PennAthletics.com.