Major college basketball
Lamar Stevens punctuated a late bucket that assured Penn State would leave the steamy Palestra triumphant with a yell of “This is my city!”
“It was just some emotions that came out,” Stevens said.
No sense holding them in, not after a win that could propel the Nittany Lions toward their first NCAA Tournament in nine years. Stevens’ face was on the big screen with the message, “Thank you, Philly!” The mascot was chest bumped by overzealous players. Coach Pat Chambers grabbed a mic and told the nearly 8,000 fans that packed the place that, yeah, football-crazed Penn State was a basketball school, too.
“My head is still spinning,” Chambers said. “That was wild.”
Izaiah Brockington scored 23 points and Mike Watkins’ fast-break dunk with 1:42 left put No. 21 Penn State ahead to stay in a wild 89-86 win over No. 23 Iowa on Saturday at the Palestra.
Chambers might finally have a team he can take to the NCAA Tournament in his ninth season.
“Our vision has always been to be a Top 25 team, to find success and go to the NCAA Tournament consistently,” Chambers said.
Those goals have been a chore at dreary Bryce Jordan Center, Penn State’s on-campus arena that barely averaged an announced attendance of 10,000 fans last season. But 193 miles down the road at the Palestra, the heart of Philly hoops, the steamy gym was packed. Tickets on the secondary market were going for $150 a seat in the corners. The floor temps hovered in the 80s and industrial fans were needed to cool the players.
Iowa couldn’t handle the heat down the stretch. Luka Garza scored 34 points for the Hawkeyes (10-4, 1-2 Big Ten), but he missed three crucial free throws in the waning moments.
Garza, who scored 44 points last month at Michigan, scored 12 straight points in one stretch in the first half but missed two foul shots with 3:21 left and Iowa clinging to a two-point lead.
Garza went 1 of 2 from the line to even the score at 79-all. Watkins delivered for PSU with a go-ahead dunk before Stevens sealed it with a late layup – and his boasting howl.
Stevens and Jones each scored 16 points for the Nittany Lions (12-2, 2-1). Stevens sparked the idea of PSU making a return trip to Palestra. A graduate of Philadelphia’s Roman Catholic High School, Stevens badgered Chambers about playing a game at the Palestra before his career ended. He surely could not have imagined a showdown between two nationally ranked teams going basket-for-basket in front of a packed house once Iowa agreed to play in Philly.
Penn State might want to petition to play all its Big Ten games at the Palestra. The Nittany Lions got the best of Iowa and coach Fran McCaffery, a former Penn standout who played home games at the Palestra.
Wake Forest 69, Pitt 65: The math is pretty simple to Wake Forest coach Danny Manning. If the Demon Deacons are going to find a way to claw back to respectability in the Atlantic Coast Conference they need to defend their home court and win around half their road games, a task Manning knows is far easier said than done in one of the toughest leagues in the country.
Against a Pitt team facing a very similar path, Wake Forest took a small step in the right direction.
Ismael Massoud scored 14 points off the bench, Torry Johnson added 12 and the Demon Deacons rallied from an early 16-point deficit to edge the Panthers 69-65.
“Any time you can get a road win, it’s good, it’s special,” Manning said.
Wake Forest was down 22-6 before the game was 10 minutes old but clawed back to draw in the opening moments of the second half then held Pitt (1-2, 10-4) scoreless over the last 3:07 after Panther guard Trey McGowens hit a reverse layup to pull Pitt within 66-65.
The Panthers missed their last five shots, including a potential go-ahead 3-pointer by McGowens with 27 seconds left. Xavier Johnson’s heave from the elbow with 7 seconds remaining clanked out of harm’s way and McGowens’ potential game-tying layup with less than a second to go was blocked by Wake Forest’s Olivier Sarr. Brandon Childress drained two free throws for the Demon Deacons for the final margin.
“Disappointed in our last few possessions,” Pitt coach Jeff Capel said. “We didn’t get the shots that we really wanted. That’s on all of us and we have to do a better job in those situations knowing where we want to get the shots from and making sure we execute to do that.”
Ryan Murphy led Pitt with 18 points and four assists. McGowens finished with 12 points and Johnson and Justin Champagnie added 11 points each for the Panthers but Pitt saw a three-game winning streak come to a crashing halt during a back-and-forth second half in a game that saw 11 ties and 10 lead changes.
“I thought we panicked and in some ways,” Capel said. “It comes from a good place at times, ‘I have to make a play.’ It can never be that. … It’s where we have to grow up.”
Kansas 60, West Virginia 53: Kansas coach Bill Self knew he would need his toughest bunch on the floor to muscle up against West Virginia.
All three of them showed up.
Udoka Azubuike had 17 points and 11 rebounds while outplaying Mountaineers big man Oscar Tshiebwe in the second half, Devon Dotson and Marcus Garrett made crucial plays down the stretch, and the third-ranked Jayhawks rallied from a slow start to beat No. 16 West Virginia 60-53 in the Big 12 opener for both teams.
Dotson added 16 points and Garrett finished with 12 points and six assists for the Jayhawks (11-2).
The Jayhawks who won their 28th straight conference opener by overcoming a sluggish first half. Kansas trailed by as many as 10 before leaning on defense and dunks to beat the Mountaineers (11-2).
“I’d be honest, I didn’t think we played very tough at all the first half. I didn’t think Doke was that tough. Oscar just dominated,” Self said. “The key the second half was Dot’s conditioning – I think he played 40 minutes and never came out against pressure like that. And you know, Doke was the best player in the game the second half.”
In the first half, that was Tshiebwe who had the bulk of his 17 points and 17 rebounds. Fellow freshman Miles McBride added 13 points, most of that coming as the Mountaineers tried to close the gap in the final minutes of their eighth consecutive loss in Allen Fieldhouse.
Kansas won despite shooting 3 of 17 from beyond the arc – mostly because West Virginia wasn’t any better. The Big 12’s best defensive team couldn’t solve the Jayhawks’ own defense in the second half, when the Mountaineers shot 28 percent from the field and missed all of their 3-point attempts.
It was a much different story from the first half, when Kansas was fortunate to get within 30-24 into the locker room.
It wasn’t so much that West Virginia had dominated, either. It was that Tshiebwe had done it. The bruising McDonald’s All-American was 6 of 8 from the field, scored 15 points and pulled down 10 rebounds, all while flexing and strutting to the jeering of a sold-out field house. On the defensive end, the 260-pound Tshiebwe proved to be one of the few players in the Big 12 who could match the Jayhawks’ own big man with brute strength.
Azubuike had 10 points and seven rebounds, but he wasn’t the game-changer the Jayhawks have come to expect.