GREENVILLE, S.C. — At the far finish of the courtroom, as his teammates stretched on the alternative baseline, a lone determine in a maroon sweatsuit squared up and rose right into a bounce shot so pure it’d’ve come from a lab. Watching from a cautious distance was a silver-haired head coach who has seen sufficient basketball to know that the ol’ next-man-up-mentality has limits, particularly for a 24½-point underdog.
An hour earlier, Penn coach Fran McCaffery had sounded a be aware of cautious optimism — or optimistic warning — concerning star wing TJ Power’s standing for the Quakers’ NCAA Tournament opener in opposition to third-seeded Illinois on Thursday (9:25 p.m., TNT). Power, a clean 6-foot-9 scorer whose 44 points in the Ivy League championship lifted Penn to its first March Madness look in almost a decade, has been battling an sickness that sidelined him from apply on Wednesday.
“If you were asking me do I think he’s going to play, I’d say yes, but he didn’t practice today,“ McCaffery said. ”He didn’t really feel as much as it.”
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The uncertainty surrounding Power comes at an particularly unhealthy time for Penn. The 14th-seeded Quakers had been already missing leading scorer Ethan Roberts, who suffered a concussion within the Ivy League match and has been dominated out for Thursday’s game. He and Power have mixed to account for almost 34 of Penn’s 76.1 factors per game this season. The solely different participant in double figures is senior ahead Michael Zanoni at 11.6 factors per game.
Power’s appearance during a late-afternoon shootaround Wednesday at the Bon Secours Wellness Arena was a positive sign. The 22-year-old junior has the kind of game that does not exist as excess inventory in the stockroom at a program like Penn’s. A five-star high school senior who ranked among the top 25 players in his national class, Power spent his freshman season at Duke before transferring to Virginia as a sophomore. He ended up at Penn thanks in part to a preexisting relationship with McCaffery, who had recruited him to play at Iowa as he was building the Hawkeyes into a national force. Power is averaging 16.8 points and 7.9 rebounds while shooting 43.3% from three-point range for the Quakers this season. His combination of size and shooting ability is the kind of thing that game plans are built around on both benches.
Illinois coach Brad Underwood had high praise for Power’s 44-point performance in Penn’s 88-84 overtime win over Yale in the Ivy League championship, calling it “one of the best performances I’ve seen all year.”
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“I always tell our players I had the best game of my high school career with 102-degree fever,” Underwood said. “When somebody gets sick, it scares me to death. I hope he’s not in a position to have the greatest of his career coming off a 44-point game.”
Whatever the Quakers get from Power, they will be hard-pressed to follow in the footsteps of Princeton and Yale as the latest Ivy team to advance to the Round of 32. Underwood’s Illini are one of the hotter Final Four picks among college basketball punditry’s smarter-than-you set. After a 24-8 season in which half their losses came in overtime — including an opening-round defeat to Wisconsin in the Big Ten tournament — Illinois enters the NCAA Tournament with the nation’s seventh-best Pomeroy Rating, and the second-best offensive rating. Giving 24½ points, Illinois is by far the heaviest favorite among No. 3 seeds in this year’s field.
Besides Power, the biggest reason to believe in the Quakers is McCaffery, who coached March Madness Cinderellas at UNC-Greensboro and Siena before his 15 seasons at Iowa. His message to his players this week has been equal parts hard-ass coach and softened-up sage: It’s a business trip, but one that you might never get again, so make sure you enjoy it.
“I think that’s kind of every hooper’s dream is to go play in front of 500-some-thousand people that watch the Ivy League championship and the millions that are going to watch this game,” said sophomore AJ Levine, a precocious guard who will generate some clip-worthy reaction footage. “I think it’s just exciting. It makes you want to play harder. It makes you want to show what you can do and your ability and showcase that to the whole world. Really it’s just a dream come true, and it’s making me want to play harder than I already do.”
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Among the game’s more intriguing subplots is the relationship between McCaffery and Underwood, who developed a close bond during their time together in the Big Ten.
“When you face a Fran McCaffery team, you’re going to get a team that’s electric offensively,” Underwood said. “I think he’s one of the best offensive coaches in all of college basketball.”
McCaffery is fast to shrug off such reward, pointing as an alternative to his gamers. The humility is not completely empty. Right now, all of the teaching acumen on the earth doesn’t imply as a lot as Power’s well being.
