Tigers searching for answers

It wasn't the missed lay-ups. It wasn't the piss-poor officiating in the second half, no matter what the Tiger partisans claimed. And it wasn't sophomore forward Andre Logan's torn ACL.

Whatever it was, it was the sort of game that prompts questions about a team's character. The sort of game that makes you wonder if men's hoops' season is over.

Up 4-3, Penn went on a 20-0 run, shocking the headband-sporting Jadwin faithful. Sure, a couple of Princeton shots rimmed out. But there was no urgency from the Tigers. The crowd knew Princeton had to make a run to make it a game. So what did the Tigers do?

Down by 21, Princeton clawed back all the way to 37-15 at the end of the half.

That's a 22-point margin.

"We have a lot of leaders when things are doing well," freshman guard Will Venable said after the game, visibly disturbed. "When we're down, someone needs to step and push us through."

That leader was supposed to be senior guard and co-captain Ahmed El Nokali. He finished the game 0-4 from the field. The senior played only six minutes in the second half and didn't score a point all game.

The Tigers' other senior starter, forward Mike Bechtold, couldn't hit a shot, but he hustled for loose balls and rebounds in the second half. His four shots from the charity stripe were Princeton's total for the night.

The Quakers attempted 22 free throws. If they had shot better than 59 percent from the line, it could have been uglier.

Maybe Penn's jitters from the line came from its tremendous energy to start the game. The Quakers played tenacious defense, preventing the Tigers from getting good looks at the basket. Penn outrebounded Princeton 19-10 in the first half. Somehow, the Tigers looked flat to start their biggest game of the season, despite a raucous crowd.

This was the game to get pumped up. The Tigers should have been bumping each others' chests before the game. They should have been filled with so much nervous energy that they couldn't help to bubble over with emotion. Instead, they were flat.

Maybe they read the 'Prince' and decided that Penn wasn't worthy of being a rival. If so, I apologize.

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You might have thought that the Tigers had gotten their stank offensive performance for the season out of their system against Yale Saturday night, when they shot below 30 percent. Princeton shot 28 percent from the field against Penn.

"I thought tonight we'd come out after that Yale loss, but I guess it wasn't and now we've got to put it all behind us and keep our heads up," Venable said.

Princeton was 5-0 in the Ivy League going into its game against the Elis. Sure, the Tigers had fattened up against Cornell and Dartmouth, but they had also topped Harvard and Brown on the road.

You'd expect a 5-0 team to show something when it went against the conference's elite. Princeton showed it didn't belong at the top of the Ivies.

Can the Tigers turn it around?

They play Harvard and Dartmouth this weekend at Jadwin, in two must-win games if they want to remain the race with 7-1 Yale and a resurgent 4-3 Quaker squad. Even the Crimson are 5-3 and have an outside shot at the title.

Princeton will see the Quakers again this year, March 5 at the Palestra. Last night, it wasn't the ball's bounces that beat Princeton. It wasn't the half-empty student section at tipoff. If the Tigers want the next game to mean something, they need to figure out what it was.