Nittany Lions chalk up fifth straight

By Jeff Rice

- jrice@centredaily.com

UNIVERSITY PARK — Ed DeChellis didn’t like the halftime numbers he saw Monday.

The 40 points Lehigh had put up against his Penn State team (which had also scored 40) were one thing. But the stat sheet also revealed no Nittany Lion steals and just one Lehigh turnover, telltale signs of a defense on its heels.

“We were playing against them instead of them playing against us,” DeChellis said. “We were not really guarding the way we want to guard.”

Twenty minutes later, the Nittany Lions had guarded well enough to change their coach’s mind and earn a 81-68 win over the Mountain Hawks before a modest Bryce Jordan Center crowd. Penn State (8-4) is 8-0 at home for the first time since the 1997-98 season, and its five-game winning streak is its longest in four-plus seasons under DeChellis.

Geary Claxton scored 29 points, 21 of them coming in a dominant first half, to pace Penn State, but it was a defensive spark midway through the second half that allowed the Nittany Lions to gain control.

After Jamelle Cornley tied the score at 47-47 on a 3-point play with 15:24 remaining, snapping a 7-0 Lehigh run, junior guard Danny Morrissey made one of Penn State’s four second half steals and fed a charging Cornley for a transition layup. Soon after, Morrissey drew a charge on a 3-on-1 Lehigh break. Cornley added another basket, then double-teamed Hawks guard Marquis Hall to force another turnover.

“Give credit to Penn State for extending out and putting more pressure on the ballhandlers,” said Lehigh coach Brett Reed, “But at the same token, we need to make sure we’re strong with the basketball.” Morrissey’s defense picked up his own offensive game. By the time the Nittany Lions’ 14-5 run was over, he had scored seven points, then added another 3-pointer to start a 10-2 run that gave Penn State a 71-58 lead with 6:41 to play. He finished with 13 points, 11 coming in the second half, when Cornley scored eight of his 12.

Freshmen Talor Battle and David Jackson added eight points apiece for the Nittany Lions, who shot 50 percent from the field. Hall led the Mountain Hawks (6-6) with 19 points, though just two of those came after DeChellis assigned reserve guard Stanley Pringle to pick up the 5-foot-11 speedster full-court.

The Nittany Lions, who trailed by as many as seven points in the first half, forced eight Lehigh turnovers in the second. That defense helped kick-start the transition game, which produced only three Penn State points in the first half but 16 in the second half. “I think it was good for us to be in this kind of game and pull ourselves out of it,” DeChellis said.

If not for Claxton, the Nittany Lions might not have been able to. The 6-foot-5 senior, who added 10 rebounds, drilled eight of his 10 first-half shots, including all three of his 3-point tries. He also found several opportunities in the lane, and when the Mountain Hawks began to quickly double-team him in the second half, he passed out of trouble to find open teammates.

Claxton was just 1-of-2 from the field and 6-of-10 from the free-throw line in the second half, but added to the defensive cause by blocking three shots. The Nittany Lions’ leader knows what Penn State is able to do when the opposition has the ball will determine its fate in Big Ten play, which opens Wednesday when the Nittany Lions visit Northwestern.

“It’s always about defense,” Claxton said. “In order to win, you’ve got to stop somebody. We have our spurts. Sometimes we collapse ... if we could play defense for 40 minutes, I think we’d be very good in the league.”