Penn State men’s basketball defeats Cornell at home, 85-74, to stay undefeated at BJC
Penn State men’s basketball stayed undefeated at home in the 2021-22 season Monday night by defeating the Cornell Big Red, 85-74. The Nittany Lions are 3-0 at the Bruce Jordan Center and 3-1 overall.
The Penn State offense was able to generate opens shots early but it wasn’t able to do much with them. The Nittany Lions still maintained a lead in the first nine minutes of the game but the poor shooting eventually caught up with the team in the first half.
Cornell began to make its shots near the midpoint of the half and that allowed the Big Red to take the lead and hold it for an extended period of time Monday night. It grew to double digits at one point when the Nittany Lions trailed by 10, but they began their comeback from there. The team was fueled by five makes that were all three-pointers with less than five minutes in the half junior Seth Lundy made the first before senior guard Sam Sessoms made four straight to take the lead at 39-38.
Senior Jalen Pickett finished the half off with two made free throws to give Penn State a 41-38 lead at halftime.
Cornell’s deficit was as high as eight before the Big Red mounted another comeback. The Nittany Lions gave up multiple open shots defensively and couldn’t get their offense going in that time frame, allowing Cornell to go on a 10-0 run before Penn State head coach Micah Shrewsberry took a timeout with 15:52 left in the second half.
The Nittany Lions responded to knot the game up at 54 and the two teams kept it relatively tight from there, but Penn State was able to go on another run thanks to Sessoms.
The senior guard found his teammates and hit open shots to get the Nittany Lions the lead back. He and Lundy were the team’s two most consistent sources of offense and pushed the team to scoring its season-high in points on the year.
Penn State’s offense proved to be enough to get the job done in the game, and close out the 85-74 victory while tying a program record with 15 made 3-pointers.
Player of the game
Penn State forward Seth Lundy: The Nittany Lions have struggled to make open shots for extended periods this season but that wasn’t the case for Lundy Monday night. The junior forward scored 23 points in the game and made five of his eight attempts from beyond the arc. Seemingly whenever the team needed a shot in the game, Shrewsberry called a play for the junior forward to get open from beyond the arc. He added a few key stops on defense, cutting off ball handlers that were attacking the lane and forcing them into a position they didn’t want to be in. Lundy didn’t play completely mistake-free, but his play on both ends of the court was important for Penn State Monday night.
Turning point
Sessoms lights it up from deep: The Penn State offense was struggling to make shots, even open ones, in the middle of the first half. That’s when Sessoms started to take over. He had missed his first two looks of the game but finished as strong as he could have, making four straight threes to lead the Nittany Lions on a 14-5 run to end the half. His shots came both off the dribble and off the catch, and the makes tied his total 3-point attempts on the season entering the game at four. Sessoms is a good scorer who can fill it up at all three levels, but showed off his 3-point shooting for the first time all year Monday night at a crucial time for Penn State.
Quotable
Micah Shrewsberry on the team’s efforts from beyond the arc:
“They really swarm to the basketball when you put it down and drive it. They are a very help-oriented team. We talked about attacking off the dribble, the help comes, now you gotta play off two feet and find the open guy who’s gonna be out. I think still, if you go back and watch which we’ll do tomorrow, there’s better opportunities where some of those we could’ve attacked again. We want to always have the defense in rotation. Whether you shoot that three or whether you drive it again, now the lane is more open for you to get layups.”
Up next
vs. LSU: Penn State heads to Niceville, Florida, to take part in the Emerald Coast Classic beginning Friday. The Nittany Lions will open the tournament with the LSU Tigers who entered Monday night 4-0 and are projected to beat the Nittany Lions according to Ken Pomeroy’s KenPom index.
Penn State is ranked No. 87 in the country entering the week and the Tigers are the No. 30 team according to KenPom. They could present issues for the Nittany Lions with their propensity to create turnovers and Penn State’s struggles with controlling the ball.
