In double overtime, Brown outlasts Penn behind Olivia Young, veteran know-how and defense

Yet.

As it turned out, all Young needed to get herself going was overtime. After scoring 3 points on 1-for-8 shooting in regulation, she scored a game-high 9 points on 4-for-6 shooting in two overtime periods to lift the Bears to a crucial 77-65 win in Ivy League play. The 5’11 guard also had half of her six total rebounds and a game-saving block in the extra periods.

On the season, Young is Brown’s third-leading scorer, averaging 7.7 points, 4.4 rebounds, 1.1 steals, 1.0 assists and 0.9 blocks in 28.8 minutes per game. A big part of her game is 3-pointers: 58% of her scoring attempts are threes. But she has diversified her shooting from her first two seasons, when over 70% of her attempts were from long range.

She has long been a clutch player for the Bears, dating back to when she sank a game-winning jumper on the team’s foreign tour before her sophomore season. And this season, she is shooting much more efficiently in clutch minutes (57.1%) than overall (34.5%).* On Nov. 16, she hit a shot with 2:31 left against UMBC that helped Brown eke out a 2-point win. Then she tied her season high of 13 points in a win over Yale on Monday to open Ivy League play before providing the overtime heroics on Saturday.

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Young’s takeover started just 16 seconds into the first overtime, when she nailed an elbow jumper in a soft spot of Penn’s zone. She did the same thing just over a minute later, and both jumpers gave the Bears 2-point leads.

“I feel like I stepped up a little bit more,” Young told The IX Basketball postgame. “… I was wide open in those [moments], right around the free-throw line, and that’s a shot I’ll take every day.”

“She’s a player on our team that we really trust to hit that midrange shot,” Brown head coach Monique LeBlanc told The IX Basketball postgame. “… She takes so many threes, and that’s a big part of her job. So for her to just get a 15-footer, I think she got that feel, and that was really positive.”

Brown led by as many as 4 points in the first overtime, then lost the lead, then tied it again. The Quakers had the last possession of the period and got the ball to senior guard Simone Sawyer, their second-leading scorer this season. But Sawyer’s potential game-winning 3-pointer had barely left her hand when Young smothered it, and the buzzer sounded before Sawyer could get off another shot.

“I just feel like I don’t jump the highest on the team by far, but … sometimes I time those things well,” Young said. “I just have to make sure I don’t get burned if they shot fake.”

“She has some of those explosive blocks sometimes,” LeBlanc said, recalling a similar one last season against Penn. “And they really get the team going. … In overtime, in a second overtime, you’re gonna need some momentum plays like that, some juice plays, and she’s good at that.”

In the second overtime, Young helped give the Bears an insurmountable lead. She hit a turnaround jumper with 2:59 left that put them up 5, then rebounded a Penn miss. The ball came back around to her on offense, and she drained a 3-pointer to put Brown up 8 and force a Penn timeout. After the whistle blew, several teammates converged on her at midcourt, hugging her and celebrating.

For Young, making that three felt like validation. After shooting 33.7% from 3-point range over her first two college seasons, she’s making only 25.0% this season. But the Bears’ faith in her hasn’t wavered, and she delivered on it in one of the biggest moments of the season.

“We love when Olivia plays with that confidence,” LeBlanc said. “You can see the way she celebrates and kind of gives a flex, and it’s usually all good after that.”

Beyond Young’s contributions, the Bears won because of a big performance from senior guard Grace Arnolie, their stamina in overtime, their veteran poise and their defense. 

LeBlanc had started two point guards for the past nine games in Arnolie and first-year Charlotte Adams-Lopez. But on Saturday, she opted for a bigger and more veteran lineup, so Arnolie was the lone point guard for most of her nearly 47 minutes on the court. Arnolie had a game-high 24 points, nine rebounds, four assists and two steals, offsetting an uncharacteristic eight turnovers.

“I thought we did a good job on her,” Penn head coach Mike McLaughlin told The IX Basketball postgame. “She’s just really good, and at this point, she’s played a lot of minutes, and she’s savvy. She’s very intelligent with the ball. She plays at a good pace. … [Since] she got to Brown to now, she’s one of the best players in our league.”

Arnolie, who is Brown’s leading scorer at 17.6 points per game, had 7 of her points in the first quarter, helping Brown jump out to a 12-point lead. But Penn slowly clawed back behind junior guard Mataya Gayle, who led the Quakers with 18 points, seven rebounds, four assists and four steals. McLaughlin praised Gayle for her competitive fire and how she attacked the rim, which helped open up a stagnant Quakers offense.

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In overtime, Brown’s offense found an extra gear while Penn’s sputtered. Brown shot 56.3% from the field, better than it had in any quarter of regulation. Penn managed just 18.8%, down from 45.5% in the fourth quarter. Young credited Brown’s offensive success to “being the tougher team” — something she said LeBlanc emphasizes daily — and being unflappable when Penn cut into the lead.

McLaughlin acknowledged that Penn ran out of steam in overtime, and he second-guessed his substitution decisions. He has been trying all season to find depth off the bench and consistent scoring beyond Gayle and forward Katie Collins. That’s still a work in progress; his core rotation is currently seven players, but he’d like it to be eight.

So when the Quakers finally found some momentum late in Saturday’s game, McLaughlin was hesitant to sub and potentially break their rhythm, even though he could sense they were tired.

“We’re trying to go and win it in 40 [minutes] like everyone is, and then when they throw another 10 at you, that’s what we saw,” he said.

Brown also had a remarkable veteran presence, even for a league where four-year seniors are the norm rather than the exception. Its starting lineup featured four seniors and one junior, and they played nearly 17 minutes together on Saturday, more than twice as many as any other lineup. By comparison, Penn’s most-used lineup included two seniors, a junior and two sophomores.

Asked how much confidence she has in that veteran group, Young said, “Like 3 million percent confidence. … This is probably our most experienced team that I’ve been on, and I feel the most comfortable with them than I’ve felt with any team at Brown. So it’s just amazing playing with them.”

In LeBlanc’s view, the veterans have built up literal and figurative “calluses” from all their game experience together. Those calluses helped them outlast Penn, and Saturday’s win added more, to help them hang on in future games when their grip is tested.

Their experience particularly showed on defense. The Bears held Penn scoreless for the first 4:55 of the game, and they didn’t allow a field goal for the first 4:24 of the second overtime.

The Bears have ratcheted up their defense all season, which is a big reason why they’re 10-4 overall and 2-0 in conference play. They are allowing just 80.0 points per 100 possessions, which ranks in the 90th percentile nationally. In contrast, they finished the previous four seasons under LeBlanc in no higher than the 65th percentile.

Similarly, opponents are shooting just 34.4% from the field against the Bears, which ranks in the 97th percentile. In previous years, opponents shot between 39% and 40%. Young said Brown is playing better team and help defense this season and credited assistant coach Devon Quattrocchi, the team’s defensive coordinator, for that growth.

And the Bears have made an even bigger improvement on the glass, which has helped them close defensive possessions and fueled their offense. They finished each of the previous four years in the 13th percentile or lower in defensive rebounding rate, which measures the share of available defensive rebounds that they get. This season, with senior forwards Alyssa Moreland and Ada Anamekwe back from injuries, they rank in the 85th percentile nationally.

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The Bears hope their defense makes the difference as they look to qualify for their first Ivy League Tournament since 2017. In each of the past two seasons, they’ve lost out to Penn for the fourth and final spot on tiebreakers.

The players who experienced those narrow misses haven’t fully gotten over them, Moreland said before Brown’s league opener. But they aren’t worrying about history repeating itself. They’ve learned to focus solely on winning the game in front of them.

“It still stings the same amount as the day we found out,” Moreland told The IX Basketball on Jan. 4. “And it’s always so hard to think about how close we were two years in a row. But … all we tell ourselves is we control our destiny. We don’t wait on other people’s results. … Our goal is controlling what we can control: our games, our performance and our outcomes.”

So Saturday’s result was undeniably a big step toward Ivy Madness for the Bears. But to them, it didn’t feel that way. It just felt like a game where they had to dig especially deep, not wanting to come up empty after 50 minutes of fight.

* CBB Analytics defines clutch minutes as those where the score is within 6 points in either direction and there are less than five minutes left in regulation or overtime.