A couple weeks ago, Mike Jensen told me that Ibrahim Jaaber was the one guy on the floor for Penn who could really go toe-to-toe with the future NBA stars on the BCS teams the Quakers played.
At first, I must admit, I didn't see it. But over the last two or three weeks of the season, and into the NCAA Tournament, it became clear. And now, that status has been cemented.
It might seem improbable that Jaaber is the first Penn player to win Big 5 Player of the Year since Tony Price did it with the 1979 Quakers team that went to the Final Four. In fact, when I first saw that, I didn't really believe it. But I got out the Daily News Big 5-0 book, which had the list of all the Big 5 Players of the Year in the City Series' first 50 seasons, and there it was.
Jerome Allen was beaten twice, in 1994 by Temple's Eddie Jones and in 1995 by Villanova's Kerry Kittles. It's hard to argue with that Ugonna Onyekwe was also beaten twice, in 2002 by Lynn Greer and in 2003 by Jameer Nelson. It's probably harder to argue with that, as good as Onyekwe was and even though Penn won the Big 5 outright in 2002.
But in 2007, Jaaber's competition was really only teammate Mark Zoller and Villanova's Curtis Sumpter. So the voters of the Herb Good Basketball Club decided that the Geasey Trophy should move from the Big 5's 33rd Street office into the building next door, instead of to one of the other gyms in the region.
As an aside, I'm not one of the voters, if you're wondering, but that isn't the point.
If I had a vote -- and I don't mean this as disrespect to Ibby, who had a great Penn career -- I admit, at the time when the voting was conducted, I would have gone for one of the other two.
Sumpter was the star of the Big 5 champions, the player that the other teams respected the most... and yet, in the last month of the season, Scottie Reynolds was the star and the go-to guy, and the player who delivered the clutch shots.
I probably would have voted for Zoller, because he just did so much for Penn in terms of putting up numbers. 18.2 points and 7.5 rebounds per game, 87 assists, 55 steals and 12 blocks over the season. Plus the countless dives for loose balls, those big free throws against Temple, and being a guy who grew up watching Big 5 games and wanting to be a part of them.
But then I thought -- and talked to Mike just now -- and I thought about how much I watched Jaaber over the last few weeks of the season and saw that he really does have the kind of presence and ability to take over a game. Not always against Big 12-sized opponents, but against a lot of other ones. And against North Carolina, to borrow from Mike again, he was the guy for Penn that could play even with the other team.
So I thought about it this way: what happened when the players weren't on the floor, or at least weren't being effective? With Sumpter -- and it happened against Kentucky -- Scottie Reynolds stepped up more often than not. Yes, Sumpter made a difference when he scored a lot, but he had a lot of quiet games down the stretch, even if his scoring didn't drop too much.
Zoller got in foul trouble a lot, and Penn was definitely a different team without him on the floor. But the Quakers still went 13-1 in the Ivy League, and won that game against Brown on the last weekend after he had fouled out.
So it comes down to Jaaber, and this is where he has a very strong case. He averaged 36.9 minutes per game. That's 92.3 percent of the possible minutes he could have played, which is the 12th-highest percentage in the country according to Pomeroy.
Which means that we don't have a full idea of what Penn would have been like without its starting point guard on the floor. It also means, combined with his average of 2.2 fouls committed per game, that Jaaber was able to stay out of foul trouble, and thus be on the floor when his team needed him to direct traffic.
Add that to 15.9 points and 4.5 rebounds per game, plus 90 steals, 162 assists and 17 blocks (second-best on the team), and the picture becomes even more clear.
Ibrahim Jaaber didn't just win this year's Big 5 MVP award, he earned it. In a city which prizes its hard workers, that is high praise in and of itself.
