You could call La Salle a dangerous team, but they don't exactly have a lot of weapons.

Only four players scored in the Explorers' most recent game, a 72-61 win at Saint Bonaventure on Saturday.

Those four -- Kimmani Barrett, Darnell Harris, Rodney Green and Jerrell Williams -- have scored over 72% of La Salle's points this year. By comparison, Penn's top six scorers account for virtually the same percentage of the Quakers' points.

Penn won a thrilling game at Tom Gola High School Arena last year by shutting Harris down after a torrid first half, which makes the possible return of Michael Kach -- Penn's best perimeter defender -- seem even more important.

I'll be getting coach John Giannini's perspective on Tuesday's matchup with Penn tomorrow afternoon, so if you have a question you'd like addressed, shoot me an email at scurria@sas.upenn.edu and I'll post his response.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. -- Miami coach Frank Haith started sophomore Dwayne Collins over junior Jimmy Graham last night against Penn, and the decision paid off when Collins terrorized the Quakers inside while Graham still had seven points in 23 minutes. Haith had an interesting explanation for the move:

"It wasn’t anything bad that Jimmy did. What we looked at was [that] ... officiating at the beginning of the game is when it's the tightest. And I think Jimmy always gets two fouls, so he sits for 17, 18 minutes, and he comes back in the second half and he gets his third foul. So he ends up playing like 11 minutes for the game. We want to get him more minutes. We want him on the court more. I'm not proving my theory like an Einstein, but [tonight] he got his first foul in the second half. His aggressive nature hurts him to start games sometimes."

Penn injury report: Harrison Gaines (hamstring), Michael Kach (back) and Brennan Votel (hamstring) likely won't return for Saturday's game against N.J.I.T.

Good thing Votel wasn't going to get in the game, because his mind might not have been on basketball. A troupe of eye-catching females made its way behind the junior during a first-half media timeout, and Votel found some time to chat it up with them on the bench before play resumed. Good to see at least some positives in an otherwise bad night for the Quakers.

It was a great night of promotions at the Hurricanes' BankUnited Center. Instead of the Palestra-style protocol of throwing items into the stands, Miami instead dropped trinkets in tiny parachutes onto the crowd from the rafters. (Sadly, none were aimed at the media section.) Also, any fan could get a free shave or haircut right above Section 108. Spiffy.

Click here for excerpts of the Penn press conference, courtesy the Inquirer.

CORAL GABLES, Fla. -- Greetings from about two blocks away from the Miami Hurricanes' BankUnited Center, where the Quakers will try not to set any more dubious NCAA scoring records Wednesday night.

As of midnight, Penn is a 20- or 21-point 'dog, and it's not hard to see why. The 'Canes were ranked for two weeks, then suffered their first loss (to Winthrop) and fell out of the Top 25, but they're still a darn good team on paper.

No way will Penn come out as flat as it did against Florida Gulf Coast, but the Quakers just don't seem to match up well in this game. Miami shoots the lights out from three-point land (nearly 44%), which has killed the Quakers all year. The 6-foot-1, 185-pound junior Jack McClintock has been particularly ridiculous in this department; he leads the ACC with 2.91 threes per game and a 54.2% clip from deep and has a 20-point scoring average. James Dews, a sophomore with a bit more size, is a distant second in the conference in three-point percentage (47.9) and scores nearly 12 per game.

According to Penn's game notes, Brennan Votel, Harrison Gaines and Michael Kach are doubtful again after missing the FGCU game, which means we'll see plenty of Aron Cohen (who'll start) and Andreas Schreiber, plus some more Kevin Egee, Conor Turley and possibly Cameron Lewis as well.

Check back here at 8 p.m. where I'll be blogging the game live. Afterwards, myself and fellow DP Sports Editors Krista Hutz and Sebastien Angel will all have stories on dailypennsylvanian.com breaking things down.

As promised, here are my personal Ivy Rankings, Edition 2. (Here's No. 1.) RPI is included this time as well, and starting in the next edition I'll include how each team's RPI moved in the previous week.

1. Cornell (6-4, Previous Ranking: 3, RPI: 118). The Big Red had the best-quality win of the week -- Stony Brook -- so the No. 1 spot is theirs by default.
2. Columbia (5-7, Previous Ranking: 4, RPI: 203). 46-point victories are in short supply around the Ivy League, even against an opponent like Polytechnic.
3. Brown (6-5, Previous Ranking: 1, RPI: 119). The Bears got blown out by Notre Dame, but the Irish are 10-2, so Brown only moves down two spots.
4. Harvard (4-11, Previous Ranking: 7, RPI: 301). Harvard is still losing, but by smaller and smaller margins. I'm predicting a win over Dartmouth on Saturday.
5. Princeton (2-10, Previous Ranking: 8, RPI: 291). Still not much for the Tigers to be proud of, but their nine-point loss to Monmouth this week pales in comparison to what the three teams below them did.
6. Yale (3-7, Previous Ranking: 6, RPI: 158). 35-point loss. (Kansas.)
7. Dartmouth (5-7, Previous Ranking: 5, RPI: 241). 35-point loss. (Siena.)
8. Penn (4-8, Previous Ranking: 2, RPI: 255). 30-point loss. (Florida Gulf Coast.) Pick the outlier in that group. Sorry, Quakers, but last place is a lock this week.

A couple thoughts after last night's game at Lafayette:

I am really starting to think that Harrison Gaines is the most important player on the Quakers. Grandieri might know the offense inside and out, but Gaines is the spark that gets everything going. Moreover, he practically cannot be subbed out -- at least not until Kevin Egee and Aron Cohen prove they can play defense and control the offense without turning it over. It seems that Gaines' play -- more than that of any other player -- is very closely correlated with the Quakers' success.

Last night, Lafayette tough perimeter defense and good interior help gave Gaines a lot of trouble. He wasn't able to pass the ball inside with ease and he wasn't able to use his quickness to get inside. He had an awful game -- got beat on defense a few times and made some very poor decisions on offense -- but experience is a good teacher.

Just look at Mike Kach. The senior had to face the same perimeter defense that Gaines did and is probably just a little more athletic. But he made the right decisions and was crafty enough to have a great game. He had to create his own shot all game, and when he wasn't able to, he found the open man and crashed the boards. A great all-around game from him.

Here are the +/- numbers from last night. Minutes played are in parentheses, and the season total is the last number:

Grandieri: -13 (35) -22

Kach: -3 (25) -31

Votel: 0 (3) -4

Eggleston: -8 (31) -10

Reilly: -4 (13) -7

Gaines: -6 (28) +22

Cohen: -3 (15) -31

Schreiber: -2 (6) +6

Bernardini: -4 (25) +6

Lewis: -4 (5) +3

Cofield: -6 (6) -10

Egee: -5 (8) -28

If you've followed Penn basketball for more than 10 minutes, you probably know that the team will take a major blow without recently-graduated and current European basketballers Mark Zoller and Ibrahim Jaaber this season. It sounds bad, but the stats make it look even worse.

Zoller and Jaaber averaged 34.1 points per game, or 46 percent of the team's total. And if you take out Stephen Danley's (graduated) 8.7 and Tommy McMahon's (medical redshirt) 5.0, (and yes, Adam Franklin's 0.7) the current team (10 returning players) only accounted for 34 percent of last year's points. Other than Brian Grandieri, the highest average last year was Kevin Egee's 3.9 points per game.

Coach Glen Miller is clearly not oblivious to this issue.

"We're trying to find out [who's going to score], we don't have those answers right now," Miller said last Friday. "Just like the Ivy League has a lot of parity, on our team from top to bottom there's a lot of parity."

So where will the points come from in 2007-08?

The obvious answer is that Grandieri (11.7 points per game) will pick up the slack. Grandieri is the team's best player, but he's a guy that slips into the short corner and nails 10-footers or finds a loose offensive rebound and puts it in, not a guy who breaks a defender's ankles and throws it down over a guy like Drexel's Frank Elegar. He was a cog in last year's offense, and without the parts around him can he do the same thing?

All is not lost, though. There is a lot of potential in this team.

Darren Smith, while he was tentaitive last year and his shot isn't exactly beautiful, can knock down that corner three as well as anyone in this league. He hit an astounding 22 of 46 from deep (48 percent), he's just got to be less gun-shy (a.k.a. shoot other than just on the game's first three possessions) in his second season.

Egee also hit at a great percentage from three, going 20 for 39, but his strength is his all-around offensive game. He had a couple of strong drives in the Red and Blue scrimmage that ended in a runner (one went in, one didn't). And he has the strongest triceps on the team.

Guys like Aron Cohen and freshman Tyler Bernardini are real unknowns, but each has a nice shot and could put it to use.

The inside game will be a big question mark, as guys like Justin Reilly, Brennan Votel and Cam Lewis have to prove they can score on the block. Lewis' post game looked improved in the Red and Blue scrimmage, so we'll have to see what he can do in a game, and how the other two will fare. Lets just say they weren't the deadliest of shooters last season - Votel and Reilly went a combined 8 for 31 from three in 2006-07 (26 percent), while averaging a respectable 39 percent from inside the arc.