VILLANOVA, Penn. _ Villanova and Penn were seeing each other on the basketball court Wednesday night for the first time since the Quakers' broke the Wildcats' 25-game Big 5 winning streak last season at the Palestra.
And as much as the Quakers tried to make it back-to-back wins over 'Nova, and yes they tried, the Wildcats pulled away with clutch scoring by Justin Moore and cool free-throw shooting from Collin Gillespie to take an 80-69 victory at Finneran Pavilion.
The Wildcats (6-2, 2-0 Big 5) used a different strategy from their normal three-point attack, shooting only 10 shots from beyond the arc while scoring 48 points in the paint. Saddiq Bey was the main force inside, scoring a career-high 27 points, all of them coming before he had some foul trouble late in the game.
Villanova scored 11 straight points from the end of the first half into the start of the second to take its largest lead, 41-30, but the Quakers (5-4, 1-1) came back and hung around for a while. The Villanova margin varied between 2 and 4 points for six minutes. But Moore hit three baskets, one of them resulting in a three-point play, and Gillespie went 6-of-6 in the final 1:17.
