Penn star TJ Power misses practice due to illness, questionable for NCAA Tournament matchup vs. Illinois

GREENVILLE, S.C. — At the far end of the court, as his teammates stretched on the opposite baseline, a lone figure in a maroon sweatsuit squared up and rose into a jump shot so pure it might’ve come from a lab. Watching from a careful distance was a silver-haired head coach who has seen enough basketball to know that the ol’ next-man-up-mentality has limits, especially for a 24½-point underdog.

An hour earlier, Penn coach Fran McCaffery had sounded a note of cautious optimism — or optimistic caution — regarding star wing TJ Power’s status for the Quakers’ NCAA Tournament opener against third-seeded Illinois on Thursday (9:25 p.m., TNT). Power, a smooth 6-foot-9 scorer whose 44 points in the Ivy League championship lifted Penn to its first March Madness appearance in nearly a decade, has been battling an illness that sidelined him from practice on Wednesday.

“If you were asking me do I think he’s going to play, I’d say yes, but he didn’t practice today,“ McCaffery said. ”He didn’t feel up to it."

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The uncertainty surrounding Power comes at an especially bad time for Penn. The 14th-seeded Quakers were already missing leading scorer Ethan Roberts, who suffered a concussion in the Ivy League tournament and has been ruled out for Thursday’s game. He and Power have combined to account for nearly 34 of Penn’s 76.1 points per game this season. The only other player in double figures is senior forward Michael Zanoni at 11.6 points per game.

Power’s appearance during a late-afternoon shootaround Wednesday at the Bon Secours Wellness Arena was a positive sign. The 22-year-old junior has the kind of game that does not exist as excess inventory in the stockroom at a program like Penn’s. A five-star high school senior who ranked among the top 25 players in his national class, Power spent his freshman season at Duke before transferring to Virginia as a sophomore. He ended up at Penn thanks in part to a preexisting relationship with McCaffery, who had recruited him to play at Iowa as he was building the Hawkeyes into a national force. Power is averaging 16.8 points and 7.9 rebounds while shooting 43.3% from three-point range for the Quakers this season. His combination of size and shooting ability is the kind of thing that game plans are built around on both benches.

Illinois coach Brad Underwood had high praise for Power’s 44-point performance in Penn’s 88-84 overtime win over Yale in the Ivy League championship, calling it “one of the best performances I’ve seen all year.”

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“I always tell our players I had the best game of my high school career with 102-degree fever,” Underwood said. “When somebody gets sick, it scares me to death. I hope he’s not in a position to have the greatest of his career coming off a 44-point game.”

Whatever the Quakers get from Power, they will be hard-pressed to follow in the footsteps of Princeton and Yale as the latest Ivy team to advance to the Round of 32. Underwood’s Illini are one of the hotter Final Four picks among college basketball punditry’s smarter-than-you set. After a 24-8 season in which half their losses came in overtime — including an opening-round defeat to Wisconsin in the Big Ten tournament — Illinois enters the NCAA Tournament with the nation’s seventh-best Pomeroy Rating, and the second-best offensive rating. Giving 24½ points, Illinois is by far the heaviest favorite among No. 3 seeds in this year’s field.

Besides Power, the biggest reason to believe in the Quakers is McCaffery, who coached March Madness Cinderellas at UNC-Greensboro and Siena before his 15 seasons at Iowa. His message to his players this week has been equal parts hard-ass coach and softened-up sage: It’s a business trip, but one that you might never get again, so make sure you enjoy it.

“I think that’s kind of every hooper’s dream is to go play in front of 500-some-thousand people that watch the Ivy League championship and the millions that are going to watch this game,” said sophomore AJ Levine, a precocious guard who will generate some clip-worthy reaction footage. “I think it’s just exciting. It makes you want to play harder. It makes you want to show what you can do and your ability and showcase that to the whole world. Really it’s just a dream come true, and it’s making me want to play harder than I already do.”

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Among the game’s more intriguing subplots is the relationship between McCaffery and Underwood, who developed a close bond during their time together in the Big Ten.

“When you face a Fran McCaffery team, you’re going to get a team that’s electric offensively,” Underwood said. “I think he’s one of the best offensive coaches in all of college basketball.”

McCaffery is quick to shrug off such praise, pointing instead to his players. The humility is not entirely empty. Right now, all the coaching acumen in the world doesn’t mean as much as Power’s health.