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Shift in focus puts Lions' defense in spotlight Mason and a neutral-site shellacking at the hands of Pitt, a game salvaged only slightly by a strong final 10 minutes. Later, a pre-Christmas trip to New York paid stress-free dividends, as the Lions pulled off an impressive 92-76 victory over St. John's at Madison Square Gar- den. Returning home to wrap up the non- conference schedule, they defeated lowly Morgan State with ease to improve to 8-5 heading into the Big Ten season. THE BIG TEN, SO FAR Coming off a relatively strong finish to the nonconfer- ence slate, Penn State looked capable of at least challenging a pretty good North- western team at the Bryce Jordan Center. That wasn't the case, though, as the Wildcats ran up a 51-32 halftime advan- tage before coasting to an 87-77 win. Gashed defensively, the Lions allowed shooting struggles to dictate their effort. The Lions' makeup has changed dra- matically since then. Bouncing back with a 60-47 win at Rutgers, Penn State continued the process of moving from an up-tempo, high-scoring approach to one that relied more heavily on the defensive staples that have defined Chambers' tenure with the program. The same was true at Michigan, at least for the game's first 30 minutes. Leading the Wolverines by 14 points, the Nittany Lions played some of their best defensive basketball in holding the hosts to just 42 points with fewer than 11 min- utes left to play. But a series of sloppy turnovers, mental mistakes and missed shots allowed the Wolverines to close with a 30-14 run en route to a 72-69 comeback victory. Still, Chambers was not deterred. "Michigan was exactly what we needed. We needed to be in that position, and then we needed to learn from it and find success," he said. "I was very positive after the game. I was very upbeat. Thurs- day we came in, watched the film: Here's how we're going to get better, here are the little things we've got to do. I'll tell you what, they're coachable young men. They did a great job." P ayton Banks knew this was coming. The Penn State redshirt junior has been around head coach Patrick Cham- bers and the Nittany Lion basketball program since he arrived on campus prior to the 2013-14 season. So when Chambers announced last March, and again in the fall, that his new-look Nittany Lions would aim to score 80 points per game and emphasize an electric, up-tempo offense, Banks could- n't help but feel a bit skeptical. As it turned out, that skepticism was not unfounded. After the first two weeks of the conference season, the Nittany Lions were not scoring in the 80s with regularity. Instead, they were using a renewed focus on defense as the cornerstone of their success. "I kind of had a feeling that was going to happen," Banks said. "[Chambers] was so focused on the scoring. We have a lot of talented people on the team, so the scoring would come from a lot of different places, but the one thing that needs to stay constant at all times, re- gardless of whether our shots are falling or not, is defense. "With a young squad, nobody likes playing defense when they first come here. Nobody played defense in high school. So yeah, I personally saw it coming. I know he probably did also, but he was just trying to pump up the offense, which has changed a lot over the years, too." The living embodiment of a scrap- per's mentality, Chambers focused on aggressiveness on the boards and de- fensive intensity when he was an assis- tant at Villanova and later as head coach at Boston University and now at Penn State. Even so, he was publicly committed to letting his new stable of explosive athletes run free this season with the mindset that they would outscore opponents. And there have been some indications that the Lions possess the potential to do that. They were averaging 72.7 points through their first 18 games this year, which means that this could turn out to be the highest-scoring team Chambers has had in his six seasons at Penn State. It will almost certainly be the highest- scoring Nittany Lion team of Banks' ca- reer. Penn State averaged 70.9 points per game in his first season, then dropped to 66.9 during his redshirt freshman year, then 65.8 in 2015-16. Of course, in today's game, prolific scoring is a necessity, not a luxury. The low-60s averages of Chambers' first seasons with the Nittany Lions aren't going to cut it this year or in the future. In conference games this season, only Rutgers has averaged fewer than 60 points, an outlier at a lowly 56.5 points per game. The league's other 13 teams were averaging from 67.3 points at the bottom end of the scale to 79.8 at the top, with the Nittany Lions trending toward the lower end in scoring against Big Ten competition. Chambers has been fixated on con- ference-only stats because they offer a glimpse at where the Nittany Lions are finding success and where they still need to show improvement. It was too early as of mid-January to draw many conclusions, but the indicators were to his liking. The Lions were second in BANKS

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