It's been seven losses in a row now, but head coach Ed DeChellis doesn't think the Penn State men's basketball team has reached the point of no return.

"We're all in this thing together," DeChellis said during his weekly press conference yesterday. "What I never want to get to is where I don't think our team is playing hard. Somehow that ends up being that we've given up and we're never going to give up."

Yesterday, the Nittany Lions (10-11, 1-7 Big Ten) had a weight room lift in the morning, then went into the film room around 3 p.m. before taking the floor at the Bryce Jordan Center to practice.

The lift focused on mainly upper body and core muscles, DeChellis said, with the intent on keeping players' legs fresh for tomorrow's game against No. 4 Wisconsin.

Film room time would be spent trying to accentuate whatever positives could be taken from Saturday's 10-point loss to Purdue, DeChellis said prior to the session, while also pointing out what could have been done better, like guarding Boilermakers forward Carl Landry.

And when they took the court, the Lions' 16 active players would be split up as evenly as possible by size and talent into two teams and play a game.

Then the roster would be split up again, and the scout team would begin to run Wisconsin's packages against the Penn State players that regularly have playing time during games.

"It's normal business for us," DeChellis said.

All of this in preparation for a stretch of games that for any team looks daunting, much less a team on its longest losing streak in two seasons.

Penn State will play a top-five team in four of its next five games. The Lions play Wisconsin and No. 3 Ohio State twice each, plus a game with Northwestern this Saturday.

The Badgers and Buckeyes sit atop the conference with 8-1 records, making for one of the toughest stretches in Penn State men's basketball history.

The Lions have twice played three top-five opponents during a regular season, most recently three in six games during the 2000 season. But they have never had four games versus elite teams in such a short time span.

"They're all hard," DeChellis said. "This time last year, we were looking at some tough stretches [a four-game losing streak], and we didn't know when a win was going to come and then we beat [then-No. 6] Illinois at Illinois."

That one-point win is Penn State's most impressive during DeChellis' three and a half years as coach. Senior guard Ben Luber holds it as his proudest moment on the court. But even Luber would like to forget about it, "because its been talked about so much."

He and the rest of the team would rather create a new one.

"We're going to keep playing hard and try to execute and try to become a better basketball team," DeChellis said. "Is that easy? No. Every day coming in here and you haven't won games and you've tried and you've worked hard and it just hasn't happened."