City of Basketball Love

Ari Rosenfeld (@realA_rosenfeld)
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Sometimes, basketball can be as simple as which team makes shots and which team doesn’t.

Just ask Fran Dunphy and his Temple Owls.

After a game in which Temple relied heavily on the three-point shot, shooting 10-for-22 from beyond the arc in a road win against a ranked Cincinnati team, the Owls reverted back to their old ways, suffering a 77-50 loss to Houston at the Liacouras Center.

Temple shot less than 35 percent from the field, but it was the three-point line where it struggled the most. In a first half in which they fell behind by 20 points, the Owls made none of their 12 attempts from deep, and ultimately shot just 3-for-23 (13 percent) for the game.

“Obviously against Cincinnati we made shots, which is the reason why we were able to win the game. We just didn’t have it [today],” Dunphy said. “3-for-23 from the three point line is never gonna be good enough. I like the number of threes we shot but I certainly don’t like the percentage of threes that went down.”

Houston, on the other hand, hit shots from all over the floor; the Cougars made nearly 55 percent of their field goal attempts and connected on seven of their 15 three-pointers, converting at a 46.7 percent clip.

The shooting got so bad that Temple at one point went over seven minutes of game time without a made field goal, allowing Houston to break the game open with a 17-1 run.

As Dunphy and his players saw it, however, this wasn’t a matter of plain old poor offensive play--although Dunphy wasn’t happy with his team’s nine first half turnovers. Instead, they felt they executed the offense well, but simply couldn’t get anything to fall.

“We were getting the shots we wanted, but today we just weren’t able to make shots, and they made shots,” said Jaylen Bond, the Owls’ senior center. “That’s what the game came down to. I think they shot around 50-something percent, and we shot around 30. We can’t win games that way.”

“I think we were getting pretty good looks,” senior guard Quenton DeCosey added, echoing his teammate’s sentiment. “We just weren’t making shots today.”

Temple’s 50 points was its lowest output of the season, and the first time the Owls had scored fewer than 60 all year. DeCosey and sophomore Obi Enechionyia led the team with nine points each, as no one managed to reach double figures.

Part of the poor shooting performance could certainly be attributed to playing without Enechionyia for much of the first half.

Temple’s best three-point shooter at 42.5 percent on the year, the stretch forward picked up two fouls within the first two minutes, then was hit with his third early in the second half. Enechionyia played just 18 minutes, and none of the Owls’ other shooters were able to step up in his absence.

“It destroys some of our flow, there’s no question about it,” Dunphy said in regards to Enechionyia being limited. “But we have to next man up kind of thing, and we have to do a better job of that.”

While Dunphy and his players are confident in their ability to make shots, the numbers indicate the Owls are probably a bit closer to the team that played today than they are to the team that bit Cincinnati, at least in terms of 3-point shooting.

Entering today’s game, Temple had shot just 32 percent from deep, which ranks 259th in the country; after factoring in today’s performance, that figure dips closer to 30 percent.

However, on a guard-heavy team whose tallest rotation player--Enechionyia--also does a bulk of his work behind the arc, the three ball is probably the best chance the Owls have to compete in American Athletic Conference play.

If you take Dunphy’s word, you can expect Temple to come out firing again when they next take the floor in what will be another road test against Connecticut.

“We don’t have a great presence inside. That’s not a real tough thing to figure out,” Dunphy said. “We need to shoot a number of threes but we didn’t do a good job of running our offense, we didn’t have good execution of our offense today. I give Houston great credit but we have to  do a lot of work before Tuesday’s game.”