City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Daniel Dingle picks his spots to step up for Temple, and he picks them carefully.

Because when the redshirt junior forward from the Bronx is playing at his best, he makes a world of difference for the Owls.

Dingle stepped up in another big way on Thursday night, hitting several crucial shots and chipping in with some big defensive plays as well to help Temple to a 63-58 win over UConn that kept the Owls’ momentum rolling in the American Athletic Conference play.

“Just an unlikely finish to the game,” Temple head coach Fran Dunphy said afterwards.

He was talking about a game-closing 21-4 run by his Owls, one that saw an offense that had been stymied by a tough Huskies defense for the first 30-plus minutes suddenly wake up in large part to one player who seems to be popping up at the right moments.

Dingle’s career-high 15 points marked only the third time that he’s hit double figures this season. The previous two times came in two of Temple’s biggest wins of the year, a 77-70 win at then-No. 22 Cincinnati on Dec. 29 and a Jan. 24 win over previously-unbeaten and then-No. 8 Southern Methodist at home on Jan. 24; he had 14 on each occasion.

Dingle couldn’t pinpoint a reason why he seemed to rise to the occasion when his team needed him the most.

“Each game I take the opponent the same way as the next,” he said. “So I just play, go out there and whatever happens.”

He’s not the only reserve to have stepped up in the recent past for the Owls (15-8, 9-3 American), who tied Southern Methodist atop the league with the win.

Backup forward Mark Williams, who didn’t see any time against UConn had 16 points and five rebounds the prior outing against Central Florida, and freshman Trey Lowe had 11 points against South Florida two games before that.

“It would be great if we could count on (Dingle) to step up the last seven games and do what he did for us tonight," Dunphy. "We need him, we need everybody...it's not easy being a reserve in a situation like that but if they keep their heads about them, then we can have a chance to do things like we did tonight."

Every win is big this time of year for Temple, who began the year 6-6 against a brutally tough schedule but is now rallying with a strong conference slate to put itself in the NCAA picture with Selection Sunday less than five weeks away.

But it looked like a three-game winning streak would ends at the hands of UConn (17-7, 8-4), who led by 12 with under six minutes to play as Temple had mustered just 42 points through the game’s opening 34 minutes.

Then Dingle caught fire, knocking down three 3-pointers in just under two minutes, with senior guard Devin Coleman adding one of his own to help turn that dozen-point deficit into a two-point disadvantage with a full 3:45 left on the clock.

“We know he was a capable 3-point shooter,” Conn head coach Kevin Ollie said of Dingle, being kind to a forward who’d made only 21.2 percent (7-of-33) of his 3-pointers coming in. “But we were trying to run them off the 3-point line--especially when you’re up 12, you know the 3-point line is going to get them back in the game. We just didn’t execute.”

Suddenly, a Liacouras Center with 8,316 in attendance was rocking, and all the momentum was firmly on Temple’s side.

Dingle’s contribution wasn’t limited to one side of the court, either. A crucial shut-down of UConn grad student Sterling Gibbs on the possession after his final 3-pointer of the evening helped Temple tie it up on a Quenton DeCosey jumper with 1:49 left, the game’s first tie since it was 31-31 early in the second half.

DeCosey, who led the Owls with 23 points in the win, hit the game-clinching bucket, putting some improbable spin on a layup through contact that resulted in a 3-point play and a 59-58 lead with 70 ticks on the clock.

“I don’t know how that went in,” DeCosey said. “I’m just very thankful that it went in.”

Temple forced three turnovers to finish things off. A steal by Josh Brown on the ensuing possession led to two DeCosey foul shots, and then a Rodney Purvis double-dribble and bad pass from Jalen Adams (after two more DeCosey freebies) closed out the game.

The Huskies did a good job of shooting themselves in the foot down in the second half, even as they were expanding their lead. One possession saw three missed layups in a five-second span at an open rim, and on another UConn big man Amidah Brimah had a ball elude his grasp as he went up for a dunk.

Those buckets cost the Huskies dearly down the stretch.

“We missed a couple of layups, Amidah had the ball in his hands—it just slipped out of his hands, I think because of the tape on his hands but if you’re out on the court, you’ve got to make that play,” Ollie said.

By beating second-place UConn, the Owls are currently a game and a half up on every other AAC team that’s postseason eligible; SMU won’t be playing in either the AAC or NCAA Tournaments this spring due to a self-inflicted ban.

That would be a great finish for a team that was predicted to finish sixth in the league’s preseason standings--and they already have wins over four of the five squads picked in front of them, Memphis excluded.

“We’re at the top of the conference, number one, so I think we’re one of the best teams in the conference,” DeCosey said. “We’ve got to stay focused, we’re on a bit of a roll right now.”