City of Basketball Love

Jeff Griffith (@Jeff_Griffith21)
& Graham Foley (@Graham_Foley3)
--

Alani Moore II was feeling it.

Continuing to start this season in place of senior Josh Brown, who’s been in-and-out of the starting lineup with an ankle injury, Moore simply couldn’t miss out of the gates Thursday night.

With Brown sitting on the Temple bench wearing a suit, Moore once again stepped into the senior’s starting position – and stepped into four consecutive three-pointers – as he singlehandedly built his team an early 10-point lead and sparked their offense, which had been slow to start.

“I just came out, hit my first shot,” said Moore, a 5-foot-10 freshman point guard. “After that I kept letting them fly and they started falling. I was very confident in my shot, and it started falling early.”

“When I see a shot go in, It’s like a trigger,” he added. “It tells me to keep shooting the ball.”

Behind Moore’s explosive early stretch and his team’s strong strong shooting performance as a whole, the Temple Owls fended off the Yale Bulldogs en route to a 83-77 win Thursday night at the Liacouras Center, in their final game before their winter break and American Athletic Conference slate.

“(A win like this), it’s something that you’re pleased with, no question about it,” head coach Fran Dunphy said. “We’ve had a number of games like this during the course of the year that we’ve found a way to get the wins, and I’m just hoping we make this our M.O. when we go at our league schedule as well because we’ll have a lot of close games.”

Brown, who entered the season hampered by a seven-month-old achilles injury, returned to the lineup in the Owls’ seventh game against St. Joe’s on November 30. He eventually regained his starting role, but recently found himself back on the bench with soreness after putting up double-digits in battles with George Washington and DePaul.

Having missed Temple’s last two wins over NJIT and Yale, as well as multiple days of practice, the senior has until his team’s upcoming conference opener – a home bout with Cincinnati – to finalize an ongoing decision process of whether or not to accept a medical redshirt for the remainder of the 2016-17 season.

“He’s trying his best,” Dunphy said. “He’ll meet with the doctors again, the doctors I’m sure talked to him tonight, he’ll meet with them again on Wednesday when we play Cincinnati.”

“Hopefully he’ll be able to play,” he added. “They’ll tell me, the doctor and the trainer and Josh Brown will tell me. I would love to have him, that’s what he initially wanted to do, so I’d love to have him be able to play, but we’ll see how it goes.”

While no decision has officially been made regarding Brown’s return Dunphy certainly has to pleased with the way his replacement has performed, despite being just a freshman.

In his first 12 college games prior to Thursday night’s win over Yale, Moore averaged 8.0 ppg and shot 48.9 percent from beyond the arc – the Owls’ leader in the latter category.

“No matter what the circumstances are, Alani was terrific tonight,” Dunphy said. “His first half was pretty spectacular. It gave us the cushion that we needed to kind of have the advantage in the first half, and down the stretch he was tremendous making shots. They didn’t give him much space in the second half, but when it came time to get him to the foul line...he certainly came through.”

“He stepped up big time,” senior Daniel Dingle added. “He’s no longer a freshman since his first game, he’s been playing well, plays hard.”

Thursday night, Moore ended up with a game-high 26 points on 6-of-12 shooting. His knack for finding the bottom of the net permeated to a few other members his team, as the Owls ended up shooting a solid 35 percent from beyond the arc.

Three triples by Dingle and Shizz Alston, Jr. in the early second half helped the Owls open up the game’s biggest lead to that point 48-35. Dingle finished with 19 points, while Alston added another 16.

From the free throw line, the Owls shot an astounding 93 percent, making 28 of their 30 attempts.

“(The free throw shooting) was very huge,” Dunphy said. “Absolutely huge, they stepped up and knocked them down. Mark Williams had two big ones, Quinton Rose had two big ones, Shizz and Alani were there a lot, so you’d expect them to put their mark on that part of the game and they did, so it was pretty terrific foul shooting, which was great.”

For Obi Enechionyia, however, the night was a much colder one after making the Owls’ first three-pointer. The junior shot 1-of-11 from the field and finished with just three points, but snatched a key team-high 10 rebounds.

Enechionyia’s struggles Thursday night were a continuation of a difficult stretch of games. The 6-foot-10 Virginia-native has averaged 10.2 ppg over his last five contests, a significant underachievement for the team’s top scorer.

The Owls struggled as a whole to score down low. The Bulldogs outscored Temple 32-14 in the paint and turned away six of the Owls’ shots; four of which were blocked by Jordan Bruner, who helped pace Yale with 15 points.

“It’s a team effort, getting everybody involved, getting everybody shots,” Dingle said. “We play teams like Cincinnati, teams like Cincinnati, USF, other teams (in the conference) are going to key in on Obi. When we’re making shots, they’ve got to stay honest, and that’s going to get Obi more in the flow and he’s going to step up and make shots like I know he can.

With the win, Temple is arguably in a far better spot going into conference play than many had anticipated two months ago. Last season, the eventual league-champion Owls were 5-5 as they got set to play Cincinnati in their first conference battle.

For the young squad, wins like these provide a major catalyst with another trip through their challenging league schedule forthcoming.  

“I feel like we’re maturing,” Dingle said. “Winning early, it helps boost our confidence knowing that we can compete and play with anybody. But then with games like New Hampshire when we lose, we can lose to anybody so we have to bring it every night...fortunately we came out with the victory so that should help us when we play against Cincinnati.”