City of Basketball Love

By Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
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Temple coach Adam Fisher entered the press room after Saturday afternoon’s Big 5 contest against La Salle and summed it up nicely in eight words.

“They kicked our butt from start to finish,” Fisher said, and he wasn’t wrong. 

La Salle’s 83-75 win at John Glaser Arena, which put Fran Dunphy’s squad into the Big 5 championship game next Saturday, was a nearly 40-minute, two-way clinic. The Explorers controlled the glass, locked down Temple’s main offensive weapons, limited their turnovers, and got yet another career day from senior guard Corey McKeithan to improve to 6-2 (2-0 Big 5) a month into the season.

“Seventeen offensive rebounds,” Fisher noted, adding: “Their toughness was better than ours.”

Dunphy wasn’t quite as enthralled with his team’s performance, saying his group had “lots of room to move and a long way to go,” but there’s no doubt the La Salle faction of a sold-out crowd at Glaser went home happy. 

In earning a trip to next Saturday’s Big 5 championship game against Saint Joseph’s, La Salle won just about every important statistical category. The 17 misses they grabbed led to a 20-11 advantage in second-chance points. They limited Temple to a single 3-pointer, on 16 attempts. They forced 15 turnovers against seven committed, leading for more than 36 minutes, including all of the last 34 minutes and 45 seconds. 

And they did it with balance: seven different La Salle players had at least one block, the same number who had at least one steal. Everybody in Dunphy’s top eight made a contribution, from McKeithan’s game-high 28 points to freshman Deuce Jones’ defense on Temple standout Jamal Mashburn Jr.

All of it helped La Salle overcome a 39.5% day from the floor, the main red mark from Saturday's test.

“Obviously a very good win for us, for so many different reasons,” Dunphy said. “I thought these guys did a great job. Corey was terrific.”

McKeithan, who arrived at La Salle this offseason after three years at Rider, has been the biggest revelation in the city. 

As a Bronc, the 5-foot-10 guard from Windsor (Conn.) averaged 4.8 ppg across three years, his 8.0 ppg mark as a full-time starter his junior year serving as his high-water mark. He’s blown past that in all but one game thus far this season, setting and re-setting his career scoring mark three different times in the last month, doing it again in fine fashion against Temple. 

He was 10-of-19 from the floor, 3-of-6 from 3-point range, 5-of-5 from the foul line, with four assists and two steals without a turnover in 37 minutes of action. Through eight games, he’s averaging 19.0 ppg while hitting 41.7% of his 3-pointers, with an assist-to-turnover ratio of 2.4:1. 

“I think it starts with the coaches first,” he said. “They’ve got the confidence in me to handle the ball and shoot the ball as I’m doing now, and then my team, they give me confidence as well. I miss a shot, they tell me to keep shooting.”

“He’s a born scorer, but I think he’s also starting to feel the game,” Dunphy said. “The fact that he’s handling the ball as much as he is, is really a sign of somebody who has got his act together. He knows where the ball’s supposed to be, and a lot of times he knows the ball is supposed to be with him, to try to make a shot.”

Daeshon Shepherd (above, right) and the Explorers limited the effectiveness of Temple's Jamal Mashburn Jr. (Photo: Mark Jordan/CoBL)

McKeithan led four in double figures. Demetrius Lilley added 13 points and six rebounds, getting much of that production early; Daeshon Shepherd and Jahlil White added 11 apiece. 

It was an especially meaningful game for White, who played the last four years at Temple, and came away with a double-double against his former teammates, the 6-7 wing adding 12 rebounds in 27 minutes.

“I think a lot of it [was] let’s win for Jahlil White,” McKeithan said of the grad transfer from Wildwood (N.J.). “Everybody wants to beat their old team. We thought about it before the game, we talked about it, and we said ‘start to finish, they’re a great team, so [we] have to [play from] start-to-finish.”

Shepherd and Jones teamed up on the other end to bother Mashburn, who came into the game averaging 23.3 ppg for Temple (4-3, 1-1 Big 5). Mashburn scored 15 for the Owls, but needed 19 shots to get there. Much of the credit went to Jones, the freshman even blocking one of Mashburn’s layups from behind, Dunphy not surprised by the boost Jones gave in his 17 minutes.

“If he did it today in the game, you can imagine what he can be in practice,” Dunphy said. “He can be a pain in the butt, and that’s what we needed him to be. Credit to Mashburn, every time he rose up in the second half and took a mid-range jumper, it was dead in the basket.”

Redshirt sophomore guard Quante Berry led Temple with 18 points and a career-high 15 rebounds (five offensive). But that wasn’t enough for the Owls to overcome the Explorers’ group rebounding efforts, with many of the afternoon’s 50/50 balls going the way of the home team. 

“We’ve got to have a heart, we’ve got to have a fight,” Fisher said. “We can’t think somebody else is going to go get it. ‘Well, I boxed out my guy’ — well, we need all five guys. They did a great job, they sent five to the glass, they played really well here at home and they did a nice job tonight on the glass.”

Temple won’t play again until the Big 5 Classic, when it will face Villanova in the third-place game. Drexel and Penn will meet in the fifth-place game. 

La Salle has one game in between, a road game at Northeastern (5-3) on Tuesday, which means a trip up to Boston the day before.