City of Basketball Love

Joseph Santoliquito (@JSantoliquito)

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VILLANOVA, PA — This was something Villanova women’s basketball coach Denise Dillon wanted to see and needed to see. The Wildcats needed someone to share a portion of the scoring burden on the highly reliant Jasmine Bascoe, and the team’s defense had to tighten.

Dillon received a little dose of both Saturday night, when the Wildcats ran Temple off the court, with a season-high 88 points in an 88-58 Big 5 victory.

Villanova (4-2) received a career-best, game-high 19 points from Ryanne Allen, the 6-foot-1 senior guard who transferred in from Vanderbilt last year. Temple turned the ball over 19 times, which turned into 24 Villanova points.

“I’m excited for our team to get a great Big 5 win at home, to get a win here at home, against a really talented Temple team,” Dillon said. “I think our defense (helped in creating the transition points). I was pleased with the effort, knowing the matchup was going to be tough. We had a week to prepare recognizing the strengths of Temple with their presence on the attack, and rebounding. Our defense created offense for us, which got us out running.”

Villanova outscored Temple 31-11 in the second quarter spelling the difference.

“The reminder (after the first quarter) of what our keys were,” Dillon said. “It was all on the defensive end. I kept saying it was the talking, the digging, letting people know where they were and create some action for us. It was an opportunity for us to wake up.”

Maybe, possibly, wake up and use the template the Wildcats created for the rest of the season. Villanova had been uneven over its first five games, winning some battles on the court here, losing double-figure, third-quarter leads there, like the ’Cats did against Princeton.

It was Allen who ended the first half with a buzzer-beating three-pointer.

It was Temple that beat Villanova last year, 76-62, in the inaugural Women's Big Five Classic Championship—at Villanova.

It was not exactly forgotten.

“That was a tough loss last year, so the focus this week in practice reminding them about that loss,” Allen said. “We reminded the people who weren’t last year about that loss and how we wanted to get them back. That was a huge emphasis for us, especially losing on home floor. It was nice to get that back for us.”

The emphasis for Temple (3-3), meanwhile, is to regroup, stressed Owls’ coach Diane Richardson.

“I don’t think we played hard, I don’t think we were very competitive today and transition points are something that we don’t normally give up,” she said. “We didn’t sprint back. I don’t know what to say. We just have to go back to the drawing board. We have to bounce back. We can’t play like this the rest of the season. We can’t get beat by 30 points. That’s the thing. As old as I am, I usually have more energy than they do.

“That can’t happen. I’m like somebody’s grandmother and I have more energy than them. If your granny can run around and be excited, surely you can at 18 to 22.”  

By the end of the third quarter, it was Villanova 63, Temple 42.

The game was actually over by halftime.

The Wildcats took a commanding 44-24 lead into intermission, thanks to Allen’s team-high 12 points on four-for-four shooting from three-point range. The 12 points put Allen two points shy of her season-high 14, which she scored in the Wildcats’ 84-73 victory over JMU on Nov. 16—and five off her previous career-best 17 points the 2022 Archbishop Wood graduate scored against Boston College in Villanova’s 76-70 first-round Women’s Basketball Invitation Tournament victory last season.

The Wildcats opened up what was a close game with an 8-0 run from 5:44 left in the half down to 3:49. The ’Cats were clinging to a 23-19 edge, when Brooke Bender capped off the run with a three-pointer, pushing Villanova ahead, 31-19. Temple did not get within 10 points again.

The glaring difference was how well Villanova protected the ball, and how Temple did not over the first 20 minutes. The Owls turned the ball over 13 times that translated into 18 Villanova points, while the Wildcats turned the ball over a mere four times for two Tempel points.

After a slow start, Villanova heated up to nail 7 of 12 from three-point range in the first half to Temple’s anemic 1-for-6. 

The teams ended the first quarter knocked at 13-13, but it was easily the “Bascoe show.” The 5-foot-7 sophomore guard scored eight of the Wildcats’ first 13 points, all coming on fastbreaks. She closed the opening quarter with a steal-and-score layup, while Temple saw four different players score, primarily using 6-1 junior Saniyah Craig, who closed the opening 10 minutes with four points and a rebound.

The 24 points was a season low in the first half for Temple, which shot 9 of 23 (39.1%) in the first half to Villanova’s 18 of 33 (54.5%). The Owls also could not deal with the speed of Villanova, which outscored Temple 20-2 in fastbreak points in the first half.

“We have to play Temple basketball,” Richardson said. “We absolutely have to do better than that. The second quarter really punched us and we didn’t respond well enough. We didn’t compete today. We were jogging. We came out last year on their court and beat them for the Big 5 Championship. I expected Denise to have her team bouncing back. But I also expected more out of our team as reigning Big 5 champions, to play like champions. And we didn’t do that.”

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Joseph Santoliquito is an award-winning sportswriter based in the Philadelphia area who began writing for CoBL in 2021 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on BlueSky here.