City of Basketball Love

Aron Minkoff (@AronMinkoff)
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The Temple Owls continue a tough non-conference slate with a trip up to Madison on Saturday afternoon to take on powerhouse Wisconsin and the pride of Chester, head coach Bo Ryan. While the Badgers made it to the national championship game last year, a game that they lost to Duke, Wisconsin looks a lot different this season after losing several players to the NBA Draft.

At 5-3, the Badgers dropped the season opener to Western Illinois, 69-67, but rallied to pick up key victories over Notre Dame and 14th-ranked Syracuse. The Owls sit at 3-3 after starting the season with losses to then-No. 1 UNC, No. 22 Butler and No. 14 Utah (with a win over Minnesota mixed in), followed by wins in their last two matches over Delaware and Fairleigh Dickinson.

Three keys for the Owls:

1. Value each possession
The Owls have had trouble putting together a consistent 40 minutes thus far on the season, including in this week's win over Fairleigh Dickinson. Temple started off well in both halves, but the Knights were able to close out the opening period on a 15-4 run to cut the Owls' lead to four points.

“We’re playing a program--a terrific, terrific program, in a place where they don’t lose very much," Temple coach Fran Dunphy said. “So we’re going to have to play an outstanding game against them, take care of the ball.”

Turnovers have not been so much a problem this season for the Owls. They have a team assist-to-turnover ratio of 1.7, averaging some eight turnovers per game. To put it into perspective, their opponent Wisconsin averages 11 turnovers per game with an assist-to-turnover ratio of 1.07.

“We’re going to have to be very careful about how we run our offense, and we’re going to have to be terrific on the other end of the floor,” Dunphy said. “I’ve seen them and I have great, great respect for Bo as a coach and as a program, it’s been a pretty spectacular program since he has been there.”

Wisconsin, historically has been quite good at home, Temple players cannot let the noise get into their heads and needs to come out firing.

“It’s going to be a great opportunity, packed house, we’re going to have to bring our own energy out there and just play together as a team,” Quenton DeCosey said.

2. Get the young players involved early

Temple boasts an impressive freshman class, one that has already seen its three players play a significant amount of minutes.

Led by 6-foot-6 wing Trey Lowe, who averages 7 ppg, Temple will need Lowe to get active early and often. He has been a bit of a spark plug this season so far, and will need to continue playing with that energy.

Lowe is joined by steady ball handler Levan Alston Jr., a 6-foot-4 guard who comes in and plays in relief of starter Josh Brown. Alston Jr. averages five ppg in 16.6 mpg off the bench.

“How good they are, the place we’re playing in, are we ready?,” Dunphy said. “Are our young guys ready when they get in the game? So yeah I’m very very concerned about (it). We can’t take too many possessions off on Saturday.”

3. Connect on 3-pointers

Temple the last couple of years, this year especially has been a team that shoots an excess of 3-pointers. This season they have taken an average of 25.5 3-pointers per game, and have only connected on 8.1 of them. This is a 3-point shooting percentage of 33.3 percent.

This is fairly poor for a team that takes so many attempts from behind the arc.

“We’re going to play how we’re guarded,” Dunphy said. “The other day we shot, I thought too many threes, but by the same token if we’re shooting good ones I’ll take that.”

The status quo will not be acceptable against Wisconsin, they must make more shots if they want to beat a Wisconsin team that easily can and should return to the top-25 following this weekend, if the team emerges victorious against Temple.

“We know we have to be smart on both ends of the court,” senior forward Jaylen Bond said. “We played against some of the best teams in the country, unfortunately we lost but there’s things we took away from it, things we learned from it that will help us against teams like (Wisconsin).”

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Programming note:

Temple will face off with Wisconsin at 12:30 and the game will be featured on CBS, at the same time, the Temple football team will play for the AAC championship on ABC. It is the first time in school history that two sports teams have both been featured on major networks at the same time.