City of Basketball Love

Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
--

Temple didn’t need its best game to beat South Florida.

The Owls had it in spurts, and that was enough.

Three day away from easily the biggest game of the regular season, a Big 5 clash against national No. 1 Villanova with the city title on the line, the Owls first had to get through an antithetical opponent in the Bulls, the American Athletic Conference cellar-dwellars.

South Florida freshman Jahmal McMurray was on fire at the Liacouras Center, but his team shot itself in the foot with turnovers as Temple pulled away down the stretch for a 77-65 win.

It’s the fifth win in a row for Temple, but they’ve certainly played better this season.

“It was okay, I wasn’t elated to be honest with you,” head coach Fran Dunphy said. “Defensive numbers aren’t very good for us and that is always the first line to look at.”

The Owls allowed the Bulls to shoot 27-of-49 (55.1 percent) from the floor, with McMurray’s 24 points leading the way. The freshman guard was 8-of-17 from the floor, including 4-of-7 from 3-point range.

He had his team within four points with 13 minutes remaining despite the fact they lost their last two games by a combined 65 points to two teams (SMU and Cincinnati) against which Temple is 3-0 this season.

“McMurry is a really hard guy to guard,” Dunphy said. “I thought we did a really good job the first time we played, I don’t think we did as good of a job today. He’s a tough guard for us,”

Temple made up the difference in turnovers, forcing 20 that turned into 27 points the other way. Some of those were forced, but there were also a few straight giveaways by USF.

Sophomore forward Obi Enechionyia and senior forward Jaylen Bond each had 18 points to pace the Owls. That’s the fifth double-digit outing in the last six games for Enechionyia, who is averaging 9.5 ppg on the season but 13.7 ppg in that stretch.

“Hopefully he is getting more comfortable with everything that we’re doing,” Dunphy said. “He obviously didn’t kill it early in the season and now he’s starting to get more comfortable, get more space to shoot his shots and he’s been shooting it pretty well.”

Bond added 14 rebounds for his seventh double-double of the season. Junior point guard Josh Brown added 11 points and nine assists, while Quenton DeCosey (12 points, six assists) and Devin Coleman (10 points) rounded out five Owls in double figures.

A balanced offense saw the team set a new season high with 21 assists on 32 field goals, as the team shot 47.8 percent from the floor.

“Well I thought we moved the ball okay,” Dunphy said. “We need to be better at moving the ball through the middle of the floor. I think Jaylen did a couple of good things today, a couple of turnovers, but a couple of good things. We’re not an inside power basketball program so we need to do better when we do get a chance to get down low, but i think we shot okay.”

The Owls came out as hot as could be on Valentine’s Day, making 14 of their first 18 attempts from the floor to jump out to a 34-19 lead on the Bulls. But they only had six points over the closing 7:30 of the first half, which ended with a McMurray triple to pull his team within nine.

South Florida got as close as four midway through the second half before Temple finally found its rhythm again thanks to miscues from its opponent.

Four turnovers in a row by USF led to a 13-2 run that made it a 64-49 lead in the Owls’ favor with under 10 minutes to play. Three-pointers by junior Josh Brown (11 points, nine assists) and Devin Coleman (10 points) around the five-minute mark and one more by Quenton DeCosey with three minutes left helped Temple seal the win.

“Coach said in the beginning of the season we could beat any team in the country, or we could lose to any team in the country,” Brown said. “So we’ve just got to stick with it, sometimes our shot’s not falling, sometimes we can’t get stops, but we just stick with it, we find a way to win.”

With South Florida out of the way, Temple can finally turn its attention to arguably the biggest game of the regular season, with the top-ranked Wildcats visiting the already sold-out Liacouras Center on Wednesday.

Bond said that there had already been “a little bit” of buzz around the campus regarding the de-facto Big 5 championship game and chance to take down Villanova, but that will clearly escalate in the coming few days.

“We tried to take one game at a time, we focused on this game coming into today,” he added. “So now we got this out of the way, we can get ready for Villanova.”