City of Basketball Love

Any team that plays Cincinnati knows points are going to come at a premium and turnovers are going to come in bunches.

And if Temple didn’t know that, they learned it pretty quickly Wednesday night.

The always-physical Bearcats, who allow just 63.1 points per game, had Temple searching for answers on the offensive end early on, as they turned the ball over on their first four possessions.

Although the Owls found a way to recover from their ice cold start, they were unable to handle the Bearcats’ level of physicality and athleticism for a full 40 minutes, as No. 23 Cincinnati – which is used to winning ugly – took down Temple at the Liacouras Center Wednesday night by a final of 56-50.

“You’ve got to learn to win tough games,” Cincinnati head coach Mick Cronin said. “Our saying is you’ve got to win when you miss shots. You can’t only win when you hit perimeter shots. You’ve got to be able to win ugly, you’ve got to be able to win when the ball’s not going in.”

Ugly was the perfect word to describe what took place on North Broad, as the two teams combined for 34 turnovers and 34 fouls.

“We turned it tonight 16 times, we’re not a 16-turnover team,” head coach Fran Dunphy said. “They make it difficult to score in the half-court, but they didn’t pressure us or any of those things that cause those turnovers, they were walks, they were occasionally bad pass, that kind of thing.”

It ended up being two key turnovers in the final forty seconds that dashed the Owls’ chances of an upset in the most fitting way possible; it was a blocked shot attempt from Dingle – who had a game-high 15 points – that cost Temple multiple chances at a game-tying basket with 14 seconds left.

It was a 10-0 stretch in the second half that helped Cincinnati open up their biggest advantage since they led 9-0, 47-39 off of slams by Jacob Evans – who had a team-high 11 points – and Tre Scott.

Junior forward Gary Clark matched Evans’ 11 points and added six boards.

That run helped the Bearcats regain control, as multiple Owls failed to make wide-open three-point attempts in the minutes that followed to cut the lead.

Temple’s difficulty shooting in the final eight minutes of play was a small picture of the their overall shooting night. The Owls shot just 26 percent from the field and 19 from beyond the arc.

Cincinnati struggled to shoot as well, going just 33 percent from the field.

“First of all, I thought Temple played extremely hard tonight,” Cronin said. “Neither one of us obviously shot the lights out, it wasn’t a thing of beauty. But I thought they competed really hard, so did our kids. I think the key to the game for us, we got tougher as the game went on.”

Early on, the rebounding efforts of sophomore Ernest Aflakpui were a major key in combating Cincinnati’s physical play down low. He finished with 11 rebounds, most of which came in the first half, as he was hampered with foul trouble in the second frame.

Combined with Aflakpui’s fouls, it certainly didn’t help that 6-foot-10 forward Obi Enechionyia, started off by continuing his recent cold stretch before finishing with 10 points and 10 boards.

“People are guarding him differently, he’s not getting too many open looks,” Dunphy said. The next progression in his game, he has to make that adjustment of shot fake and go by, which he did late...But it’s that, they’re running at him differently than they did a couple of weeks ago, people are figuring it out and he needs to fix that.”

With Aflakpui and Enechionyia struggling at times, Cincinnati ended up out-rebounding Temple 46-43 and outscored them 24-18 in the paint.

“We started rebounding the ball better as the game went on,” Cronin said. “Second-shot opportunities and free-throw opportunities were the difference.”

The owls, who were looking to improve to 3-0 against the top 25 after having defeated Florida State and West Virginia will now have to settle with being 0-1 in conference after the loss to Cincinnati.

After an overachieving non-conference run, a single-digit loss against the league’s preseason is nothing to scoff at, but it’s hard to think the Owls weren’t looking for coming into this one.

Going into a road stretch with trips to UCF and SMU, they’ll certainly have their chance to notch their first league win against a tough opponent soon enough.

“It’s huge,” Dunphy said. “We’re starting off, the first three games in the league are teams that are playing really, really well. Everybody’s going to be a tough act to play well against, and the fact that we were where we were at the end of the game, I was pleased with that.”