City of Basketball Love

Graham Foley (Graham_Foley3)
--

The Temple Owls began the 2016-2017 season by flying past the minimal expectations set for them.

With sophomore guard Trey Lowe redshirting and senior guard Josh Brown sitting out indefinitely with an achilles injury, the outlook was bleak for a young team with minimal depth.

Nonetheless, Temple (13-11, 4-7) began its season by winning six of its first eight games with two wins coming on back-to-back days in Brooklyn over No. 25 Florida State and No. 19 West Virginia. Temple turned heads and raised the possibility of repeating as the American Athletic Conference Champion.

Since then, the Owls have come back to Earth.

Temple lost seven of their first nine conference games and quickly found themselves towards the bottom of the AAC. With 11 losses on the season, an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament seems highly unlikely and the Owls must focus on winning as much as possible to enter the AAC tournament with momentum.

“That was the real Temple team,” said senior guard and captain Daniel Dingle on the team’s surprising start. “We’re so young, we’re getting better, we’re in practice, we’re engaged, guys are getting the film, this is serious business right now so I think we’re more engaged than we’ve ever been.”

The first step for the Owls in gathering momentum and pushing toward the tournament is to win the tough conference games in front of them. They will face their first test when the No. 25 Southern Methodist University Mustangs come to the Liacouras Center on Thursday night.

SMU (20-4, 10-1) is currently ranked second in the AAC standings, trailing No. 11 Cincinnati by one game. Temple was able to hand the Mustangs their first loss of the season last year when SMU came to Temple in late January. This season, however, the Owls did not fare as well, losing by a score of 79-65 in Dallas on Jan. 4.

“They’re a terrific, terrific team,” head coach Fran Dunphy said. “Anybody can go for 20, anybody can get double-doubles, they’re ready to go and they’ve had a terrific, terrific season. 20-4 is pretty impressive.”

SMU is led by 6-7 junior forward Semi Ojeleye who leads the team in scoring (17.7 ppg) while also contributing as one of the team’s top rebounders (6.7 rpg). He is joined in the frontcourt by 6-8 senior forward Ben Moore who leads the team in rebounding (8.0 rpg) and also adds some offense averaging 11.7 ppg.

Shake Milton, a 6-6 sophomore guard, is another double-digit scorer for the Mustangs, averaging 13.9 ppg and 4.3 rpg. He is joined by senior guard Sterling Brown (12.0 ppg, 6.8 rpg), another 6-6 Mustang, who was named the American Athletic Conference Player of the Week Monday coming off a win against Tulsa in which he scored 27 points.

While the lineup may seem daunting, Dingle believes the team learned a lot from their first matchup against SMU and expects a better result this time around.

“I think we’re a whole different team, a better team than we just played,” Dingle said. “Definitely we learned who we are, we learned how they play, and we learned how to compete.”

Dingle has been the team’s standout leader as his final year as an Owl comes to a close. Dingle (12.6 ppg) went 6-of-7 from beyond the arc and tied a career-high with 22 points in Temple’s 83-74 victory over the University of South Florida on Sunday. He has scored in double figures in seven of his last eight games.

“The expectation is that he is going to be really consistent in the last seven games,” Dunphy said of Dingle. “We just need him to take care of the basketball, make some plays for us, do a great job on defense, rebound the ball, just be a great leader for us and I think his leadership has taken another step up.”

With the injuries of Lowe and Brown, Temple has played with a young roster all year. Freshman guard Quinton Rose (9.6 ppg) has experienced a lot of playing time for the Owls coming off the bench. Alani Moore, a 5-10 freshman guard, has started plenty of games averaging 7.9 ppg and leading the team in 3-point shooting percentage at 41.8 percent.

Playing against an SMU rotation that does not include a single player under 6-5, Moore will have to find a way to rise up and continue to produce offensively for the Owls.

“[I have to] never give up on a play, because they offensive rebound the ball really well, they’re very tall and athletic,” Moore said. “Being my height, I’ve just got to be stronger and tougher and play smarter when I rebound.”

With just seven games left in the regular season and slim NCAA at-large hopes, the AAC Tournament may be the Owls’ only path to the Big Dance.

But the Owls have made it clear that they are not worried about meeting the requirements for a tournament bid. They simply are focused on winning one game at a time and on trying to finish the year with seven victories.

That, of course, would start with an upset victory Thursday night against the tough SMU Mustangs.

“We gotta win the games, stay focused, stay engaged, just keep working hard and take it one game at a time,” Dingle said. “We’re not focused on two, three games down the road. We’re not worried about ECU next week. We’re worried about SMU tomorrow.”