City of Basketball Love

Owen McCue (@Owen_McCue)
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In B.J. Johnson’s first year at La Salle last season, the Philadelphia native lost his first three Big 5 games.

With seconds on the clock and the Explorers holding a four-point lead, that crept into the back of Johnson’s mind during Sunday night’s game against Temple.

Temple senior guard Josh Brown drove to the hoop, looking for an easy bucket to keep his team alive. Instead, Johnson swatted Brown’s layup attempt and secured La Salle’s 87-83 win at Tom Gola Arena.

“It’s a Big 5, so I guess we just don’t want to give them (anything),” Johnson said. “If he made the layup, things could have gone a different way. The block kind of eliminated that.”

After a rough start in Big 5 play to start Johnson’s career, the Explorers have now won their past three contests against their city foes.

La Salle beat St. Joe’s in the two teams’ second meeting last February, although it was not part of the city tournament. The Explorers won their first Big 5 contest this season, picking up a double overtime win against Penn on Nov. 13. Sunday night’s victory against Temple gave them a 2-0 start to Big 5 play this season.

The last time La Salle earned at least a share of the Big 5 title was the 2012-2013 season, when La Salle tied with Temple at 3-1. The Explorers made the NCAA tournament and advanced all the way to the Sweet 16.

“If you win the Big 5, you go to the NCAA tournament,” La Salle coach John Giannini said. “I’ll often tell them. You can try to outplay 350 other teams to get an at-large bid. You can try to outplay the 14 teams in the A-10 to win a championship, but if you go 4-0 and some years 3-1 in Philly, you’re usually good enough to be in the postseason. It’s almost always true.”

The Explorers were almost on the wrong side of a classic Big 5 game on Sunday, in a city series that’s seen plenty of them -- La Salle’s first Big 5 game this year, against Penn, went to two overtimes before the Explorers pulled it out.

With 10:46 left in the second half, La Salle trailed Temple 66-55 and the crowd’s energy at Tom Gola Arena was beginning to fade.

Coming out of a timeout, Explorers’ redshirt-junior guard Pookie Powell hit a step back three with the shot clock expiring and La Salle was off and running. The shot sparked an 11-0 run for the Explorers, which tied the game, 66-66, with 7:29 left to play.

“I think it got us fired up,” said Powell, who poured in a game-high 29 points. “We were in a drought. We weren’t scoring, and that bucket kind of gave us some life.”

Neither team led by more than four points for the rest of the game. La Salle captured its first lead of the contest when senior guard Amar Stukes knocked down two free throws with 2:14 left. Temple guard Quinton Rose, who scored 21 points on Sunday, knocked down a jump shot on Temple’s next possession, giving the Owls back the lead and setting the stage for Powell.

Powell said he has prided himself this season on not forcing threes off the dribble, but once again, he found himself with the ball in his hands and the shot clock winding down. With Brown’s hand in his face, he knocked down a contested pull-up three from the top of the key with 39 seconds left to give La Salle an 83-81 lead it did not relinquish.

“I practice on that shot a lot,” Powell said. “I’ve taken many reps on that shot, so I felt confident when it left. The shot clock was winding down, the ball was in my hand and coach always told me, make a play, so that’s what I had to do.”

Johnson and Powell combined for 54 points on Sunday. Giannini said the Explorers will need to rely on the two upperclassmen throughout the season.

La Salle heads to Ireland next, where the Explorers’ will play in the Basketball Hall of Fame Belfast Classic. Their first game is against Towson on Friday.

The Explorers next Big 5 game comes against Villanova at the Wells Fargo Center on Nov. 10. La Salle has a home game against St. Joe’s on Feb. 3 to finish out the round-robin tournament.

They will be ready.

“Coach drills in our head that the Big 5 champion always goes to the tournament and we’ve got a lot of seniors and we don’t want to go out without getting to the tournament,” Johnson said. “We just go into every Big 5 game trying to take it up another level. We’ll be ready when the next Big 5 game comes.”