As Jaylen Bond subbed out for junior forward Mark Williams with 10:30 left in the second half of Temple’s 79-70 win against Fairleigh Dickinson University, the sophomore forward received a small applause from the 4,034 people in attendance for Wednesday’s game at the Liacouras Center.
Moments after Bond, who scored 10 points in the first 9:30 of the half, left the game, senior guard Quenton DeCosey ran the fast break and dunked an alley oop pass from junior guard Josh Brown to put the Owls up by 23 points and bring the crowd fully to its feet.
Bond and DeCosey combined for 40 points in the Owls’ (3-3) win against the Knights. DeCosey led the Owls in scoring with 22 points.
“My teammates were finding me,” DeCosey said. “They were playing a lot of zone. Daniel Dingle threw me a couple nice passes to me. We were just finding the open spots, inside out.”
The Owls built a 13-point lead with 3 minutes in the first half, looking to already be pulling away with the game.
Led by forward Earl Potts, Jr., who had 14 points in the first half, the Knights went on a 13-2 run to close the Owls’ lead to 36-34 before the break. Potts finished the game with 29 points on 10-of-15 shooting.
“We just made some mistakes we can’t make,” DeCosey said. “Let him up for air a couple times on the perimeter, made some switches. We got to switch hard and aggressive, so we’ll look at the film and make our corrections.”
Fairleigh Dickinson went 6-of-11 from three-point range in the half. Potts was 4-of-6 from three-point range, while the Owls made two of their 11 shots from deep during the first 20 minutes of play.
In Temple’s 69-50 win Sunday against Delaware the Owls shot 9-of-29 from three-point range, and coach Fran Dunphy said he was not pleased with number of shots his team took from deep.
Dunphy said without a strong inside presence, the team may have to rely on its outside shooting this year.
“We didn’t shoot it great in the first half,” Dunphy said. “The second half we shot it better. We’re not a post up team necessarily. That’s not where our strength is, so we’re going to play how we’re guarded. 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.”
Coming out of the halftime break, Temple changed its approach going inside against the Knights. Bond had eight points in the first 6:18 of the second half after totaling six points in the first half.
Temple started the half on a 30-9 run and finished the half shooting 56 percent from the floor.
“We work on our jump shooting everyday in practice, but I felt like we had the advantage inside tonight,” Bond said. “Their tallest guy was about [6-foot-8-inches], so we had to pound it inside and get some easy buckets.”
Brown set career highs with seven assists and four blocks in the game. Freshman guard Trey Lowe helped the Owls with eight points in 16 minutes.
Lowe showed off his athleticism in the first half with a two-handed put-back dunk from the left baseline.
“It was pretty impressive, very, very impressive,” Dunphy said. “He’s such a good athlete. He’s got a pretty good IQ. Now, he’s really got to pick it up on the other end of the floor defensively.”
Owen McCue can be reached at owen.mccue@temple.edu or Twitter @Owen_McCue.
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