It was Small Business Night at The Liacouras Center, and one of the smallest players on the floor gave Temple the business for virtually the entire night.
Tulsa guard Dwon Odom was getting anything and everything he wanted throughout the game. Odom picked apart the Owls for 16 points and 10 assists and made his biggest impact down the stretch.
Odom hammered home a dunk in the middle of a 13-point run that brought Tulsa back from the dead with seven minutes left. Then with less than a minute to go, Odom connected on a jumper to push the Tulsa lead to three. The Owls could not find a game-tying bucket and fell to the 10th ranked team in the conference.
Temple (14-11, 6-6 American Athletic Conference) was defeated by Tulsa (10-15, 4-8 AAC) 80-74 Wednesday night at The Liacouras Center. Temple guard Jamal Mashburn Jr. returned after missing the previous two games with a toe injury and scored 19 points but it was not enough to pull out a win.
Temple guard Jameel Brown entered Liacouras clad in a T-shirt bearing the fearsome visage of NASCAR’s legendary “Intimidator,” Dale Earnhardt. But Wednesday, it was Odom whose speed, smarts and power cowed the opposition.
“He gets downhill,” said Temple head coach Adam Fisher of Odom. “And then, his ability to get in the lane and create for himself and create for others is at a high level in our league.”
Mashburn had a slow start in his return, missing his first five shots and ending the first half 2-12. Hobbled and hesitant, Mashburn eventually found his footing and opened the second half with seven straight points.
Odom practically superglued himself to Mashburn’s torso on defense and made life difficult for the nation’s second leading scorer. Mashburn finished shooting just 6-20 from the field and 1-5 from three. Odom was just as effective on the offensive end, tallying 16 points, six rebounds and 10 assists in a game that Temple needed to win to keep pace for a double bye in the conference tournament.
“[Mashburn] missed a lot of time, obviously, coming back first half, shooting numbers weren’t great, but I thought he really defended and played really hard,” Fisher said. “We talked about with him like he’s a guy that we trust. We went over to him and said ‘How many shots have you made in your career?’ They’re gonna fall.”
Tulsa, even after Wednesday’s victory, has won fewer than a third of its games in the AAC. Temple’s defeat — its third straight since the 98-94 overtime victory against East Carolina on Jan. 8 — now has the Owls hopes of earning a double bye in the conference tournament all but dead.
To spring from such a lowly state to the conference title, and with it an appearance in the March Madness tournament would be an unprecedented feat for Broad Street’s ballers. But not by much: If the season ended today, Temple would sit seventh in the AAC — four spots above the 11th-place pit from which they stormed through a cloud of controversy to the conference title game.
Tonight, however, the storm was a gilded monsoon. With Odom as chief weatherman, Temple found itself thoroughly drenched.
As the matchup neared halftime, Temple’s pop-happy marching band struck up a brass rendition of Kendrick Lamar’s iconic “Humble.”
Odom sat down, but for only three minutes in the second half. And he certainly was not humbled. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but he was never once humbled, not in the least.
Neither did Tulsa ask him to pretend otherwise: The Group of Five doppelganger to Russell Westbrook simply bounced the ball near halfcourt as the clock ticked beneath 20 seconds. Then, he thundered toward the right baseline and jacked up a Kyrie Irving-style fallaway fader.
Swish. Temple still held a one-point advantage at the break. Deceptively.
Proof of Mashburn’s pain lingered on the baseline and the box score. It was the Owls’ frontcourt anchor, forward Steve Settle III, who gave the team its spine and spark — swatting errant shots to launch Temple’s fastbreaks, tipping wild rebounds into his own ample hands in heavy traffic, and wafting his effective-if-awkward standstill jumper over a rotating cast of overmatched collegiate Midwesterners. He even scored on a Statue of Liberty slam to retake the lead late in the second half.
There was still Odom to contend with as the night wound down. Eleven minutes into the second half, he pulled off the post up step-through traditionally achieved by much larger men. With just under eight remaining, he hectored guard Quante Berry on an entry pass and shepherded Tulsa’s offense to the other end for another assist.
And less than a city block south of North Philadelphia’s old Baptist Temple, Tulsa wrung two baptisms of its own from Odom’s hand — first on a pass to guard Keaston Willis, who ended up leading the Golden Hurricanes in scoring with 19 points. Then, Odom stormed the lane of his own accord and punched the rim harder than Al Gore hammering a hanging chad.
‘’[Willis] was a big emphasis going into the game,” Fisher said. “[Tulsa] runs a lot of action for him, coming off screens. And once he makes one, he feels good. He can shoot from deep. So we just didn’t do a good enough job on him in the second half.”
With fewer than five minutes remaining, Tulsa took its final lead of the night. A heavily-contested Berry corner three with under two minutes remaining seemingly served only to delay the inevitable. The Owls were down just one with a minute remaining but could not deliver a final blow and ultimately fell to the Golden Hurricane.
Temple will remain at home as they look to bounce back against Florida Atlantic (14-10, 7-4 AAC) on Feb. 16 at noon.
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