Owls’ March goals aren’t changing despite recent losses

Temple Men’s Basketball dropped a game to North Texas on Wednesday, but the Owls are still trending upward.

The Owls have a 12-8 record through the first 20 games of the season. | JEREMY SHOVER / THE TEMPLE NEWS

Temple has had a mix of impressive wins and underwhelming losses through the first half of the American Conference schedule. It suffered a less-than-ideal one-point loss to East Carolina on Jan. 8 after leading by as much as 11 but rebounded by narrowly beating a middle-of-the-conference Rice team on Jan. 11. 

Then, head coach Adam Fisher got a signature victory when the Owls defeated No. 19 Memphis on Jan. 16. The win was followed up by a victory against Tulane on Jan 19 while the Green Wave were at the top of the conference.

Right after Temple earned a spot in the top four of the AAC it dropped two straight games to beatable opponents. The Owls’ chances at obtaining an at-large bid in the NCAA Tournament are non-existent, so regular season results won’t matter much for the rest of the season — as long as the team secures a respectable seed in the AAC tournament. What does matter is how well they play in Fort Worth, Texas, from March 12-16.

“We’re gelling off the court and on the court,” said guard Shane Dezonie. “We took a loss at ECU and that kind of built us. It helped us for the next game. We came back at Rice, won that game in a tough game and I felt like, in practice, we just kept gelling. We didn’t hang our heads.”

Heading into the season, Temple was picked to finish sixth in the AAC preseason poll after surprisingly finishing second during the 2023-24 season.  Guard Matteo Picarelli and forward Steve Settle III were the only two starters from last year’s roster who returned this season. The Owls landed a big-time transfer in guard Jamal Mashburn Jr. but the new roster’s struggles were evident.

Mashburn was the Owls’ only viable scorer at the beginning of the season and there was a visible drop-off when was off the court. Besides Mashburn, the main scoring threat came from guard Zion Stanford, who put on a show in Temple’s third game of the year against Drexel on Nov. 12 with a then-career-high 23 points.

But circumstances have changed as the team prepares for its February matchups. Mashburn is still the driving force, but the team has been able to mesh and found its footing that can give them a boost in the AAC tournament. Guard Quante Berry has come into his own to become a legit scoring threat, averaging 10.6 points per game. Dezonie missed the team’s first handful of practices but now shows the stretches of play he displayed toward the end of last season. 

“We go into every game with the exact same preparation,” Fisher said. “The season doesn’t end on January 16. This is our approach. This is what we do. We’re very consistent with it. What we show on what day is always the same, so that no game becomes too big or too low, because, again, they’re all gonna go in one column.”

The result of the team’s chemistry is a 12-8 record. While it’s not an eye-popping record, the team has improved from last year and has shown it can compete with any team in the conference. The Owls had an 8-11 record at this point last year and were in the middle of a 10-game losing streak. Temple has already matched its regular season total wins as the team didn’t notch its 12th victory until the final game of last season. 

Besides its blowout loss to Villanova in the Big 5 Classic on Dec. 7, Temple competed in every game. The Owls’ 12 wins could easily be 14 or 15 if a couple of things broke their way through the season. Temple’s first loss of the season to Boston College on Nov. 15 was just a three-point loss where they missed seven free throws. They were able to play decently against a much bigger Florida State team and never were out of reach. 

Even in the Owls’ loss to Rhode Island on Dec. 21, they battled back from a halftime deficit and kept pace with the Rams for much of the second half. They have shown potential and proved they are capable of staying in games, despite their shots not always being effective.

Even if the Owls don’t enter the conference tournament as a top seed, they have the roster to make a competitive run at a championship. 

“We can control how hard we play, how we defend,” Fisher said. “The shots aren’t always going to fall and we’ve got to be a team that we are in games when shots aren’t falling.”

The Owls have been in this exact position in the past when its ultra-talented 2023-23 team was capable of beating the nation’s best teams. Then-head coach Aaron McKie preached that his team was capable of putting together a strong week in the AAC tournament and punching its ticket into the NCAA Tournament.

But the self-described “tournament-or-bust” squad fizzled out and couldn’t keep up with Cincinnati in the second round of the conference tournament.

Temple is a more complete team now than it was then. The Tulane win displayed an encouraging performance and even the loss to the Mean Green on Jan. 23 doesn’t derail its chances of ending the season as a top team in the AAC. North Texas holds teams to just 59 points per game while forcing them to shoot 41% from the field. The Mean Green also forced 13 turnovers per game, yet the Owls barely gave the ball up.

Temple only turned the ball over seven times and kept up with a team that is 11-0 at home. The only problem was Temple couldn’t get multiple players going at once. Only Stanford, Mashburn and Berry gave the Owls a pulse, but none found a rhythm when the other was hot.

Despite the loss, the Owls have a strong chance to be in a strong position to make a run as conference play hits its peak. If the Owls can keep their play up, another postseason run is in the realm of possibility.

“You can get caught up in the hype,” Fisher said. “We told [the team], read all your press clippings after the Memphis game, go online, go on social media, see how great you are. When we come in the next day, we gotta get back to work.”

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