On a night where the Temple Owls (7-1) and spectators were honoring the Liacouras Center’s 15th birthday, it was a night of celebration on North Broad Street, but the Towson Tigers (4-6) did their best to blow out the candles and crash the party.
Thanks in large part to Towson’s junior forward Jerrelle Benimon, a Georgetown transfer, Towson and company hung tough with the Owls for a large portion of the ballgame, which seems to be the story in a majority of Temple’s wins so far, but the Owls tightened up their play down the stretch, handing Towson their fourth loss in five games by a score of 72-61 on Wednesday night.
The Owls have struggled mightily with covering big, physical big men all season long and that continued to be the case on Wednesday night. Temple had absolutely no answer for Benimon as he dropped a game-high 28 points, along with 18 rebounds.
“Benimon’s a hard guy to guard, I thought we lost him twice on screens across the lane we thought we had the communication down perfect and one of our student-athletes didn’t do what he was supposed to do on that,” Temple coach Fran Dunphy said. “I thought for the most part, this is gonna sound crazy we had containment, but he is a tough guy to guard. I thought he plays as hard as anybody as I’ve seen, as competitively as anybody I’ve seen, so I was really impressed with him. He really came after us. “
Temple senior forward Rahlir Hollis-Jefferson, a very versatile big man, gave Towson fits all night long and Hollis-Jefferson played his best game of the season. Although sometimes undersized at 6-6, Hollis-Jefferson is never outworked or outhustled on the basketball court and Hollis-Jefferson was on point en route to a career-high 20 points.
“(Rahlir) was great. He was absolutely terrific. Six assists to go along with 20 points, he made a lot of midrange jump shots tonight,” Dunphy said. “I’d been saying that for a while if we're going to be a good basketball team, he needs to make midrange jump shots and he certainly stepped up and made a lot of those tonight.”
From a skill standpoint, Hollis-Jefferson has come a long way from his freshman year and over the years has added a midrange jump shot to his repertoire, which has added a whole different element to his game.
“I’ve been working on midrange for the longest so I put it to use out there,” Hollis-Jefferson said. “Hard work over the summers and even during the course of the years that I’ve been here, I’ve just put in time in the gym.”
As a fifth year senior, Randall has seen it all. From the good to the bad, Randall has rocked the cherry and white to witness it and as one of the team's leader, he knows that moving forward, the team as a whole can improve.
“We made shots they missed shots but I think there’s a lot of things out there that we can do extremely better then what we did,” Randall said. ”As a leader of this team, I know we can do better.
As for what they can do better? Randall had this to say:
"On the defensive end we got a little slippage, we're letting a lot of guys go by us," he said. "(There are) a lot of things that each and every guy can improve on and I think as we improve as individuals and we bring that to the table, we’ll be a better team.”
At times this season, Temple has relied heavily on the 3-point shot, but the Owls limited their shots from the outside and took only 17 shots from downtown. Temple converted on just four 3-pointers and many players seemed hesitant to pull the trigger for whatever reason.
After allowing 12 3-pointers vs. Duke, all of which seemed to gasp air out of Temple, the Owls held Towson to one trey.
Senior guard, Khalif Wyatt continued to struggle shooting the ball for the third consecutive game. Wyatt scored just 11 points on 3-11 shooting.
“(Khalif) is in a little bit of a funk shooting the ball,” Dunphy said. “He’s going to be fine but he’s going through a little bit of a low at this point.”
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- Temple's student section shows its support for big-time recruit Rysheed Jordan. (Chase Senior/Philahoops)
-Jordan looks on: With highly touted high school recruit Rysheed Jordan of Vaux Roberts in the house, Temple’s student section showed the youngster some love as seven members of the Wild Cherry Crusade painted Jordan’s first name on their bare chest.
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