The Broad Street Birds, created by former Temple star Shizz Alston and featuring several former Owls players and staff, will play their first game of The Basketball Tournament against the Beale Street Boys July 20 at 4 p.m., and the game will be televised nationally on ESPN2.
The team is competing in the Wichita region for the $1 million prize in its first year of the bracket-style tournament.
The Broad Street Birds’ roster has many familiar faces for Temple basketball fans, as several players from the late-2010s will team up for the Birds. Forwards Quinton Rose, Scootie Randall, Daniel Dingle and Damion Moore will play under head coach and general manager Tony Paris, a longtime Philadelphia basketball coach, trainer and filmmaker. Former Owl and South Bay Lakers guard Nate Pierre-Louis is listed as a booster.
Former Temple guard and current La Salle Director of Player Development Trey Lowe reunited with his former teammates as an assistant on Paris’ staff and believes the Birds can go on a run in the tournament.
“Me and Tony, we want to win this whole thing,” Lowe said on last week’s episode of The Scoop, OwlScoop.com’s podcast. “We’ve got a great team, a couple of vets on there, so we’re just trying to do what we can to win.”
Alston, Rose, Lowe, Pierre-Louis and Moore were all teammates on the 2018-19 Temple team that went 23-10 in former head coach Fran Dunphy’s final season on North Broad Street. That squad, which lost to Belmont in a First Four game out in Dayton, was the last Temple team to reach the NCAA Tournament.
Alston also spoke to OwlScoop about the formation of Temple’s TBT team. To hear more about how players were selected and Alston’s expectations for the team, listen to this episode of The Scoop.
“It wasn't too long ago that we were just playing in the (NCAA) Tournament, four years ago,” Alston said. “So I think that the camaraderie we have, and the continuity we could bring on the court, that could help us win.
“I know a lot of teams, they just pick random guys,” Alston added, “and they don't know how to play with each other. So we’ve gotten to play with each other, so hopefully that’ll work for us.”
The Broad Street Birds should get a big lift in the paint from Jason Thompson, a Mount Laurel, New Jersey native who played four years at Rider before becoming the No. 12 overall pick in the 2008 NBA Draft. Thompson averaged double-figure scoring in three of his nine NBA seasons, including a career-high totals of 12.5 points and 8.5 rebounds per game for the Sacramento Kings in 2009-10.
The Beale Street Boys, created by Memphis alumni, will be coached by Willie Kemp and feature Alex Lomax, Jeremiah Martin, Chris Crawford, Adonis Thomas, Will Coleman and Shawn Taggert.
Big 5 squad opens play July 24 against the defending champs
The Big 5 TBT team, coached by former Temple star Khalif Wyatt, will take on defending TBT champion Blue Collar U, a team comprised mostly of former University of Buffalo players.
Wyatt, who was just announced this week as Adam Fisher’s director of player development, will have two former Temple players on his roster in forwards Rahlir Hollis-Jefferson and Sage Tolbert. Wyatt will also coach players like Ramon Galloway, a member of the 2013 La Salle Sweet 16 team, and he’ll have some size with the likes of three other familiar faces in former St. Joe’s big man C.J. Aiken, Markus Kennedy (who played at Villanova and SMU), and Clifton Moore, who had collegiate playing stops at Indiana, La Salle and Providence.
