Positivity and confidence are keys to Adam Fisher's coaching
In the closing seconds of Temple’s 85-65 season-opening win over Maryland Eastern Shore Monday night at the Liacouras Center, Adam Fisher walked along the Owls’ sideline to dole out high fives to his players on the bench.
And with less than 10 seconds to play and Temple comfortably ahead, Fisher still motioned for guard Quante Berry to come back to the sideline for some coaching instead of treating the redshirt freshman’s late minutes as an afterthought in a blowout.
There’s plenty to work on, and the opponents will get tougher in the coming weeks for sure, but Fisher had good reason to be excited about his first game as Temple’s new head coach. In becoming the 12th coach in the program’s history to win his head coaching debut, Fisher’s Owls overcame a poor-shooting first half to coast to a comfortable victory by clicking first at the defensive end before more of their shots started to fall in the second half.
The contributions came from the older and newer players on the roster. Temple relied upon its top two returning players, Jahlil White and Hysier Miller, to set the tone for the night. White posted a double-double of 15 points and 14 rebounds to go with two blocked shots, and Miller scored a game-high 17 points and dished out five assists.
“They’ve got me for life,” said Fisher, noting that he will be “forever grateful” to both players for staying at Temple instead of heading elsewhere in the transfer portal following the coaching change that brought Fisher to North Broad Street after successful assistant coaching stints at Miami and Penn State.
In a little more than 20 minutes off the bench, Zion Stanford looked very smooth and played with great control and poise in his first college basketball game. The 6-foot-5 freshman from West Catholic scored 12 of his 14 points in the second half and also swiped two steals and two rebounds.
White, Miller, Stanford and the rest of the eight players who took the floor for significant minutes Monday night looked loose.
They weren’t perfect, but they were positive. They looked like they were having fun.
They looked confident.
Those things seem to be at the heart of Fisher’s approach.
Fisher was asked if he’s always been that way. He’s learned under head coaches like Jay Wright, Jim Larrañaga and most recently Micah Shrewsberry.
Does there need to be more positivity now, Fisher was asked? Can coaches just not coach players the same way they did five or 10 years ago?
“I think it’s changed,” Fisher said, “but Coach Larrañaga, I think, is a hall of famer. He’s a hall of fame person. He treats the gym and practice facility as his classroom, so we do the same thing. I always saw with him (that) he’s so positive with guys that when they play, no matter what time it is, no matter how many mistakes they make at shootaround, he just builds guys up. So they play with great confidence when the ball gets tipped, and that’s something we’ve really worked on. I think our guys see it, and it spreads.”
It might sound like lip service to a skeptic. It’s one game. The Big 5 games in December will certainly look and feel different. Teams like VCU, Nevada and FAU will most certainly be better than UMES.
But it was hard not to notice the difference in atmosphere between last season and Monday night, and playing a team like UMES was a good time to take the temperature on it in more ways than one.
Last season, Temple was quite literally the team that was capable of beating anyone and losing to anyone. The Owls lost to Wagner. Then they beat Villanova. Later in the season, they upset then-No. 1 Houston on the road. Then they eventually lost six of their last eight regular-season games and suffered a 30-point drubbing at the hands of Cincinnati in the quarterfinal round of the American Athletic Conference tournament.
Last December, just five days before Christmas, Temple lost to UMES at the Liacouras Center in a game that was sort of the “uh oh” moment for a team that often looked like it was playing against itself. Losing to that Hawks team with a sub-300 NET ranking put a big dent in Temple’s hopes of landing an at-large NCAA Tournament bid in March.
That UMES team actually went on to post an 18-13 record, but it was still a bad loss for a Temple team that wasn’t shy in talking about its NCAA Tournament aspirations in Aaron McKie’s fourth year at the helm of the program. This edition of the Hawks the Owls faced Monday night was quite different from the group that beat the Owls at the Liacouras Center last December. Chace Davis and Troy Hupstead, starters on Monday night, came off the bench in last year’s win, and the Hawks’ five starters from a year ago are no longer with the program.
Faced with the possibility of stumbling out of the blocks like they did last November, this Temple team instead did what it was supposed to do against an inferior opponent.
The Owls were holding an eight-point lead and sitting at just 14 points with 11:44 left in the first half as both teams shot a combined 7 of 28 to that point. They eventually saw their lead grow to 25-6 and never led by less than double digits the rest of the way, and cohesiveness on the defensive end was a big part of it and rather impressive for a team that lost its top four scorers and was blending in three transfers as starters.
“I feel like that’s one of the main things that we focus on,” White said, “just being together every single day, knowing that we have a lot of new pieces, and we have to be able to jell to be successful. I feel like Coach does a great job of emphasizing togetherness, and that’s something that we’ve all bought into.”
Stanford’s sharp debut on Monday night might serve as an example of how Fisher’s positive approach could turn out to be a good one on North Broad Street.
Fisher said when it came time for the team to start its shootaround Monday, Stanford was over at the team’s Pearson-McGonigle Hall practice facility instead of where he should have been at the Liacouras Center.
“I think somebody said, ‘Hey, go get Z!’ Because we sat down for film and I looked around, and I see him running in,” Fisher said. “But it’s our program. Did him being there at 1:32 affect us winning tonight? No. But I’ll be you he’s never going to be in the wrong gym ever again, and you want to build his confidence. The worst thing I could yell and scream at him and say, ‘How did you not know where we are?’ Instead, it’s we laugh about it, take a deep breath, relax. Tie your shoes, let’s watch film. I think you saw his poise today, so it was great.”
Matteo Picarelli, one of three transfers in Temple’s starting lineup Monday night, said his new head coach has struck the right balance between being upbeat and being strict.
“He focuses a lot and gets on us on the details,” Picarelli, who scored nine points and knocked down two three-pointers, told OwlScoop.com after the game. “But he also understands Zion had been there for an hour at the practice facilities, and he was getting shots up. It's not like he was late because he overslept or he didn't care. He was getting his shots up. I don’t know. Maybe he didn't see the time or something. It was his first time at a shootaround. Maybe he didn't even really understand how it worked. So trusting in him that he was locked in, I think that was great.”
During the postgame press conference Monday night, Stanford was asked in part if playing in big games in the Philadelphia Catholic League helped him have a smoother transition into Division I college basketball and helped teach him to be as composed as he was in the Owls’ season opener.
“In high school, the competition I played against, it carries on,” Stanford explained. “Basically, when you play through high school, you play against the same people your whole life. The more you get older, it’s the same. Just the next level. For real, for real. It’s a little bit faster. That’s what I worked on in the summer, to get my body right. That’s the biggest change I had to make.”
Before the next reporter could ask a question, Fisher had one of his own.
“When you say ‘for real, for real,’” Fisher began, “that means you’re for real?”
“Mmm hmm,” Stanford answered, not missing a beat as the whole room broke out in laughter.