If Temple is looking to recapture the magic that fueled its improbable run at last season’s conference tournament, one that left the Owls a game shy of an NCAA Tournament berth, Sunday was a good place to start.
After jumping out to a 15-point second-half lead, Temple watched North Texas get within one, but the Owls did just enough defensively and at the free-throw line down the stretch to pull out a 66-61 win at the Liacouras Center over the American Athletic Conference’s second-place team, dealing the Mean Green just their seventh loss of the season.
Playing their sixth straight game without leading scorer Jamal Mashburn Jr., Temple won its third in a row and turned in its best defensive performance in nearly three months. UNT’s 61 points were the lowest by a Temple opponent since the Owls’ 62-61 win over Davidson back on Dec. 18.
After finishing the regular season Sunday at 17-14 overall and 9-9 in league play, Temple will enter this week’s American Athletic Conference tournament in Fort Worth as the seventh seed and take on No. 10 Tulsa, a team the Owls just beat last Tuesday on the road by four. If Temple beats Tulsa Thursday night (7 p.m. EST tip-off) it will face UNT again in Friday night’s 7 p.m. quarterfinal game. The Mean Green (23-7, 14-4) secured a double bye as the tournament’s No. 2 seed.
Whether or not Temple will have Mashburn, the nation’s fourth-leading scorer, remains to be seen. The Owls’ star guard, who is averaging a career-high 22.0 points per game, is still nursing a toe injury that has kept him off the floor since Feb. 12. After he scored 32 points in a Feb. 1 overtime win at ECU, the New Mexico transfer missed the next two games with the toe injury and came back to play at Tulsa, but the injury didn’t respond well after that.
The Owls have gone 3-3 since and face the possibility of being without him for the rest of the season.
“I know the answer probably stinks for [reporters], and I'm not really trying to throw you off,” Temple head coach Adam Fisher responded when asked if Mashburn will be able to play next week. “We are literally taking it day by day. You could ask him. Every morning, I'll text him or see him (and ask) ‘How you feel? How we feeling? We'll see.
“The one thing I would tell you is, we would want to make sure he practiced. He has not practiced in a full practice yet, so I would like to see him practice before we put him in a game, just because of his safety and his career and his health. That'll be number one. Any guy in our program, your health is number one. So as annoying as day to day is, we ask him every day, how do you feel? How do you feel?”
For another day, at least, the Owls had to be feeling pretty good about themselves, considering they more than picked up the slack for Mashburn, who walked to center court in a boot as he, Matteo Picarelli, Shane Dezonie, Steve Settle III and walk-on Christian Tomasco were honored on the program’s senior day.
Settle scored a team-high 15 points to go with five rebounds and no turnovers in 35 minutes, while sophomore guard Zion Stanford chipped in 14 points and team-high totals of seven rebounds and four assists. Picarelli added 10 points and Dezonie nine on an afternoon when the Owls played efficient offense against the nation’s third-best defensive team.
UNT came into Sunday’s game holding opponents to just 59.3 points per game and 40.9% shooting. Temple shot 52% (12-for-23) in the first half and held UNT to 39% shooting (11-28) in the first half to take a 34-24 lead into the break. The Owls finished off the day shooting 48% (20-42) and assisted on 10 of their 20 field goals while holding the Mean Green to 38% shooting (20-52) overall and just 2-for-12 from three-point range.
Temple held UNT’s leading scorer Atin Wright to 3-of-12 shooting and 1-of-5 from three-point range just three days after he dropped a personal season-high and conference single-game season-high 42 points in a win over Charlotte.
“Obviously he was coming off a big game,” Picarelli said of Wright. “He's a great shooter, and we were trying to make his life hard and not give him open looks from three. Everyone that was on him, I think, did a pretty good job and tried to be physical with him, just make his life hard. He's a good player. He's going to make plays.”
But after the Owls grabbed their largest lead of the game at 15 points at 39-24 on a Settle jumper at the 17:55 mark of the second half, Wright almost singlehandedly brought UNT back, scoring all 18 of his points in the second half with the help of 11-for-13 shooting from the free-throw line.
Things officially started to get interesting when Wright scored on a layup and got the deficit within single digits at 54-46 with 5:15 to go. From that point, UNT went on a 13-6 run and eventually got within one at 60-59 with 1:11 to go on a pair of free throws from Jasper Floyd. Dezonie, who missed the Tulsa win with an illness, responded in his return with his biggest bucket of the day, a putback of a missed Picarelli corner three to push Temple’s lead back out to three at 62-59 with 42 seconds left.
After Wright and Settle traded two free throws apiece over the next 16 seconds, Temple got the stop it needed when the Owls blanketed Wright in the lane and forced a miss. Stanford rebounded it and got the outlet pass to Quante Berry, who was fouled with 10.8 seconds left and put the game on ice with two makes from the line.
Sunday’s win was particularly satisfying for Settle and Picarelli, players who transferred in from Howard and UMMC, respectively, prior to last season and helped Fisher establish his footing as a first-time head coach. Picarelli first came to UMBC from Milan, Italy and played his first three seasons there before arriving at Temple prior to last season, averaging 7.0 points per game, racking up 29 starts and finishing the season as one of just three players to appear in all 36 games.
While he’s played much more of a reserve role for most of the season, Picarelli has averaged 9.6 points and 27.0 minutes over the last three games. He was nearly flawless in the first half in helping Temple build its 10-point halftime lead, hitting both of his threes and all three of his foul shots after drawing a foul on a third three-point attempt. He scored nine points and didn’t turn the ball over in 11 first-half minutes.
Settle, meanwhile, has gone from being a once-overlooked player on a loaded, nationally-ranked DeMatha Catholic team to one who two years ago helped Howard reach its first NCAA Tournament in 31 seasons. He redshirted his first season at Howard, started five games in a COVID-shortened 2020-21 season and then averaged double figures in his next two years with the Bison.
The 6-foot-10 forward has averaged 12.3 points and shot 41.7% from three, the second-best mark on the team behind Mashburn.
“I think my growth has been phenomenal,” Settle said. “Personally, I think I've put in the work. I think the coaching staff, they gave me the confidence, and at the end of the day, I'm just trusting everything I've done over the summer, over preseason, in the weight room, just everything I've done, and they provide me with everything I need to be the best player I can for this team. So I trust them, I trust myself, and I'm playing with great confidence every game.”
As the tournament’s 11th seed last March, Temple ran through UTSA, sixth-seeded SMU, third-seeded Charlotte and No. 2 seed FAU in four days before running out of gas in the championship game against UAB.
Having done it in the past and generating a little national buzz along the way, Picarelli thinks the road map has been established.
Beating the league’s second-best team Sunday put some gas in the tank.
“We did it last year. We're going there to do it again,” Picarelli said. “Like coach said, we've been in every game, we’ve played with everyone, and we're gonna go there and try to take care of business, and that's our goal.”
