Temple's season ends with AAC tournament loss to Tulane
Temple’s season is over after Friday afternoon’s 69-60 loss to Tulane in the quarterfinals of the American Athletic Conference tournament at Dickies Arena in Forth Worth.
And in a familiar storyline that has plagued the Owls all season, injuries and poor shooting did them in.
Temple (17-12 overall, 10-7 American Athletic Conference), the tournament’s fourth seed, has been playing without leading scorer Khalif Battle since early December, and without starting point guard Jeremiah Williams, who missed seven of the last eight games with a shoulder injury.
Friday, they lost redshirt freshman guard Damian Dunn to an ankle injury that limited him to 19 minutes and seven points on 3 of 8 shooting.
Tulane (14-14, 10-8) was without its leading scorer Jalen Cook and his 18.0 points per game due to a hamstring injury, but the Green Wave still found a way to shoot 52% (26 of 50) from the floor, while Temple shot an abysmal 28.4% (19 of 67). Freshman point guard Hysier Miller scored a career-high 21 points to go with four assists, two steals and just one turnover in 34 minutes, but he didn’t get much help. The rest of the Owls’ starting lineup shot 7 of 38, 18.4%. Tai Strickland (1 of 12) and Jahlil White (2 of 13) had particularly rough shooting days.
Temple trailed by nine at 36-37 at halftime and eventually cut Tulane’s lead to three at 43-40 on a Jake Forrester basket with 12 minutes, 25 seconds left to play but never got any closer the rest of the way.
As of now, third-year head coach Aaron McKie and his staff will be returning the nation’s second-youngest roster. The Owls started a true freshman (Miller), a redshirt freshman (Dunn), and two second-year freshmen (Nick Jourdain and White) Friday.
“I think we’ve positioned ourselves in terms of pieces,” McKie told reporters after the game. “We feel good about the guys we’ve got. With college, as I like to call it – free agency (the transfer portal) – you add some guys that you think can help you, but it’s more about maturity and growth. So it’s one thing that you can think you have an opportunity to be good, but guess what? Everybody else is thinking the same thing that’s in the conference and throughout the country.
“So we’ve got a long road ahead of us. We’ve got to continue to work and get these guys better each day. They’ve got to get stronger, they’ve got to get conditioning, got to get better. They’ve got to get better as basketball players, and we all have to do that collectively. They’ve got to get better as basketball players, I’ve got to continue to get better as a coach, and if we put in the work throughout the summer, I think we have a chance to be a really good team.”