In trying to understand the ebbs and flows of the Temple women’s season, one game explained a lot
Temple can't seem to get out of its way as inconsistencies, mainly on defense, continue to hold the Owls back.
In many ways, Temple coach Diane Richardson still doesn’t know which team she’s going to get on any given night.
Will she get one that plays dominant defensive basketball? That’s what she got Saturday in the Owls’ last game, a 59-55 victory over American Athletic Conference foe South Florida, in which the Bulls had no answer for Temple’s suffocating defensive pressure.
Or will she get the lackluster defense she called out on Jan. 14 — and even found herself apologizing for after her team’s 59-57 loss to Memphis?
Remember this is a Temple collective that ran through its December schedule with relative ease playing its best basketball of the season, en route to a 5-2 record. Since the turn of the new year, the Owls haven’t had the same success, going just 6-4 since January (13-10, 7-4 American).
Next up, the Owls have a Valentine’s Day road date against Alabama-Birmingham (7 p.m., ESPN+).
Consistency has been a problem for Temple during that stretch, specifically on the defensive end. Since conference play began, Richardson has begun her postgame press conferences by addressing the team’s defensive efforts.
Early on in the game against South Florida, it looked like she was going to have to pull out a similar script after an uneventful first quarter. But then the December Owls returned in the second quarter with a performance so stifling that USF failed to score a single point through the first eight minutes of the period.
If that was the Jekyll, then Hyde reemerged in the third as all the work Richardson’s squad did in the second quarter was nullified by a poor defensive showing after the halftime break.
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“We sat back on our heels a little bit,” Richardson said. “Instead of playing defense like we normally do, we watched [Bulls forward Romi Levy] shoot a couple of threes.”
The Owls squandered an opportunity to put the game away by allowing Levy and the Bulls to convert on 52.6% of their shots.
Even with all of their inconsistencies, the Owls capitalized on opportunities to win the game in the fourth quarter. Returning to the pressure it put on USF in the second quarter, Temple locked in on both ends of the floor and found a way to make sure that it wasn’t going to lose another close game because of mental lapses and poor play defensively.
Tiarra East, the Owls’ steady scorer, led the way again with a game-high 21-point effort, but much of the credit goes to Owls forward Tarriyonna Gary, who scored all eight of her total points in the second half — and recorded the game-winning steal.
“Every time she shoots, we think it’s going in,” Richardson said. “That was good to see the ball going in, and her steal at the end of the game. It was awesome.”
Temple came away with a win that could bode well going forward as it allows the Owls to keep pace with the top four teams in the AAC. With that being said, the Owls must clean up their inconsistencies if they want a double bye in the conference tournament. With Temple sitting as the fifth seed, Richardson knows how important it is to be one of the top four seeds to secure that double bye.
However, she can’t focus on the tournament right now.
“We’ve got to take it one game at a time,” Richardson said. “I don’t want to look ahead. … We have to get through these games before we can think about [the AAC Tournament].”
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