Khalif Wyatt finished with 25 points against La Salle. (Credit Joe Fedorowicz)
By ANDY EDWARDS
Philahoops Staff
Twitter: @DLNAndyEdwards
Before Wednesday’s much-hyped clash with La Salle, rumors swirled around numerous media outlets that the Temple University men’s basketball team could be headed to the Big East next season. If the Owls are indeed leaving the Atlantic 10, they made sure to snatch a nice parting gift on their way out.
Khalif Wyatt scored a team-high 25 points, Micheal Eric added 18 points and 12 rebounds, and the No. 22 Owls (22-5, 11-2) won their 11th straight game, overcoming a career-high 33 points from Earl Pettis in an 80-79 overtime thriller against a relentless Explorers squad in sold-out hostile territory. Ramone Moore added 18 points of his own as Temple stayed on top of the Atlantic 10, won its seventh consecutive game against La Salle, and remained atop the Big 5 standings (3-0) despite blowing a 10-point lead with four minutes to play. La Salle (18-10, 7-6) had two chances to win it on the final possession, but Pettis and Sam Mills couldn’t connect on a pair of threes as the final horn sounded on the Explorers’ chance for a signature victory.
“It was a great game,” La Salle head coach John Giannini said. “We were so close. I thought both of those last shots were in. D.J. Peterson got a great rebound to get Sam another look, and Sam’s shot looked like it was in.”
It wasn’t, and the Owls considered themselves lucky to escape with a win. Temple’s victory, impressive as it was, was rife with anxious moments. The Owls led 70-60 after Rahlir Hollis-Jefferson finished a dunk underneath, but Pettis scored 11 of the game’s next 12 points to send it into an extra session. His pull-up three with 1:25 to play tied the contest at 71, but not before he sank two free throws following a technical foul on Moore to pull the Explorers within three.
“Obviously that stretch where we go up 10 there, and we should be able to manage the game better than we did,” Temple head coach Fran Dunphy said. “We had a couple of interesting plays, calls, what have you, and we didn’t keep our poise like we needed to.
“To come out of here with a win given all those circumstances, we’ll take it, but know that we were very fortunate…We didn’t manage the last three minutes of the game like we normally do, like we should have, and I’ll take the blame for that.”
The Owls led 80-74 after two free throws by Juan Fernandez with two minutes remaining in overtime, but Tyreek Duren knocked down a three and Pettis canned a jumper to close the gap to one. After Fernandez misfired on a jumper, Pettis pulled up for three from the top of the key with five seconds left, but his attempt caught the back iron. Peterson muscled his way to an offensive rebound with two seconds left and calmly found Mills wide open in the corner for a game-winning attempt. Mills’ shot looked good, but landed just long as a sizeable Temple contingent celebrated their program’s longest winning streak since 1999. With the win, Temple is now a full game ahead of Saint Louis with three to play, while La Salle fell into a tie for seventh with its fourth loss in five games.
“I saw Khalif was backing up,” Pettis said of his final shot. “I saw the shot was there. It felt good; it just didn’t fall today. I was just looking to be aggressive. Whatever the defense gave me, I was going to try to make the play.”
“We pretty much knew Pettis was going to shoot it,” Wyatt said of the final play. “He was having a great second half, and he had a great game. It was us against them, and it ended up being me against Pettis at the end. He got a pretty good shot off, but I played pretty good defense, got a good contest, and thank God he missed it. Then they got another opportunity in the corner, and Mills had a good shot, too, and thank God he missed it.”
“It would have been poetic justice, to be honest with you, the way Earl played, if that ball had gone in,” Dunphy conceded. “We just got lucky at the end there.”
Neither team scored in the final moments of regulation, when Wyatt made perhaps his only mistake of the game. The Owls had the ball with 5.6 seconds left and a chance to win on the last possession, but Wyatt lost track of the clock and was unable to get off a shot before the buzzer sounded.
“I didn’t know the time,” Wyatt explained afterward. “It was my fault.”
“We had a thought that Ramone would be matched with a big guy, and maybe we could get it right back to Ramone and let him go make a play,” Dunphy said. “Khalif, we talked about 5.6 (seconds) probably a number of times, and he just zoned out on it. That’s what happens to young guys, but I should have called a better set and bailed us out a little bit there, and I did not.”
Ramon Galloway and Mills each scored 12 points and Duren added 10 for La Salle, which came up just short of the first 19-win season in Giannini’s eight-year tenure. The Explorers, looking for a signature victory to add to their best NCAA Tournament resume in two decades, will now likely have to run the table in the Atlantic 10 Tournament to book a trip to the Big Dance for the first time since 1992. Despite the heartbreaking setback, Giannini had plenty of positive things to say about his team’s performance.
“I told them in the locker room we did a lot of things right,” he said. “You play a team that, you’re playing good defense against, who can’t miss a shot, and you’re a hair away from beating them, you can only do that if you do a lot of things right.”
With that said, Giannini was also quick to concede that the game was a substantial lost opportunity for his squad, which hadn’t beaten a ranked opponent since 2001.
“This league is incredible,” he said. “The difference between winning and losing is minuscule…Because of where Temple is, it’s the kind of game that could’ve got us in the postseason.”
Wyatt had an answer for La Salle’s second-half run, scoring on four consecutive possessions during what appeared to be a decisive surge. The junior guard knocked down a pair of threes, a breakaway slam, and a tough runner in the lane to turn a one-point deficit into a 59-50 lead with nine minutes to play. The Explorers had rattled off a 9-2 run to take their first lead since the 15-minute mark of the first half on a pair of Jerrell Wright free throws, but the Norristown native refused to give in to a raucous enemy gym.
“It was big for us,” Wyatt said of his spurt. “It seemed like every time we made a run today, they had an answer. We got a couple big leads in this game, and every time we got up they just kept fighting. That stretch, it was big for us, but La Salle knew how to bounce back.”
“He was spectacular,” Dunphy said of his junior star. “Spectacular. His last jumper at the top of the key might have been 30 feet. It was a huge jump shot. He’s a great player. He’s a great offensive player, and I’m proud of his defensive effort on Pettis as well at the end. He’s just one of those kids that has it in his DNA. He’s a fearless kind of kid. He wants the opportunity, and he took advantage of it.”
The Owls shot 72 percent (13-of-18) from the field in the second half, putting on an offensive clinic against the tough perimeter defense of the Explorers.
“I, like any coach, don’t really have a problem with honest criticism,” Giannini said. “I’m sitting here looking at them shooting 72 percent in the second half, and I’m telling you, we were playing good defense. We were playing hard. They’re amazing. If you help, they find that open man, or as soon as you turn your head for a second to help, they’re cutting to the front of the rim. And my goodness, do they make shots. They make shots; they make free throws. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a team play better offensively. They get good shots and they make them. I would be happy to criticize ourselves, but I just have to praise Temple.”
Eric scored Temple’s first six points, taking full advantage of his size and strength to power his way to easy buckets inside. Eric dominated on the boards, grabbing five rebounds before the first media timeout as both teams struggled from the perimeter in the early going. He nearly had a double-double as the teams hit the locker rooms for the break, notching 12 points, seven rebounds and three blocks in the opening stanza.
“I thought this was his best game,” Dunphy said of Eric. “I thought he did some really good things, finished some plays…He blocked some shots. If he blocked six, he probably changed another four or five. I thought he did very, very well and I’m very proud of him.”
Despite some shooting woes of its own, Temple kept the Explorers at arm’s length for much of the first half with suffocating defense. La Salle missed 22 of its first 30 shots from the field, and the Owls gradually built a lead as the shots began to fall.
They led 32-22 after Moore’s jumper from the baseline found nothing but net, but La Salle cut into the deficit with a series of highlight-reel plays. The Explorers rattled off seven straight points to close the half, thanks to a three-pointer by Pettis, an alley-oop from Duren to Galloway, and an earthshaking one-handed slam from Devon White off a beautiful wraparound feed from Galloway in the lane as a sellout crowd threatened to blow the lid off the Gola Arena.
“I think La Salle is really a very good basketball team,” Dunphy said. “We had a tough time with them at our place. For us to have a decent lead at the end of the game I was surprised at and happy about, but our biggest disappointment as a team is that we didn’t manage the last three or so minutes of the game. I think La Salle is really good, and they are going to make some noise in the Atlantic 10 Tournament.”
Inches away from his first win over a ranked school, Giannini was thrilled with the way his Explorers competed for a full 40 minutes — and then five more. When asked if the nail-biting loss was a positive result for the rest of the season, however, he made it clear that La Salle is no longer in the business of moral victories.
“No,” he said. “Oh my gosh, no. If our program is where like, we feel great about a loss, no. Emphatically, no. Holy cow, no.”
-Fedorowicz column: Philahoops’ Joe Fedorowicz says the Temple victory typical of recent Owls-Explorers history.
Postgame Audio
Khalif Wyatt and Michael Eric
Earl Pettis
John Giannini
Fran Dunphy
