Three Man Weave: Temple Controls Cincinnati 75-71 in Wire-To-Wire Victory

The Owls are now 4-0 this season when they hit 40% or more of their three-point attempts.

Author:
Russ Heltman
Updated:
Feb 21, 2022 7:55 AM EST

CINCINNATI — Consistency is crucial in AAC play, and the Cincinnati Bearcats (17-10, 7-7) can't find much of it this season. The Temple Owls (15-9, 8-5) rained fire on Wes Miller's crew in a 75-71 victory.

“That was unacceptable," UC head coach Wes Miller said after the game. "Being a head coach, it starts with you. Unacceptable, I am not an excuse kind of person. I give Temple credit, they were ready to play and quicker to the basketball, they out played us in every way a team could outplay us in the first 20 minutes of the game. Our guys battled in the second half, I like the character of our team, I like our group. I expect us to fight, to battle. There are no moral victories, this is college basketball. I’m ticked, but I always say don’t take credit away where it is due, and it is due to Temple.”

Zach Hicks (16 points, team-high seven rebounds) & Co. put on a shooting clinic to highlight continued defensive issues for the Bearcats. Temple has now shot over 40% from outside four times this season and is undefeated in all of those contests.

Here's the Three Man Weave on an offensive display from the road team.

Zach Hicks Goes Nuclear From Deep

If you could label anyone on the 330th ranked three-point shooting team a sharpshooter it would be Hicks, who came unhinged in Fifth Third Arena.

The 6-foot-7 freshman patrolled the wing like an assassin waiting for kick-out feeds from Damian Dunn (15 points) or Hysier Miller (13 points, five rebounds, three assists). Hicks went 4-of-5 from outside in the first half and had a shooter's mentality. Once he started heating up it became infectious towards a teamwide 8-of-10 performance in the first twenty minutes.

"I mean a lot of personnel mistakes," Ody Oguama said after the game. "We just gotta know exactly who we are closing out too. We talked about it earlier and I personally thought we came out a little flat as a team in the first half and that's what happens."

Temple's ball movement overall was impeccable in its pursuit of the two most efficient shots in basketball: threes and free throws.

The Owls' early aggression in the game put Cincinnati on its heels and kept their tight man-to-man switching scheme just loose enough to find space for high-quality releases.

I mentioned free throws, and unlike the three-point shooting, Temple didn't break character there. They shot 17-of-25 from the line and were the more aggressive team most of the afternoon.

Temple Crashes The Boards At Will

It's very hard to win games shooting poorly and struggling on the glass. That was the formula for Temple on this road trip in a wire-to-wire victory. The Owls out rebounded Cincinnati 43-39, and there was never a key workhorse to the production.

Of the eight Owls to secure a missed shot, seven of them had at least four rebounds. Temple entered the game 49th nationally in offensive rebound rate and got just enough of them to keep possessions alive and wear out Cincinnati.

“This is college basketball," Miller said when asked about playing three games in one week. "I’ve never tried to play the mind game, like trying to figure out brains, it’s just not who I am. I think that you can get into a lot of trouble coaching, I can tell you this. I do that every day. I could not sleep for two straight weeks and be excited to come and do that [play a game], so I don’t buy into the fatigue. So, I don’t know, because I can’t relate to that. That’s not what I believe, if we start saying that then we start making excuses. So, I’m not going to talk like that, and I don’t hear anyone on our team talking like that.”

The Bearcats got decent production from John Newman III (eight points, six rebounds) on the glass, but no one else was able to get down and dirty against Temple's aggressive frontcourt. After playing sound ball against Wichita State, Abdul Ado (three rebounds, one steal) was a ghost on both ends. The graduate transfer finished with the worst net points produced (-7.2) on the team.

meanwhile it was also a rough Sunday for Cincinnati's workhorse guard David Dejulius. He really struggled to find open cutters and poppers against Temple's tight man-to-man defense, and it kept defenders even tighter on him (6-of-16 FGs). Although, the performance extended a 10-game streak of scoring in double figures for the senior guard.

Jeremiah Davenport (24 points, five rebounds) was the only Bearcats guard close to 50% shooting in the game.

Jeremiah Davenport Tries To Will A Win

Cincinnati's second-leading scorer this season posted one of the best performances of his career on Sunday, tying his season-high with 24 points. UC needed any semblance of offense in the second half, and they found it in Davenport.

The junior guard showed off his entire arsenal of skills from the outside shot (3-of-9), penchant for finding contact (5-of-5 FTs), and aggressiveness attacking the rim. Davenport is the exact type of player you want getting hot when nothing is going right, but he needed just a little bit more help from his other teammates.

Davenport is finding his stride at the right time while staying efficient; he's now scored 14-plus points in five of the past seven games. The guard could probably stand to take an even larger role in the offense. He finished with a team-high 25.9% usage rate on a day where he posted the second-highest true shooting percentage on the roster (73%).

“I think that Jeremiah knows his value, and how important his role is to our success," Miller said. "We’ve had a number of halves like this in the past couple weeks. It’s not about Jeremiah getting 24 every night, it’s about Jeremiah being Jerimiah and being important to this team. He had some big moments there in the second half and I thought the energy was what it needed to be.”

Cincinnati got a great showing from their top talent in Davenport, but the teamwide inconsistency was too much to overcome. Davenport got a few easy looks but did a lot of the work on his own in contested situations. The Bearcats haven't found a reliable (efficient) third scoring option, and it's one of the reasons this offense has had so many starts and stops in 2021-22.

The Bearcats are now firmly sixth in the AAC behind Temple, who owns the tiebreaker. The top-five teams do not have to play on the opening day of the AAC Tournament next month.

"Same focus," Oguama said about the team's mindset during this up and down stretch. "We come out and have the same focus. Same things we talk about every single day in practice, every single time we take the court as a team, we always have the same principles. So this is going to be the same thing we just gotta keep building together as a team."

Cincinnati continues its push for fifth on Wednesday at UCF. The game tips off at 9 p.m. ET on ESPNU.

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