Wichita State basketball rallies to win at Temple for the first time in program history
It’s been an up-and-down season, but this Wichita State men’s basketball team can now claim something that no other Shocker team has accomplished in the American Athletic Conference era.
Wichita State scored 16 unanswered points down the stretch to break free from a close game for a 79-65 win over Temple on Thursday, notching the program’s first victory at the Liacouras Center after nationally ranked WSU teams in 2018 and 2020 came up short in the same building.
“I talked to these guys before the game and told them about the great teams that have come to Philly and didn’t get a win,” WSU head coach Isaac Brown said. “I really hyped up that they had an opportunity to do something that no other Shocker team had done before. I’m always talking to those guys about the past and now they wanted to do something where they could say they were the first.”
WSU (14-12) has a four-game road winning streak in conference play, which has helped level their AAC record (7-7) for the first time this season after an 0-3 start. The win over Temple also brings the Shockers within one game from fourth place in the conference standings (and a first-round bye in Fort Worth) behind Temple (14-13, 8-6 AAC), which lost its fourth consecutive game, and Cincinnati, which bungled a 16-point lead in a road loss to East Carolina on Wednesday, with four games remaining in the regular season.
In a season where frustration had mounted after the team felt like it lost several games it should’ve won, beating Temple in Philly charted as the best win of the year for the Shockers. And afterward, they celebrated like it.
“Nobody has won here but us,” WSU guard Jaron Pierre gloated, referring to his coach’s pre-game challenge to be the first Shocker team to win on Broad Street. “It just feels great to celebrate that win.”
Much like the SMU game in Dallas, where the two teams traded 15-0 runs in the final eight minutes, it was a game of runs in the second half between the Shockers and the Owls.
Temple opened with a 9-2 run to tie the score, WSU answered back with an 11-2 run, only for Temple to hit four straight three-pointers and score 13 straight points to take a 62-58 lead with 6:23 remaining. That’s when the Shockers reeled off 16 unanswered points and ended the game outscoring the Owls 21-3.
Jaykwon Walton (game-high 21 points) and Craig Porter (10 points, eight rebounds, six assists) scored 18 of the 21 points during WSU’s winning run.
It was particularly impressive from Porter, who delivered another masterpiece down the stretch for the Shockers despite being limited and ineffective up until that point due to foul trouble.
But WSU’s senior point guard came through when the game mattered most, as he took advantage of a defensive mismatch with a step-back go-ahead three to give WSU a 64-62 lead with 4:31 left. Porter followed that up by grabbing a defensive rebound, leading a fast break and hitting Kenny Pohto (12 points) for an alley-oop pass for another easy two. After a Temple timeout, Porter delivered the dagger with another step-back triple followed by a tear-drop floater in the lane to extend WSU’s lead to 71-62 with 2:32 to play.
“Coach IB has got so much confidence in me, so when a coach has that kind of confidence in you, then it’s hard not to have confidence in yourself,” Porter said. “He knows that I can make these big plays and he puts me in a position where I’ve got to deliver, so that’s what I did.”
A point of pride afterward for the Shockers was winning the rebounding battle by 16, 42-26, over a bigger Temple team. WSU grabbed 38% (12 total) of available offensive rebounds, its fourth-best rate of the season and Temple’s fourth-worst allowed, while the Shockers boarded out at a 83% clip on the defensive end, their third-best rate of the season and Temple’s third-worst.
James Rojas produced his third double-double of the season with 11 points and 11 rebounds, while Melvion Flanagan, the diminutive walk-on point guard who made his second career start, pitched in and secured a career-high seven rebounds.
WSU also hit double-digit three-pointers for just the fifth time this season with Walton accounting for half of the team’s 10 by matching his career-high with five triples. After struggling with turnovers the last two games, WSU limited its count to 12 against Temple, which helped the Shockers’ offense pump out a healthy 1.16 points per possession against the third-best defense in AAC play.
Both coaches agreed afterward that the more physical team won the game.
“I always try to make the correlation with boxing,” Temple coach Aaron McKie said. “Sometimes you watch and see guys with a busted eye and their lip bleeding and most people say they need to stop the fight. But in the boxer’s mind, they’re thinking they’re going to have to carry me out of here. You’ve got to have that kind of mindset. You have to have it and the teams that are able to win at this time of year have those types of mindsets.”
Brown also proved to be a maestro of the yo-yo, switching WSU’s defense often and effectively to turn Temple into a jump shooting team and limit the damage done by its dynamic duo of Khalif Battle and Damian Dunn. Battle was held scoreless on 0-for-4 shooting in a season-low 17 minutes, the first time he’s been blanked since he was a freshman at Butler in the 2019-20 season, while Dunn managed 14 points but on 3-of-13 shooting.
Battle and Dunn both excel in isolation situations, where they can use their array of moves off the dribble to take advantage of defenders on an island. By switching to zone, WSU was able to effectively cut off the duo’s supply of shots at the rim.
WSU’s zone defense was never better than down the stretch when it led to eight consecutive defensive stops, including two turnovers forced by Rojas to help the Shockers rally for the victory.
“The zone slows teams down and it makes you have to make passes against it and teams have to run offense and can’t just drive the basketball,” Brown said. “Our guys just stayed calm and they battled down the stretch and came out with a big win.”
