Brown suffers Achilles injury, to have surgery Wednesday
The outlook of Temple’s 2016-17 basketball season has gotten a lot more complicated.
Josh Brown, the Owls’ starting point guard and top returning backcourt player, suffered a left Achilles tendon injury Friday and is scheduled to have surgery Wednesday. Brown, a 6-foot-3 rising senior from Newark, NJ, led the American Athletic Conference and was ranked eighth nationally with a 3.5 assist-to-turnover ratio.
Per a release issued by Temple, Brown’s surgery will be performed by team physician Dr. Milo Sewards at Temple University Hospital.
A Temple spokesperson offered no definitive timetable for Brown’s return, but playing part or all of the upcoming season without Brown, perhaps the team’s toughest player and leader, will certainly be a formidable task for the Owls, who are looking to make a return to the NCAA Tournament after getting knocked out in the first round back in March as a No. 10 seed in a 72-70 overtime loss to No. 7 seed Iowa in a South Regional game in Brooklyn at the Barclays Center.
In that tournament loss, Brown scored a season-high 16 points on 7 of 11 shooting from the floor while swiping nine rebounds and dishing out five assists. The lefthander averaged 8.3 points, 4.9 assists and 4.8 rebounds per game and also led The American in minutes played with 36.2 per game.
A player who was known more for his defense than his offense coming out of Coach Bob Hurley’s nationally-known St. Anthony High School program in Jersey City, NJ, Brown has seen his shooting numbers go up incrementally in each of his first three seasons – from 31.7 percent as a freshman to 39.8 percent as a sophomore to 41.3 percent last season. He has also developed a penchant for hitting big shots, banking in a game-winner at Memphis as a sophomore and then hitting a floater with 2.5 seconds left that beat then-No. 23 UConn back on Jan. 5.
Brown’s injury is another dose of bad luck for a Temple program that lost promising freshman guard Trey Lowe for the remainder of the 2015-16 season due to injuries he suffered in a one-car accident in New Jersey back on Feb. 28. Lowe, who had averaged 4.8 points and 1.5 rebounds through 28 games, hit 5 of 8 three-pointers and dropped a career-high 21 points in a loss to eventual national champion Villanova. The 6-6 wing guard would have been a likely starter as a sophomore, but it’s uncertain at this point as to whether he will be able to play any part of the upcoming season or have to redshirt.
With the statuses of Brown and Lowe up in the air as they continue to recover from their respective injuries, Temple will have to rely heavily upon rising sophomore combo guard Levan Shawn Alston, who averaged 2.0 points in 31 games as a freshman last season, and two promising incoming freshmen in point guard Alani Moore and Quinton Rose.
Moore, a 5-9, 160-pound guard out of Washington, DC’s Friendship Collegiate Academy, was ranked at No. 140 overall in the final 2016 Rivals150 rankings. He chose Temple over offers from Georgia Tech, UMass and Seton Hall. Rose, a 6-5 wing guard/forward from Bishop Kearney High School in Rochester, NY, had offers from several high-major programs like Wake Forest, Pitt and Miami but committed to the Owls last August.
That group, along with redshirt freshman guard Ayan Nunez de Carvalho and rising senior Daniel Dingle, will have to compensate for the offense left behind by graduated seniors Quenton DeCosey and Devin Coleman, who averaged 15.9 and 9.2 points per game, respectively. Dingle, a 6-7, 235-pound forward who averaged 4.4 points per game as a redshirt junior, has also shown the ability to handle the ball and dished out 50 assists last season.
OwlScoop.com Editor John DiCarlo can be reached at jgdicarlo@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter @OwlScoop_com or @jdicarlo.