Owls' Enechionyia rediscovering his confidence
Much like his Temple team’s season as a whole, sophomore forward Obi Enechionyia’s season has seen its fair share of peaks and valleys.
His performance in Thursday night’s 83-79 overtime win over Tulsa left him staring down from another one of those peaks.
Enechionyia dropped 17 points on 7 of 12 shooting, including 3 of 5 from downtown, and added four boards in 23 minutes of action on the Liacouras Center floor.
Senior guard Quenton DeCosey led the Owls with 21 points, but they all came in the second half and overtime. Even with early foul trouble that limited him to eight first-half minutes, Enechionyia was Temple’s only consistent scorer throughout the entire game.
“He shot it pretty well tonight,” Temple head coach Fran Dunphy said after Thursday’s win, which pushed the Owls’ record to 13-8 on the season. “When he gets his feet set as a jump shooter, he’s terrific.”
With the Owls struggling mightily from the floor in the first half (11 of 31), Enechionyia kept the Owls afloat with his nine first-half points. He also hit a dagger of trey that put the Owls up by four and basically sealed the come-from-behind win with 34 seconds left in overtime.
“I’d say my confidence is really high right now,” Enechionyia said. “It didn’t really drop off that much. I just wasn’t hitting shots. That happens sometimes. But I feel like I’m back in my groove.”
This season, things got off on the wrong foot, almost literally, when the 19-year-old missed the Owls’ season-opening loss to then-No.1 North Carolina with an ankle injury. He returned to the lineup and started the next 11 games, averaging 10 points per game in that span, including a career-high 25 points in the overtime loss to St. Joe’s on Dec. 13.
But also mixed in there were duds of two points each against Wisconsin, Cincinnati and Connecticut.
Despite going 8-6 in that span, Temple didn’t play all that well as a team with bad losses to Houston and Memphis, and the overtime loss to Saint Joseph’s spliced in.
Dunphy felt his team needed some type of spark and decided to switch up the Owls’ starting lineup, including moving Enechionyia to a bench role. The Owls played better, going 5-1 in that span, but Dunphy decided to put his talented sophomore back into the starting lineup against unbeaten No. 8 SMU on Jan. 24. Enechionyia responded with eight points and five boards in 19 effective minutes in the Owls’ upset victory.
Enechionyia has remained in the starting lineup since and dropped 18 points at East Carolina and 13 points as South Florida, respectively, before Thursday night’s showing.
Compared to last season, his shooting percentage has actually dropped from 45 percent to 42 percent. But that’s not much of a surprising considering he’s had more opportunities to shoot with almost five more minutes of action per game.
He’s now averaging 9.6 points per game this year in 22.4 minutes per game, and his three-point percentage has greatly improved from 28 percent last year to 40 percent this year.
“I’m always working on my shot, but I’ve been trying to get into the paint more as well,” he said. “I want to be versatile and do anything the team needs.”
That has to be music to Dunphy’s ears because while Enechionyia’s jumper has improved, the coach wants his young forward to become a more well-rounded player. That’s especially true with rebounding. The 6-foot-9, 220-pound forward is averaging just 3.6 boards per game this season.
“I’d like to see his rebounding numbers get better, that’s the biggest thing,” Dunphy said. “The next step is to work hard at the other parts of the game, including the defensive end and the rebounding and the playmaking.”