Aiden Tobiason leads Temple past Delaware State, 83-65, in season opener
PHILADELPHIA — Aiden Tobiason called it his “flow state.”
Whatever it was, the sophomore guard’s 16 second-half points helped Temple pull away from Delaware State in the Owls’ 83-65 season-opening win Wednesday night at the Liacouras Center.
Tobiason looked the part third-year head coach Adam Fisher will need to make that freshman-to-sophomore jump and become one of the program’s go-to players. He led all scorers with a career-high 23 points, a little more than 18 better than his 4.8 points-per-game average from last season.
With a little more than 15 minutes to play, Delaware State was still hanging around and down by just a bucket after a Zion Bethea (team-high 20 points) three-pointer. From there, Temple began to put the game away with a 10-0 run, fueled by seven points from Tobiason on a pair of dunks and a three.
Tobiason said he and his teammates were a bit antsy through the first half and into the second and just needed to calm down.
“We were just throwing the ball and not making the right reads a little bit,” Tobiason said. “But once we calmed down, once we trusted in each other and played our game, that’s when we get into flow of things.”
Temple, which never trailed and eventually led by as many as 18 points at 81-62 with a little less than two minutes to play, put four more scorers in double figures beyond Tobiason. Nebraska transfer Gavin Griffiths, a former 4-star, top-25 recruit, scored 16 points on 7-of-9 shooting in his Owls’ debut.
He scored the first bucket of Temple’s season on a dunk courtesy of a lob from forward Babatunde Durodola.
“It was something Coach drew up,” said Griffiths, who shot 2-for-4 from three-point range and added five rebounds and two assists. “We ran that play a lot of times in practice. It was something we worked on in shootaround today.”
Three hours before tip-off, Temple put out a statement that it had been informed by the NCAA of potential eligibility concerns involving one of its players, Alabama State transfer guard CJ Hines, “stemming from circumstances prior to his enrollment at Temple.” The statement said Hines would not play “while the review process is ongoing.”
Hines averaged 14.1 points per game and won SWAC Tournament MVP honors in leading the Hornets to the NCAA Tournament. Fisher initially addressed the situation in his postgame opening statement and said he wouldn’t be able to answer anything.
Later in the postgame press conference, Fisher elaborated a bit more on Hines’ situation when asked when he found out about it and how much of a loss it is to the team’s rotation.
“The CJ thing has been ongoing,” Fisher said. “It’s something that we’ve known about for a little bit. We’ve tried to figure out some things and you’re just in waiting.
“It is a big loss. He’s a super-talented player. … We were hoping he’d have a big role, and we’re still hopeful of it. Right now, his role is to be the best scout team player in the country, and he is. He got us better, and for right now, that’s what it is. But hopefully we can get him back, and he can join our group, and we keep taking the right steps.”
Temple was good enough and deep enough to win without Hines Wednesday night with the help of a returning player like Durodola and transfers Jordan Mason, AJ Smith and Derrian Ford. Durodola tallied six points, a team-high eight rebounds, three assists and no turnovers in 26 minutes. Ford, an Arkansas State transfer who started his college career at Arkansas as a 4-star, top-100 recruit, contributed 14 points, three rebounds and three assists. Mason, a UIC transfer, gave the Owls 10 points and a team-high six assists from the point-guard position.
Tobiason said he calls his new point guard “Magic Mase.”
“I think he’s the heart of our team,” Tobiason said of Mason, “because he’s so important. Because he’s really the main guy that brings the ball up every single time. And he gets tired. He asked me, ‘Yo, if I get tired, can you bring it up? And I was like, ‘Yeah,’ but he never asked me, so he just kept bringing it up. And he really controls it. He’s really a general.”
Smith, who played his first two seasons at The Citadel before spending last season at Charleston, scored 10 points on 4-of-6 shooting and reached the 1,000-point plateau for his career on a layup that put Temple ahead by 68-50 with 6:03 left to play.
Fisher said he saw some things he didn’t like Wednesday night, including his team’s second-half defense.
“I think 38 points is too much in the second half,” Fisher said. “I wish we would have held that number a little bit lower. But in the first half, again, give them credit. They hit some tough shots. They scored 27, but I thought we took some steps, I thought. When you play defense in the second half, you’re further away from the bench. So we talk about that all the time. You guys have got to communicate more in the second half. So we’ll keep focusing on that and clean up some of the ball-screen coverage.”
And he also sees some things he does like. The Owls, after all, shot 72.7% (16-for-22) from the floor in the second half.
“I told this team right before tip, I love this team,” Fisher said. “I enjoy coming to work every day. These guys want to get better. They just want to win. There’s a common interest, and that’s been enjoyable, and they’re really coachable. You can try to talk to these guys. You show them film, and we want to hear the dialogue. They’ll tell me at halftime, ‘Hey, Coach, this is working. This wasn’t.’ So I think when you get a little bit older, you can do that those conversations.”
Up next
Temple will have six days off before it plays again and hosts Big 5 rival La Salle next Tuesday at the Liacouras Center. The Explorers cruised to an 87-59 rout of Coppin State Wednesday night in their opener under new head coach Darris Nichols.
Postgame press conference
Listen to the postgame audio from Adam Fisher, Aiden Tobiason and Gavin Griffiths here.
