Gavin Griffiths' Temple debut starts in style
Temple came into Wednesday night’s season opener against Delaware State with a roster of eight transfers and three additional freshmen.
One made his presence known 10 seconds into the game.
Gavin Griffiths scored the Owls’ first basket of the season by throwing down a dunk on a lob pass from sophomore forward Babatunde Durodola. The play got the crowd into the game early, and Temple never trailed on its way to a 83-65 win.
“It was something Coach drew up,” Griffiths said after the game. “We ran through that play a lot of times in practice. So, yeah, it was something we worked on at shoot-around today.”
That lob play sent Griffiths on his way to scoring 16 points on 7-of-9 shooting on a well-rounded night that included five rebounds, two assists, a block and a steal in 22 minutes.
He ended his night with a putback dunk after a missed three from guard Derrian Ford and later exited the game with a cramp but later said he would be fine.
It was a successful debut for Griffiths, a former consensus 4-star recruit who was rated by Rivals as the No. 22 overall player in the 2023 class. After averaging 5.8 points per game as a freshman at Rutgers and 2.1 per contest last season at Nebraska, Griffiths is a starter on third-year head coach Adam Fisher’s Temple team that needs his shooting and athleticism.
Asked what it meant to have such a successful Temple debut after things didn’t work out as well in his first two seasons in the Big Ten, Griffiths said Wednesday night’s output came down to leaning on what he does in practice every day.
“This is something that I knew I could do,” Griffiths said, “because we’ve been working since June as a team. So everything our team did today, I’ve seen all of our guys do since June.”
Griffith played with high energy on defense and grabbed four defensive rebounds of the five he had, with Fisher saying that’s an aspect of the game the team hopes to improve upon after finishing last season as the American Conference’s worst defensive team (the Owls allowed an average of 77.7 points per game) and eighth in defensive rebounds.
“Defend and rebound, we’ve got to continue that,” Fisher said. It wasn’t where I wanted it to be last year. We tried to outscore you. So we tried to work a ton this offseason. Like, hey, we’ve got to guard better. And how does your offense get better? It’s through your defense. The more stops, and we create 16 turnovers tonight, the more we can get out in transition. I think we’re a really good transition offensive team. That’ll help our scoring, but we’ve emphasized rebounding, rebounding since day one.”
Griffiths finished as Temple’s second-leading scorer behind sophomore guard Aiden Tobiason, who poured in a career-high 23 points on 7-for-11 from the field, and 3-for-6 from three-point range. He got the line as well and hit 6 of his 10 free-throw attempts.
Tobiason is one of the two rising sophomores who stayed, along with Durodola, and Fisher believes both players can take on larger roles this season.
“I think in my first-ever meeting with (Temple athletic director) Arthur (Johnson), we talked about retaining guys,” Fisher said. “That’s a huge thing for us, and celebrating those guys. We have a poster. The four returners are on the poster for a reason. I’m not saying they’re our four best players, but they’re back here. They wanted to be at Temple, so all that stuff matters. And when you have two guys that have been through it, that started in our league and been with us, they know what to expect.”
