Skip to content
College Sports
Link copied to clipboard

Temple’s Shizz Alston hopes his most recent performance at Tulane is a sign of things to come

Alston's 29 points helped key Temple to a win at Tulane on Saturday. He'll have to keep it up if the Owls want to make the NCAA Tournament.

Shizz Alston and the Owls have nine games left in the regular season.
Shizz Alston and the Owls have nine games left in the regular season.Read moreYONG KIM / Staff Photographer

Shizz Alston has, by all accounts, enjoyed an outstanding senior season at Temple, but he hit a slump recently.

The 6-foot-4 senior went through a four-game stretch when he shot 14-for-52 (26.9 percent) from the field and 9-for-32 (28.1 percent) from three-point range.

Temple, not surprisingly, went 1-3 in those games. It was the first stretch in which the Owls dropped consecutive games.

Alston came out of the slump in a big way on Saturday with 29 points in the Owls' 75-67 win at Tulane. He took just 11 shots, hitting six, including 3 of 7 from three-point range, but also hit 14 of a career-high 15 free-throw attempts.

In the previous four games he had gone to the line a total of 12 times. Alston is seventh nationally in free-throw percentage (91.1 percent).

“I noticed the way teams are playing me real physical and I made a concentrated effort against Tulane to draw more fouls,” Alston said on Tuesday.

Alston is fourth in the American Athletic Conference in scoring (18.4 ppg). As his scoring average has grown, so has the opponents’ defensive attention on him. Alston has seen double teams and many opponents gear their defense to let anybody but him beat them.

“I am getting used to it,” he said of the extra defensive attention. “I have to get my teammates more involved and hit the open man.”

Alston, who is averaging 4.9 assists (third in the AAC) always plays with great confidence, but he admits it was boosted after the Tulane game.

“Any time you can get a win and play like that, it makes me feel confident, especially coming off the Houston game where I probably had my worst game of the season,” Alston said.

Temple, the only team to beat Houston, lost the rematch to the Cougars, 73-66, on Thursday. In the second Houston game, Alston had six points, made 2 of 9 shots, and didn’t get to the foul line.

Now the question as Temple (16-6, 6-3 AAC) hosts UConn (13-9, 4-5) on Wednesday at the Liacouras Center, is whether Alston has indeed put the slump behind him.

More important is whether Temple can continue challenging for an NCAA Tournament berth. This year the NCAA has replaced the Ratings Percentage index with its own metric to use for tournament selection. That metric is NET, which stands for NCAA Evaluation Tool.

In the NCAA NET basketball rankings, Temple is 54th, behind three other AAC teams: No. 8 Houston, No. 25 Cincinnati and No. 43 UCF. In projections by ESPN’s Joe Lunardi, Temple is listed as one of the last four teams out as of Tuesday.

The Owls have nine regular-season games left, with just one against a team ahead of them in NET and the standings: March 9 against visiting UCF.

“We know we can’t slip in any of these games,” Alston said. “We want to get to the tournament and know we can’t have any slippage.”