Enechionyia becomes pivotal player for Temple
He was the youngest player on the team, the only freshman on a veteran squad, but gradually, Temple's Obi Enechionyia gained traction.
He was the youngest player on the team, the only freshman on a veteran squad, but gradually, Temple's Obi Enechionyia gained traction.
Nobody on Temple's team, including graduating senior and all-American Athletic Conference selection Will Cummings, made a better lasting impression than Enechionyia, now a 6-foot-9 sophomore.
During the most pressurized of settings in a venue known as one of basketball's hallowed grounds, Enechionyia single-handedly kept Temple in the game in a 60-57 NIT semifinal loss to Miami at Madison Square Garden.
He set career highs with 17 points and five blocked shots. Enechionyia, who shot 5 of 9 from the field and hit all seven foul shots, also tied a career high with eight rebounds, all off the bench, in 27 dazzling minutes.
Enechionyia had kept the Owls in the game until teammate Quenton DeCosey's three-pointer at the buzzer just missed. That ended the season, but marked the start of a bright future.
Now, after Temple lost Cummings and Jesse Morgan, two of the Owls' top three scorers, Enechionyia will be expected to duplicate that NIT experience frequently during the regular season.
At the least, it provided some extra pep as he went through summer workouts.
"I think it was a really good segue into the offseason and gave me a lot of confidence," Enechionyia said after a recent practice. "It showed me the kind of player I can be every game, not just once in a while like last year."
The overall statistics didn't offer much to get excited about. But assessing Enechionyia's value last season, and now this year, takes further inspection.
He averaged 5.3 points and 3.6 rebounds in 18.4 minutes. Yet in some big games, he stepped it up. In Temple's 80-75 win over Memphis in the AAC tournament opener, he had nine points, three rebounds, and three blocked shots in 23 minutes.
Earlier in the season, he had eight points and eight rebounds in 19 minutes during a 77-52 win over then-No. 10 Kansas.
During the season he never played more than 28 minutes in a game, but he should seriously threaten that number this season.
Coach Fran Dunphy doesn't enter the season with a certain number of minutes he expects to play his newcomers. The players have to earn the time.
"I think he showed in increments that he needed to be out on the court," Dunphy said. "Toward the end of the season he really started to arrive and he might have been playing as well as anybody during the course of the NIT."
Enechionyia, who is listed at 220 pounds, appears a little stronger this year, although he says he continues to work on his strength.
He also appears to have grown.
"I have been getting that question a lot, but I don't know," he said.
He will also have a new look - he has grown a beard.
"It's something new and we will see how it goes," he said, laughing.
What else is new is that Enechionyia will be looking for more points in the paint, while increasing his marksmanship from distance. He is a true stretch power forward who can extend a defense with his outside shooting.
While he is a capable shooter, he hit just 27.9 percent of his shots from beyond the arc.
"Last year I shot 28 percent and that wasn't too good, so I focused on that throughout the offseason," he said. "I am a much better shooter than last year."
And Dunphy hopes that much better scoring is done in the paint.
"He needs to be a complete player because there are going to be some teams that will run him off that three-point line and he will have to figure out other ways he can get his shot and score for us," Dunphy said.
For emphasis, Dunphy added, "We need him to score for us this year."
One person who has been toughening Enechionyia up is 6-8, 240-pound senior captain Jaylen Bond.
"We play physical against each other, talk trash sometimes, just to make each other better," Bond said.
Enechionyia gives that 10,000-watt smile when his battles with Bond are mentioned.
"Jaylen is a good player and we like to get on each other all the time and it is a lot of fun," Enechionyia said.
He hopes his second season is the same. What Enechionyia won't forget is the final game of last season, in Madison Square Garden.
"I never really imagined playing that well in the Garden," he said. "It was hard to describe and I want to get back in that zone."
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