The California Golden Bears stun the Temple Owls
A young California team stole the show on Thursday night, upsetting the No. 20 Temple Owls 57-50 in the opening round of the Old Spice Classic.
The Golden Bears were propelled by the efforts of junior forward Harper Kamp, who scored 13 points and pulled down seven rebounds, as well as freshman guard Allen Crabbe, who added 12 points and eight boards.
“Since day one, we just told people that we’re going to surprise a lot of people,” Cal centre Markhuri Sanders-Frison said, according to the Associated Press (AP). “Everybody thought that we didn’t have that much firepower coming back because we lost a lot
of our good players last year. I think this win opened a lot of eyes to people around the world.”
The Golden Bears (3-0) remained perfect on the season, handing the Owls (2-1) their first loss of the 2010-11 campaign. The California victory was sealed in large part because of a 16-1 run that the Golden Bears produced in the waning minutes of the game’s
second half. The reigning Pac-10 conference champions cemented their victory with a late steal from Crabbe, who then hit two key free throws to put the Golden Bears up by six and the game out of reach.
The Owl loss is the first on an out-of-conference schedule that will only get increasingly difficult as the season wears on. After dismantling Seton Hall and Toledo in their first two contests, Temple now has to rebound to face a gauntlet of opponents that
includes Villanova, Georgetown, Maryland, and Duke, the No. 1 team in the land. And if Thursday night’s performance was any indication, the Owls will have to improve if they hope to compete with some of the nation’s best.
“We had some pretty open shots that we missed,” Temple forward Lavoy Allen, who finished with 13 points, said afterwards. “The offence started getting stagnant a little bit. We did a bad job on defence. We gave them a couple open threes and they hit them. It
killed us. We did a bad job of maintaining the lead and a bad job of finishing off the game.”
Although Temple was ahead 45-38 with less than eight minutes to go in regulation, they would relinquish the lead thanks to an intense defensive effort from Cal. Though the Golden Bears struggled at times with their offensive consistency, they held the Owls
without a field goal for nearly six minutes in the most critical stages of the contest.
Not bad for a relatively inexperienced team that has six freshmen and was supposed to be in the midst of a rebuilding year.
“I don’t know what a rebuilding year is,” Cal coach Mike Montgomery said following the win, according to the AP. “All I know is we start two freshmen and come off the bench with a whole lot more, and I’ve never done that before.”
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