Postcard: If Fernandez and Moore step up, Temple could go far

PHILADELPHIA -- Periodically during the season, Juan Fernandez will collect a stack of game DVDs from Temple's video coordinator and ship them to Rio Tercero, Argentina, for review. His father, Gustavo, was a 16-year pro in their home country -- a point guard who earned the nickname "Lobito" (translation: little wolf) when he was the lone star on a club team with a wolf mascot. When Juan emerged as a promising point guard on junior club squads, "Lobito" became his nickname, and his father's was upgraded to just "Lobo," or wolf.

This season's footage will be of particular interest to Gustavo, who's now a pro assistant coach in Argentina, because Juan will be the Owls' full-time starting floor general. He was moved off the ball -- "It felt strange for me to play shooting guard," he says -- as a sophomore starter for the Atlantic 10 champs, but with Luis Guzman graduated, Fernandez is assuming what he believes is his natural position. Of the transition, his father told him, "Just remember how you used to play. It's something that you never forget how to do. It always stays with you."

The question is whether Fernandez's offensive numbers -- he's the Owls' top returning scorer (12.3 ppg) on a team that doesn't always put up points with ease -- will dip while he assumes the full burden of running the show. It could be a smooth transition: He did play some point last season, and was in frequent playmaking positions on the wing, leading the team in assists (3.6 per game). What he lacks in speed, he makes up for in court vision and an ability to make nifty, one-handed dishes in the lane. But his three-point percentage jumped from 35.3 as a freshman to 45.3 as a sophomore, in part due to the ways Temple was able to free him up for open looks. Will Fernandez still get as many quality shots in this new role?

"That's TBD," Temple coach Fran Dunphy said. "A lot of it is going to have to do with how the guys around him score." The first player Dunphy named, after saying that, was junior Ramone Moore, a 6-foot-4 slasher who briefly stepped into the starting lineup last season when Fernandez was suffering the aftereffects of a concussion, and proceeded to lead the team in scoring six times during a seven-game A-10 stretch.

Moore is now locked in as the starting shooting guard, but his handicap last season, when he averaged 7.6 points, was an inability to hit threes. He shot just 12.5 percent from beyond the arc and defenses knew to sag off him. While Fernandez was working with the Argentine national team in the summer, Moore, a Philadelphia product, went to Houston to train with his sister's boyfriend, Rockets guard Kyle Lowry, and returned with more complete offensive game. Moore's shooting mechanics looked much improved -- he was 4-of-9 from long range in the practice I saw Monday -- and he said he'd adopted some of Lowry's scoring mentality.

Fernandez believes that if Moore makes threes, a breakout year could be imminent. "I told Ramone that maybe he's going to have to be our leading scorer," Fernandez said.

The Owls' preseason has been about these kinds of subtle shifts and uncertainties in the backcourt. They know they have the talent to win the A-10 again and improve on their first-round exit from the NCAA tournament. They have an elite defensive big man in 6-9 senior Lavoy Allen, who pulled out of the NBA Draft in April. They have strong defensive principles instilled in them by Dunphy, who's meticulous about teaching correct positioning in his helping, man-to-man. Last season, Temple (29-5) ranked fifth in the nation in defensive efficiency. The Owls know Fernandez and Moore can score; they just need to see Fernandez score effectively from the point, and Moore score enough to serve as an offensive leader. And they need to see both those guards, along with whoever starts at the three, put in the same level of defensive effort that Guzman and Ryan Brooks, their lockdown specialist, did to make them an elite team in '09-10.

"That may be the biggest thing for us," Dunphy said. "Replacing Guzman, who knew he was going to stay on the court [by defending], and Brooks, who took pride in trying to shut down people, or at least bother them to the point where they didn't have their best game."

There have been some promising signs in the past few weeks. Allen said that in a closed scrimmage against Penn State on Sunday, Moore did an impressive job of guarding Talor Battle, who's one of the Big Ten's best scoring guards. Temple was often carried by its three-point defense last season, holding opponents to 28.5 percent, the third-lowest rate in the nation. Dunphy said he's been pleased with Fernandez and Moore's dedication in that area, especially since he once considered both of them to be defensive liabilities.

During a film session that preceded Monday's practice, Dunphy stopped the tape after a nice defensive possession and turned to Moore. "Ramone," he said, "I think you played as hard as you could defensively there. You're starting to get it."

Hoop Thoughts from Temple practice

• Allen, who played on USA Basketball's college select team this summer, is an interesting character. He's a smooth big man with a nice jumper (teammates have occasionally called him "Big Sexy") who seems more comfortable in the face-up, pick-and-pop game than he is backing down opposing posts. He only shot 88 free throws in 1,207 minutes last season, and he's often criticized for having a "passive" demeanor. But he puts in significant effort on the glass (with great OR/DR percentages of 12.2 and 23.7) and makes intelligent decisions defending the paint while staying out of foul trouble.

Allen is also capable of some all-conference-level sarcasm. He told me that it takes trash-talk to truly get him riled up, and when I asked him which opponent ran its mouth the most last season, he said, "Ironically, it was the guys from Seton Hall."

• The single biggest thing holding back Temple's offense, which ranked 77th nationally in efficiency last season: Its ratio of free-throw attempts (533) to field-goal attempts (1,942) was abysmal. Only eight teams in D-I -- Sacred Heart, Illinois, Toledo, Presbyterian, Bryant, Dartmouth, Eastern Kentucky and College of Charleston -- had lower ratios, and none of those teams ranked in the top 60 nationally in offensive efficiency, either.

The low fouls-drawn-per-40-minutes rates of big men Allen (3.1), Michael Eric (3.5) and Craig Williams (2.0) are a major issue. The A-10's best NCAA tournament team from last season, Xavier, got much better fouls-drawn rates from frontcourt players Jason Love (4.7), Jamel McLean (5.3) and Kenny Frease (3.2), not to mention that guards Jordan Crawford (4.6) and Tu Holloway (5.0) were excellent whistle-drawers as well.

"We don't take it to the rim hard enough or strong enough or appropriately enough," Dunphy said. "We're not an attacker-of-the-rim kind of team, but we've talked about it, and hopefully we'll get better at that this year."