Fans don't do subtle. They want tangible.
"The demands of everyone have always been he's not dominant," Sciolla said.
No, he is not. Nor is he ever likely to be. Still, there are those three Atlantic 10 championships. There is the defensive IQ that is off the charts. And there are 6, 7, perhaps 8 weeks of college basketball left for Lavoy Allen to explain with his play what he has been about all along.
The numbers keep piling up. He needs five rebounds to become the fifth Temple player to score 1,000 points and get 1,000 rebounds. He needs 48 rebounds to break John Baum's school record. And there are all those games Temple has won.
The Owls senior forward came late to the game. No travel programs as a kid, nothing organized. He was on his eighth-grade middle school team. Sciolla thinks he was the fifth leading scorer.
"He played on a really mediocre ninth grade team and scored about five points a game," Sciolla said.
The high school team had voluntary workouts in the spring and summer.
"Some come and some don't," Sciolla said. "And he did. As he did, he started wanting to do more beyond just coming to the team skill-level stuff. We did a lot of one-on-one stuff. He just progressed from a middling, 6-4 ninth-grader to a guy who started on the varsity as a 10th-grader."
Why basketball? Well, he was tall.
"I was always taller than other people," Allen said "I guess other kids in school just making fun of me for being that tall and not being able to dunk and jump. That's what got me into it."
Once he got into it, he stayed into it.
"I didn't know anything about basketball except playing on the playground," Allen said. "I came a long way."
Indeed.
