Moore and Temple leaving A-10 in dust

Temple is Ramone Moore's team.

And the Atlantic Ten is the conference he dominates.

If there were any doubts that Moore is a legitimate A-10 player-of-the-year candidate, they were erased Saturday night.

The fifth-year senior guard led the Owls to an 85-72 victory over conference power Xavier in front of a "whiteout" crowd of 9,370 at the Liacouras Center.

Moore flat-out dominated anyone who guarded him, including reigning conference player of the year Tu Holloway.

He scored a game-high 30 points to lead Temple (19-5, 8-2 A-10) to its eighth consecutive win. The Southern High graduate, who made a game-high five three-pointers, was two points shy of his career high.

Dominating performances against conference opponents are becoming the norm for Moore.

He earned his second A-10 player-of-the-week honor on Feb. 6. He tops the conference with 17 consecutive double-figure scoring games. And the 6-foot-4, 190-pounder is the A-10's leading scorer at 18.8 points per game.

Surely, Moore thinks he deserves the player-of-the-year award, right?

"I'm not even going to get into that," he said. "I'll let the coaches and the voters handle that.

"I just want to focus on the rest of the season, try to maintain our winning streak and get into the postseason, and go from there."

The win kept the Owls a half-game ahead of St. Louis atop the conference standings. Having already beaten St. Louis, Temple owns tiebreakers over both the Billikens and Xavier (16-9, 7-4) with six regular-season games remaining.

The Owls travel to St. Bonaventure on Wednesday to take on the fifth-place Bonnies (13-9, 6-4). Temple should beat St. Bonaventure for the 15th straight time if it comes close to duplicating Saturday's performance against Xavier.

Guard Khalif Wyatt (18 points) and center Micheal Eric (11 points, career-high 16 rebounds) also stood out against the Musketeers.

Temple, with all eight of Saturday's players scoring, shot 46.7 percent from the field against a normally stingy defense.

The Musketeers rank second in the A-10 in field-goal-percentage defense (39.4 percent) and third in three-point-percentage defense (30.83 percent).

"We made some tough shots," said Temple coach Fran Dunphy, whose squad shot 45 percent on three-pointers. "We made some timely shots. . . . I thought we could get some decent looks. We did, and we knocked them down."

In the process, Moore showed a packed Liacouras Center crowd and a national-television audience why he's a conference player-of-the-year front-runner.

Moore "is the heart and soul of our team," Eric said. "He puts our team on his back with his scoring abilities."

 Contact staff writer Keith Pompey at 215-854-2939 or kpompey@phillynews.com. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/pompeysgridlock, and read his blog at www.philly.com/OwlsInq