I don’t want to make this an exercise in hyperbole.
They’re the No. 28 team in the country according to the NET rankings, the No. 23 team in the country according to KenPom, No. 29 RPI. They’ve won two road games all season, against two teams that have a COMBINED two conference wins on the year. They have the No. 35 adjusted offense (according to KenPom), although they do have the No. 24 adjusted defense, too. ESPN’s Joe Lunardi currently sees them as a No. 8 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
You get the point. This is not a historic or really spectacular season for Maryland men’s basketball. The Terps have been quite solid at home, save for a shellacking at the hands of a very good UCLA team, and not particularly good on the road. My friend Drew Forrester (DrewsMorningDish.com and 105.7 The Fan) recently suggested that if Mark Turgeon was still in College Park and having this type of season, Maryland fans would be all over him.
He’s probably not wrong. Which is rare for him. But we know, of course, that context matters. And that context is exactly what has made this season so enjoyable.
I’m pretty sure this Maryland team is not going to end up making a run to the Final Four this season. The Terps have a problematic lack of depth and are currently the 325th-best 3-point shooting team in Division I hoops. (I’m as surprised as you that there are somehow nearly 40 worse, but they have shot slightly better in recent games to surpass the likes of Texas A&M-Commerce.) We know this is a limited basketball team.
And yet in recent weeks the Terps have also been something else: totally must watch.
The results have been helpful. Maryland has won five of its last six, starting with an encouraging win against Hunter Dickinson and Michigan. The only loss in the stretch was a three-point loss at then-No. 3 Purdue (after a furious comeback from being down 16) that saw the Terps hold Zach Edey and company to a season-low 58 points. Even that was encouraging!
Adding in their win against Trayce Jackson-Davis and Indiana last week, the Terps have fared far better against the teams with the top bigs in the league (or B1Gs, if you will) than we could have ever expected back when they were getting slaughtered by the Wolverines on New Year’s Day. They’ve overcome their depth and 3-point shooting concerns by confidently attacking the basket, playing solid defense and squeezing solid minutes out of players like Patrick Emilien and Jahari Long.
Things are shaping up for the Feb. 16 home game against Purdue, which just lost to the same Indiana team Maryland beat, to be the biggest home conference game at Xfinity Center since the Terps clinched a share of the Big Ten regular-season title against Michigan in 2020.
There’s still no reason to be carried away yet. The word is “encouraging,” not necessarily “affirming.” But context! We remember how minimal the expectations were for this team in Kevin Willard’s first season as head coach. We had no idea what exactly to expect from Charlotte transfer Jahmir Young in his return to the area. We figured having a trio of experienced veterans (Hakim Hart, Julian Reese and Donta Scott) could help, but we knew those three weren’t necessarily stars either.
It can’t be definitively proven that Willard and his staff have gotten more out of this group than any other coach in the country would. But, probably in large part because of what we’ve watched for the last few years, it absolutely feels like the coaching is making a genuine difference. There appears to be a greater feel for the moment, like the timeout they took down 22-15 in the first half against Indiana.
That doesn’t mean the coaching staff deserves all of the credit. But if we believe there is a limitation for how far the current team can go, we have to watch at least in part to see what sort of inferences we can make about the years to come. Seeing these coaches seeming to get the most from this current group (combined with a solid recruiting class for the 2023-24 season) leaves us, well, again, encouraged.
And I don’t want to make it seem like I’m being completely dismissive of the current team’s potential, either. Reaching the NCAA Tournament at all was a best-case scenario coming into the season. Being a bit overvalued early in the season by the voting polls should have never led us to move the goalposts. I won’t now. Getting into the dance would be an accomplishment.
Given how jumbled the league is behind Purdue, if the Terps somehow were to beat the Boilermakers at home they’d establish themselves a bit as a threat in the Big Ten tournament. And the first couple of rounds of the NCAA Tournament tend to be about matchups, so a Sweet 16 type of run isn’t an unreasonable goal … although it is an unreasonable expectation.
It’s a fun team. It’s a team worth watching. It feels like a team that’s potentially laying a foundation for a return to national relevancy. That’s at least as much as we could have ever possibly asked for this season.
Photo Credit: Colin Murphy/PressBox