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The University of Maryland Terrapins, under coach Gary Williams, are starting to show signs of maturing.
College Park (Map, News) - With all of its youth, inexperience and inability to run anything resembling a legitimate offense at times, the University of Maryland men’s basketball team makes you periodically turn away as a viewer. Then again, the Terrapins also have a way of compelling you to watch some more.
These Terps are a scrappy lot. They fight for loose balls and rebounds and create steals. They dig in and seem to enjoy the thankless task of playing defense. They show enough flashes of talent to make the growing pains bearable and give their fans hope that something better is coming down the road.
In Tuesday’s 71-64 win over Wake Forest in which it played its third straight game without sophomore guard Eric Hayes — its best player so far this year — Maryland took its home crowd out of the game with poor stretches of play in each half.
The main culprit once again was the unforced turnovers, followed by defensive lapses in transition and the persistently poor outside shooting of sophomore guard Greivis Vasquez.
But against a young Wake Forest squad that reflects the youth of numerous, second-tier, Atlantic Coast Conference teams, Maryland regained enough control of the game in crunch time to earn its first conference win after losing close games to Boston College and Virginia Tech.
It was a sign the Terrapins are starting to grow up.
Block out of your mind for a minute the steamroller fast approaching. The trip to top-ranked North Carolina today will not be pretty. There’s a real good chance visiting Duke will have its way with the Terps when the Blue Devils put Maryland to its next test at Comcast Center on Jan. 27.
Consecutive losses would drop Maryland to 11-9 overall, 1-4 in ACC play. Yet, if Hayes is back in the starting lineup and playing over 30 minutes per game by the time the Terps swing into February, don’t be shocked if Maryland contends of a spot in the NCAA Tournament.
I know, I know. The Terps often can’t get out of their own way on offense, and often can’t shoot decently when they do. They have cracked the 80-point mark only once. In stunning, back-to-back home losses to Ohio and American last month, they failed to score 60 points.
Maryland might be accelerating the aging of 19-year coach Gary Williams, 62, on some nights, yet this is also the kind of team that rejuvenates Williams. That’s because, for all of their flaws, the Terps are a hustling, unselfish, coachable group.
Take away the solid, senior frontcourt of James Gist and Bambale Osby, and the Terps are without impact upperclassmen. There is no junior or senior in the backcourt rotation.
That has put much pressure on sophomores Hayes and Vasquez to run things. Hayes has been up to the challenge. It’s reflected in his assist-to-turnover ratio (81-31), scoring average (11 ppg) and long-range shooting, as he makes a team-high 37.3 percent beyond the arc.
Vasquez leads the team with 16.8 points per game, which partially masks his 32.4 percent shooting and his 4.2 turnovers per game. His outside shot has been AWOL virtually all year, and he has struggled running the point in Hayes’ absence.
The bright side of Vasquez’s uneven season is he doesn’t look nearly refined enough to jump into the NBA draft this spring.
Then, there is the trio of freshmen — guard Adrian Bowie, guard Cliff Tucker and center Braxton Dupree — who has made steady strides and rounded out an established, eight-man rotation.
Bowie’s floor game as a backup point guard continues to flourish. At 6-feet-6, the long-armed Tucker (4.3 ppg) adds versatility as a defender, shooter and ball handler. The 6-8 Dupree, about 15 pounds too heavy at 260, is the best post player prospect at Maryland since Lonny Baxter.
The Terps turn the ball over too much and don’t shoot it well enough right now. They rank ninth in the ACC in scoring (71.5 ppg) and field goal percentage (.442). On the flip side, Maryland leads the league in field goal percentage defense (.364) and is allowing 64.3 ppg, fifth-fewest in the league.
In short, the Terps are flawed, athletic, short on consistency. But this also is the type of team Williams team that usually keeps getting better.
Gary Lambrecht writes about the NFL, Major League Baseball and college sports. He can be reached at glambrecht@baltimoreexaminer.com.
