There’s a good reason why there is a mandatory “cooling off period” after games in most prominent American sports. The simple reason for that is that if you stuck a microphone in someone’s face – player or coach- 30 seconds after an emotional game, you would most likely get a visceral and unedited (and likely, entertaining) look into the thoughts of gladiator right on the heels of an event he has put years into getting just right. With that in mind, I waited four or five days to offer a post mortem on the season for Maryland basketball and what just might lie ahead. I’ve thought about a hundred approaches to this but all of my thoughts come back to one central, simple notion:
We should have seen it all coming.
(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)
First things first…you will NEVER see me pissing on a 27 win season. Ever. This is a brutally hard business. To get to that number a lot of things have to go right for you. Add to that number the fact that you finally got to a place- the sweet 16- where the program had not been in 13 years and you would think that there would have been balloons and a parade down Route 1 in College Park. The fact that the parade never happened and that Terp nation is now wringing their hands about a program that has won 55 (count ‘em- that’s FIFTY FIVE….Double nickel!!) wins over the last two seasons speaks to the notion that we, as sports fans, never seem to get right.
We want our teams to collect talent Yankee-style. We want all of the best players at each individual position. When the stars align and you have the kind of collection of players that Mark Turgeon had for this past season, you immediately think that you have a birthright to a championship even though there are examples in sports all around us that shows us that the acquisition of name brand players rarely, if ever beats a team that has played together, struggled together and, yes, lost together.
Think Kansas City Royals. Think Denver Broncos. Both were extremely talented but neither won until they had played –and, to a degree, suffered- together for a period of years. Yet, somehow, Mark Turgeon puts together a dream team on the fly in a nanosecond and we all expected a different result in spite of the evidence all around us that this group never really had the chance to percolate.
Turgeon and his staff never had the luxury of time that the Royals and Broncos had. Rasheed Sulaimon needed last summer to graduate from Duke so he could be eligible immediately in College Park. Diamond Stone flirted with playing on a national team and Melo Trimble was away at the Pan American games in Canada for a good deal of the summer. That means that 3/5 of your starting five finally played together in late August once the fall semester had started.
Contrast that to some of the teams the Terps fell short against this past season. Michigan State started three seniors and a fourth year junior. North Carolina’s Marcus Paige and Brice Johnson led a team stocked with vets and Kansas had 45 year old Perry Ellis and three veteran guards who had played multiple seasons together.
Maybe, in retrospect, a sweet sixteen run is pretty much exactly the level that this group played to. After 13 years away from it, that’s not a complaint at all.
Clearly there were some fundamental basketball issues for the sputtering. The team struggled to shoot the ball well in key stretches. A steady level of contributions off the Terp bench never developed at all and the team was plagued by a maddening inability to rebound to the level of their size. That inability led to a number of problems. They could never rebound enough to fastbreak regularly and that limited the number of easy opportunities they might otherwise have had. They also seemed to lack a “glue guy” that majored in ‘Dirty Work’ for the team. Think Vince Broadnax. Think Byron Mouton. One guy like that might’ve made a big difference. Maybe when all was said and done they were a team full of Chiefs without an Indian is sight.
The cruel part of college sports is that players come and go. It seems like you’re just getting to know guys and then they move on. Sometimes it seems like that guy is just starting to “get it” and we mourn the seasons that passed when he didn’t “get it”. But the fact that players come and go is also the cool part of deal. There are new stories and relationships and, well, potential. We get caught up in reading a player’s high school bios and our mind’s eyes immediately see the next Brad Davis or Juan Dixon. This is fun. As fans, it allows us to invest and then reinvest. Turning over the roster isn’t just inevitable…it can be essential.
The healthy assumption as a Terp fan is to expect that this year’s starting lineup will all be elsewhere next year. I know each of those that still have eligibility would be welcomed back with open arms but that is really unrealistic. I hope each one goes and makes millions. Part of any high level program’s cred these days includes the ability to tell recruits that you’ve had X number of players leave early to play professionally. In a perverted way it actually helps you when some of your guys bolt early. Those departures will allow for major opportunities for the group of players that remain a talented group of incoming freshman and a wild card or two that we don’t even know about right now.
Mark Turgeon and his staff have signed three talented freshmen for next season- Anthony Cowan, Kevin Huerter and Micah Thomas. None of them will be hand delivered playing time but if each is as good as advertised they will play significant minutes. One is because talent demands time. The other is because of the clear object lesson that this season offered: Sometimes the meal has to cook a while before it can really be enjoyed.
Terps Analyst
A fixture in the Washington sports scene since his days as a player and a coach, Chris Knoche has accumulated a diverse resume as a media presence in town for more than two decades. That resume has earned him opportunities on both national and local stages and made him a Washington DC staple on radio, television and in digital media.