Assuming there is a college basketball season in 2020-21 – full or partial- Maryland Head Coach Mark Turgeon and his staff are going to have some serious work to do to prepare for the upcoming season with the roster as it is presently constituted. Gone are the cornerstones who led the Terps to a first-ever Big Ten regular season championship – Jalen Smith and Anthony Cowan. In fact, if Turgeon and company are going to come anywhere near the level of winning of the last couple of seasons they’re going to have to get it done with the kind of team he hasn’t had to coach the last nine years in College Park.
Over the last nine years the Terps have had the luxury of either an exceptional point guard or a dominant big man, sometimes both. If it wasn’t the luxury of Alex Len back in Maryland’s waning ACC seasons it was the Melo Trimble- Cowan continuum in the first six years in the Big Ten. Throw in a Bruno Fernando and a Smith or even a Diamond Stone (swore I would never utter that name again) and you’ve had the luxury of some pretty talented players.
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The best wing during the past nine years has probably been Dez Wells. You can go ahead and argue for a Huerter or Layman. One of the reasons for what was probably the best year of the last nine was due to the performance of a senior Wells and the arrival of Trimble in that first Big Ten season of 2014-15. There have been other good wings- Kevin Huerter and Jake Layman- come to mind, but Turge has probably never had a team that will be a wing-dependent and wing focused as his 2020-21 team will be.
Darryl Morsell and Aaron Wiggins are back for Maryland and if this team is going to surprise some people it might have to be on their backs. Both are skilled wings who have played a lot of minutes in those Terrapin jerseys. If you add Eric Ayala and Donta Scott, you have four talented players to play perimeter positions.
The biggest single challenge is obvious: Who is going to be giving you the minutes you need in the interior? Smith will be playing in the NBA next season and the Terps had three young-ish bigs transfer out over the past six months. The Terps will need to get something out of Chol Marial this year. SOMETHING. He seemed so out of sync and so ill-prepared for the rigors of college hoops last year and he never seemed to recover from the surgery he had right after coming to campus last September.
Regardless of that level of contribution by Chol, the Terps will almost certainly have to embrace some new concepts and schemes to try and accentuate their positives. In most cases you’d think that you’d want to counter a lack of quality size by playing small ball and running and pressing. Yet running is often times a function of how well you rebound and, on paper, the Terps appear to be challenged there. Pressing is most successful when you are blessed with exceptional team speed and/or quickness. I’m not entirely sure that describes this group (important caveat- I say this without ever having seen any of the incoming freshmen play). Add to this the fact that Turge has been somewhat pressure-averse even when he has had excellent team speed and my guess is you won’t see huge changes in this area.
So, what are their strengths? I think the basketball IQ of the core of the team is collectively good and they offer a handful of important intangibles like effort and heart. They are also accustomed to winning and that means something. Yet those intangibles only get you so far. Players still have to make shots and get rebounds.
Strength number one will hopefully involve the ascension and maturation of Aaron Wiggins. There is nothing this guy cannot do. He is basically a five-tool guy (is that a thing in hoops?) but over his first two seasons all we could see were flashes. Consider the fact that he was playing with some pretty prime time Type A guys and players in Bruno and Stix and Ant and you can understand why a young guy will defer. That just cannot happen anymore. Step number one involves the elevation of this guy into a 16-18 points per game guy who can get you 27 or 28 on occasion.
Morsell doesn’t really have the personality or the skill set to make that kind of leap but that doesn’t mean he can’t be great for you. The fact of the matter is he did quietly upgrade his three-point shooting last year to over 33%. That number is higher than Ayala and Wigglns and even Cowan and is a testament to how much time he has put in the gym to get better in that area. His numbers will have to rise significantly beyond the 8.5 ppg and 4.7 rpg from last year but he’s going to get a lot more opportunities this season. Just because he will never be Dez Wells doesn’t mean he can’t give you a lot of Dez-like intangibles – i.e. toughness, fire, big time defense, no bullshit allowed in the locker room. He’s a senior. This is his team to lead.
The last guy to waive the magic wand over would be Donta Scott. I’m 99% sure that he would love to play small forward- his natural position. I’m 100% sure he wants to play and, moreover, do what’s best for the team College basketball is filled with a lot of 6’6”-6’8” guys who are monsters for their teams. Scott has the body and the work ethic and the edge to turn into a terror along the baseline. That might have to happen for this team to be in the conversation in another loaded Big Ten season.
The guess here is that the changes in style may be more subtle than a lot of the fan base might expect. Hopefully the biggest changes we all see is in the development of the core that returns.
I think I’d be hard pressed to find a program and a coach that was hosed more by Covid-19. Last year’s talented team had just played their most complete game of 2020 when the season came to a screeching halt. We will never know how this team would have fared in the Big Ten tournament or the Big Dance, but they had all of the elements to be successful. Beyond the dagger of the suspension of all post season the program paid even more dearly when coaches were ordered to stay off campus, effectively eliminating in-person recruiting opportunities. Turgeon has always excelled in picking up talent late in the recruiting season. He’s had success by getting recruits to come to campus and meeting his team and his staff and learning about the culture of the program he has created. Those sorts of thing are lost on Zoom and Skype. As a result, Maryland has lost out on a handful of possible late season additions that almost certainly would have helped for next season.
By next March or April most of that will be forgotten and we will deal with the black and white of ‘did the team and staff get it done this year or not?’ On paper it appears to be a pretty daunting task but there certainly are enough reasons for hope.
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.