Step away from the ledge, Terp fans.
On the heels of a pretty sound beating at the hands of the Pitt Panthers earlier this week there has been an awful lot of hand-wringing and even a little finger pointing in Terrapin Nation and, with a significant Power Five game against Oklahoma State looming it might be time look at things a little bit more rationally.
(You can discuss this on the BSL Board here.)
The Terps are 7-1 and the calendar just turned to December. There’s still so much meat left on the bone it’s hard to make a completely accurate assessment just yet. We have more questions than we have answers at this point but the team- Pitt loss notwithstanding- has plenty of reasons for optimism.
It all starts with the fact that there are three freshmen starters who all had great Novembers. They’re not gonna get worse with experience. Each will get better. More confident. More assertive. Each of the three – Anthony Cowan, Kevin Huerter and Justin Jackson has exceeded expectations already. Each is completely unafraid. Their college basketball careers started exactly three weeks ago from this writing.
They’re puppies. They struggled against a Pitt team that returned four starters from an NCAA tournament team. The Panthers started four seniors and a third year junior. Maturity matters. The experience – and perhaps even the taste of defeat- will help the younger Terps down the road.
It appears the Terps have also found a remedy to early-season offensive problems in the paint. For two plus seasons junior Michal Cekovsky has been kind of an enigmatic tease. He’s strong as an ox and runs the floor like a deer. Animal metaphors aside, he’s never really gotten it done on the floor. To be fair, his development might have been stunted last year by having Diamond Stone around for the year he was here but it never seemed that the big fella burned to play. In the four games since his return from injury Ceko has averaged ten points and five rebounds per game and played 17-18 minutes per game. Solid numbers. He also provides some easy baskets to a team that is still trying to figure things out offensively. He does some things on occasion that are maddening. Against Pitt he was content to hide behind the zone defense too much but what he does provide when he’s playing well is very much needed on this club.
I know we all keep waiting on a return to form for wings Jared Nickens and Dion Wiley. I always believe that players ultimately end up with the numbers that have already been written on the back of their baseball cards. The issue there, for Nickens, is which numbers to believe. Is he the 40% three point assassin we saw as a freshman or is he the too-streaky 34% shooter from last year? He might have been streaky last year but fans would be happy to take that percentage compared to the 19% he’s shooting right now. But those percentages are just a part of the story. If he wants to stay in Mark Turgeon’s rotation he doesn’t just have to shoot better. He has to play better.
Wiley looks like he’s still trying to find his legs after sitting out last season. He’s had some good moments but he presents a problem if you’re Turgeon and his staff. This team has played and will play a bunch of close games this season. Do you get Wiley extended minutes this year in an effort to get him in rhythm or do you keep the best players on the floor to win a close game. At this point those things are mutually exclusive. He needs to play better as well. The bet here is that he will.
Right now there are eleven Terp players averaging double figure minutes per game. That can’t last. Those numbers are there because Turge has been pushing buttons all season trying to walk the line between winning games and getting guys acclimated – be they freshmen or a grad transfer or a struggling veteran. Hard decisions have to be made and they will be.
Clearly the biggest things that this team has going for it are the shoulders of junior guard Melo Trimble. I get that he turns it over some and that his shooting comes and goes but consider this….dude is 24-6 in his college career in games decided by six points or less. That’s absurd. In sports you always hope that your team wins “its share” of the close ones. Your share is 50%, hopefully. Not 80%. Anybody can be a good player the first 35 minutes of a game. It takes testicles to do it the last five minutes. And to do it on such a continual basis is beyond special. He’s done it since the day he walked on to campus. Fans have become so used to the routine that he’s probably totally taken for granted. I won’t make that mistake.
He’s a great Terp and reason number one why this team sits 7-1 in spite of playing nowhere near their potential just yet.
So this team sits 7-1 with a high profile game against a really prolific Oklahoma State team on tap. The 6-1 Cowboys average a ridiculous 99 points per game. Only the Citadel averages more points per game in D1 hoops. I won’t go into who they beat because I don’t buy any of the comparative score stuff (we beat team A by 7 and they beat team B by 8 so we must be 7-8 points better than team B) at all. Each matchup is different. State has one of the most prolific players in the college game in sophomore guard Jawun Evans. Not only is he averaging just under 25 per game, he does it efficiently – shooting 49% from the field and 56% from three. He has scored against everybody they have played.
Because of the way the first three weeks of the season played out and looking at what lies ahead in December, Oklahoma State represents both the Terps biggest challenge and its biggest opportunity this month. It’s a game that will be played at a terrific pace with lots of highs and lots of lows but you have to let it play out and not micro-analyze every peak and valley.
It’s kinda like the season itself.
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.