Despite only one guy on the first unit playing well offensively and both starting forwards fouling out, the scrappy Terrapin men’s basketball team somehow managed to defeat No. 3 North Carolina on Saturday.
The obvious answer to the question, “How?” is that guard Greivis Vasquez was incandescent. But a one-man team would have had no chance to beat a team as good as the Tar Heels.
That’s where the Terps’ reserves came in.
With the offensive aid of guards Cliff Tucker and Eric Hayes, as well as the defensive vigor from forwards Dino Gregory and Jerome Burney, the Terps bench had, by far, its finest game as a collective unit all season.
In outscoring the Tar Heels reserves 41-5 (33-2 after halftime), the on-and-off bench, which coach Gary Williams called “tremendous” after the game, established itself as a key ingredient to the Terps’ success.
“Our bench did extremely well,” foward Dave Neal said. “Cliff came in and gave us excellent minutes. Jerome came in and played extremely well, and that’s what you need. You never know what’s going to happen. Landon [Milbourne] got in foul trouble, I got in foul trouble. Jerome’s and Dino’s times were called, and without them, I don’t think we would have won that game.”
As Vasquez was putting on a scoring clinic, tallying the Terps’ first 16 points, the other four guys around him could only watch. It took 15:50 before a different Terps starter made a field goal. Throughout the entire game, the other four starters combined for just 12 points.
So when guard Sean Mosley got into foul trouble and Tucker emerged with a raging long-distance attack that helped him score a career-high 22 points, the Terps kept feeding the sophomore the ball.
“When I hit the first shot, I knew that I was capable of hitting more shots,” Tucker said. “They just kept telling me to shoot when I got open, so I kept doing it and I got hot. Once I started making shots I started getting more confident. I was just playing with a lot of confidence and my game came to me.”
Playing with confidence seemed out of the question for Tucker during the first half of the ACC season. He received fewer than 10 minutes of playing time in seven of the first eight conference games, and he said he struggled to find a rhythm while being yanked in and out in such quick stints. Recently he has received more playing time and his offensive outputs have merited it.
“I’m proud of Cliff because he wasn’t playing for a while, and now he’s really a key to our team,” Williams said. “It takes a lot of perseverance, takes a lot of willpower when you have a lot of people telling you, ‘The coach doesn’t like you, you should be playing.’ I just told him, ‘You’re going to play before the year’s out, just keep working.’ Now he’s a confident player out there.”
Then there’s Hayes, who scored 17 points with three 3-pointers and was once again a “finisher” for Williams, playing 35 minutes off the bench. Previously mired in a long shooting slump, Hayes has made at least a pair of 3-pointers in each of the last four games.
Although Gregory and Burney combined for just two points, their contributions off the pine might have been equally important to those of Tucker and Hayes.
Trying to defend what Williams called an “NBA frontline,” starters Neal and Milbourne picked up early fouls and were limited before eventually being disqualified.
When they were off the court, Gregory was up to the defensive challenge, blocking three shots, including a Lebron James-esque chase-down of speedy guard Ty Lawson before pinning the Tar Heel’s shot against the backboard.
With 2:23 remaining, Gregory fouled out. Neal was still in, but he had four fouls to his name. And the only other big man off the bench with even a smidgen of experience was Burney, who sat out 16 straight games before finally playing last week against Clemson.
Burney proved to be no drop-off defensively, and even hit a nice turnaround mini-hook, which began the Terps’ run to erase a 16-point deficit.
“Coach Williams tells [Burney], everytime he goes into the game, ‘We need you to rebound and shot-block,'” Neal said. “He knows that’s his role, and he’s accepted it, and he knows that if he wants to play, that’s what he needs to do. Without his effort, I don’t think we would have won that game.”
Saturday’s victory will forever be linked with the brilliance of Vasquez, who recorded the first Maryland triple-double in 22 years. But while Vasquez was the shepherd in fashioning an overtime victory for the ages, the reserves stepped up and became the sheep, following the glowing lead he cast.
“Unbelievable,” Vasquez said, describing the help he got from the bench. “This team got a big heart. This is one of the teams that got the biggest heart that I’ve ever played with.”
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