BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA — When coach Mark Turgeon called a timeout with 4:05 left in the first half, the Terrapins men’s basketball players walked to the huddle with their hands on their hips. They looked gassed. They looked lost.
Just more than four minutes later, Indiana forward Troy Williams drilled a 3-pointer to beat the halftime buzzer. The Terps looked no different. They sulked to the locker room with their heads down as Assembly Hall erupted.
William’s long ball marked the end a 23-6 run to close out the half for the Hoosiers. The No. 14 Terps could not recover from No. 12 Indiana’s onslaught over the final 10 minutes of the half and suffered their worst loss of the season, 80-62, before an announced 17,472 in their final regular-season game.
“We got a little fatigued,” Turgeon said. “We weren’t tough enough mentally.”
The Hoosiers (25-6, 15-3 Big Ten) had already clinched the Big Ten regular-season title before the game, and the Terps’ conference tournament seed isn’t affected by the outcome. So the game’s lone implications were on the teams’ NCAA Tournament resumes. Still, the Terps (24-7, 12-6) will enter the Big Ten Tournament having dropped four of their past six games.
If there was a positive on Sunday, it might have been the play of guard Melo Trimble, who continued to look more like himself after breaking out of his slump Thursday against Illinois. He scored 17 points on 7-for-17 shooting, but it wasn’t enough to carry the Terps.
“Just last week in practice, I told [Turgeon] I felt really good,” Trimble said. “It’s been showing the past two games. My legs are just under me, and when my legs are feeling great, I’m great.”
The problem Sunday came when Trimble couldn’t get any help on offense. After forward Robert Carter Jr. finished a layup with 13:01 left in the first half, Trimble provided the only three field goals for the Terps the remainder of the period.
The Terps closed out the half missing 11 of their final 13 field-goal attempts, with each wayward shot igniting energy among the sellout crowd amped up for Indiana’s Senior Day.
“I just felt like we couldn’t make any shots,” Trimble said.
After Turgeon’s timeout with about four minutes left in the first, Trimble drilled one of his three long balls to trim the deficit to four with 3:47 left. The Terps could’ve climbed back in it after that shot, Turgeon said, but they failed to lock in defensively.
Indiana scored the final nine points of the half to take a commanding lead into the locker room.
“The last three or four minutes of the first half, we stopped guarding them,” Turgeon said. “It could’ve been a four- or a five-point game at half, and then it’s different.”
The margin ballooned to 17 early in the second half before the Terps finally stopped the bleeding. By that point, the deficit was too great for the Terps to spark a turnaround in the raucous environment.
When they pulled within nine just more than three minutes into the half, Williams beat them down the court for an and-1 dunk. Their inability to get back in the second half proved costly as Indiana used fast-break spurts to keep its double-digit lead.
“We kept battling,” Turgeon said. “We cut it to nine or 10 there. We just didn’t finish the first half. We didn’t finish the second half right.”
Before the game began, the Terps starters gathered on the bench. Indiana’s video intro was playing on the Jumbotron before its starters were announced, and “Indiana is the Big Ten champion” boomed over the loudspeakers.
The Terps looked on as the Indiana faithful hollered. The team had spoken all season about the importance of winning the regular-season crown, though they came to Indiana with the title out of reach. They left Bloomington as losers of four of their past six.
“We definitely hit some adversity late in the season, but we can’t splinter,” guard Rasheed Sulaimon said. “That could allow it to keep rolling forward.”
