A Terrapins men’s basketball game against a Division II foe that was expected to draw smiles and applause from the audience Tuesday instead resulted in blank stares and long silences for much of the first half.
The result was never in question. The No. 2 Terps led Bowie State for the entire night in the 93-62 blowout. But the dominating performance took a while to arrive.
It finally came with 3:30 left in the first half in the form of a monstrous one-handed slam from guard Rasheed Sulaimon, who came in soaring in from the left baseline.
Sulaimon, who brought the crowd to its feet again in the second half with a breakaway jam, finished with a game-high 16 points on 7-for-10 shooting. After playing 37 minutes in Saturday’s 72-61 win over No. 18 Purdue, Sulaimon sat for the final 14-plus minutes with a towel draped over his head.
“Coach did a great job of really managing everyone’s minutes and making sure everyone stay fresh,” Sulaimon said. “Everyone got on the court and contributed in this game.”
Coach Mark Turgeon, who said Monday he’d like to have a minutes limit on his players, didn’t play any starter longer than Sulaimon, who finished with a season-low 20 minutes. Reserve guard Jaylen Brantley, who added 10 points, played the most minutes on the team with 21.
Tuesday’s bout was a rare nonconference game scheduled in February during the middle of the Big Ten slate. The Terps (22-3) scheduled it to stay fresh with a week between Big Ten games, Turgeon said, and he believed the contest served that purpose well.
The fifth-year coach plans to give the Terps off Wednesday before they prepare for Wisconsin on Saturday.
“It kind of keeps us in our rhythm instead of playing Saturday to Saturday,” Turgeon said.
Turgeon attributed the slow start Tuesday to the team not being ready for the Bulldogs’ traps. He said they never mentioned them in practice.
“The first timeout, I was pretty upset,” Turgeon said. “But I was upset for myself, too.”
It wouldn’t matter against the inferior Bulldogs (13-10), though, who were routinely bullied in the paint by the Terps’ frontcourt.
Forward Michal Cekovsky, who had scored more than two points just once since Dec. 12, came off the bench to score a career-high 14 points on 4-for-5 shooting. Like most of his teammates, a significant portion of his offensive production came at the free-throw line.
The Terps went 33-for-44 from the charity stripe. Bowie State committed 18 first-half fouls, and the Terps were in the bonus less than five minutes into the contest.
“We knew we wanted to play inside out coming into the game,” Cekovsky said.
After the sluggish start — Bowie State trailed by just 12 until Sulaimon’s dunk with 3:30 left — the Terps looked more like the dominant team most expected to see.
Turgeon sat his starters for most of the second half as the reserves helped the Terps go 15-for-23 over the final 20 minutes. And Sulaimon, who helped pull his team out of the early funk, celebrated as reserves like Cekovsky and guard Varun Ram, who set a career high with eight points, capped the shellacking.
“Just like all those guys might be cheering for me, when they got in the game, I was the biggest cheerleader for them,” Sulaimon said. “It was a great feeling.”
