Maryland basketball hasn’t lived up to the high expectations this season, and it might not reach its true potential at any point. Most Terps supporters have probably accepted this by now.
The Terps are slotted to get just about the same seeding as they did last year, which is a bit of a disappointment given the insane talent they have now.
One contributor to this is the fairly dramatic drop in Melo Trimble’s and Jared Nickens’ three-point shooting percentages, which were both great last year. They went from the top three last year among Terps who shoot them regularly to the bottom three this year.
If both players were shooting as well as they did last year, it goes without saying that the Terps would be a better team. It seems unlikely that’ll happen this year, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t adjustments they can make to improve their play.
In a perfect world, Nickens would be a consistent deep threat, but there’s not much a struggling sharpshooter can do besides keep shooting. In that world, Trimble would still be the phenomenal distributor and playmaker he is now, as well as a knockdown three-point shooter. But he’s not, and he hasn’t been all year, save for a few games.
Trimble is shooting 4.8 threes per game on average, up from 4.2 his freshman year, and is converting them at a significantly worse rate of 33.3 percent.
This is a big problem, especially considering 47.6 percent of his shots this year have been threes.
Trimble doesn’t need to rely on 3-pointers. He’s one of the most effective players in college basketball going to the rim. It’s what defines him as a player. His two-point shooting percentage is 51.4, up almost five percentage points from last season, but he’s shooting less of them this year. Plus, he’s taken 62 fewer free throws than he had at this point last year.
There’s a simple fix to Trimble’s slump: Stop shooting so many threes. This won’t make him any better from long distance, but it’ll make him, and the team as a whole, more efficient. Obviously, if he’s wide open, he’s going to take the shot, but passing up some threes and penetrating more will result in higher percentage shots for Trimble, and it’ll create better shots for his teammates, too (like Rasheed Sulaimon, who’s shooting 46.7 percent from three).
It’s possible that he’s just saving his body for the tournament or the NBA and doesn’t want to take as many hits as he did last year. But even then, that’s not an excuse to become a perimeter-oriented player. Nearing the end of the season and the start of the games that really matter, it would benefit Trimble and the Terps for him to do what he does best.
