The Terrapins men’s basketball team began this season in November burdened with expectations. The Terps were the No. 3 team in the Associated Press preseason poll, and some experts tabbed them as national title favorites.
A year earlier, the Terps started the 2014-15 season with little fanfare after five key contributors left in the offseason. But after a trip to the NCAA Tournament and the addition of several new faces, the once-storied program was back in the national spotlight.
While the Terps have maintained this season that they don’t discuss the rankings among themselves, they have struggled to live up to the preseason hype. After a 2-4 skid to end the regular season, the Terps are 24-7 and ranked No. 18 in the AP poll released Monday. Last year, they finished the regular season 26-5.
The postseason, which starts Friday with the Terps’ first game in the Big Ten Tournament, offers an opportunity for a new start. The Terps’ spot in the NCAA Tournament isn’t in question, and after they fell by 80-62 to No. 10 Indiana in the regular-season finale Sunday, they reiterated that everyone is 0-0 entering postseason play. The Terps, favorites in most games this season, are even embracing a familiar role from a year ago: long shots.
“We just back to being underdogs,” guard Melo Trimble said Sunday. “All last year, we was underdogs and we played through every game like we were going to come out on top. And I think going into this postseason, we got the mindset that every team’s going to think they can beat us because we are going through these losses.”
The Terps, the No. 3 seed in the conference tournament, will face the winner of a second-round game between No. 6-seed Wisconsin and No. 11-seed Nebraska/No. 14-seed Rutgers. Last year, the Terps received the No. 2 seed in the tournament and were heavy favorites to win the regular-season conference title this season. Instead, they watched the Hoosiers, who had clinched the regular-season title before Sunday, enjoy a celebration on the Jumbotron before the game.
“Big Ten regular season didn’t go the way we wanted it to go,” coach Mark Turgeon said after the loss. “We had a tough road schedule and we didn’t handle it well.”
But the Terps are showing signs of improvement, Turgeon said Sunday. The fifth-year coach believes the tough three-game stretch to close the season, which included two road games against ranked opponents, will help them moving forward.
Senior guard Rasheed Sulaimon, one of the new faces to join the Terps this offseason as a graduate transfer from Duke, also believed the Terps would grow from Sunday’s experience. The Terps suffered their largest loss of the season against the Hoosiers and haven’t won a road game against a ranked team since 2008.
“This hard road game has prepared us for the postseason,” Sulaimon said. “Obviously we didn’t do as well as we wanted to in the regular season, but there is definitely some things we can learn from, and going into the postseason where everything is a neutral setting, I think it will be to our benefit.”
While the Terps haven’t performed up to the lofty standards set for them before the season by many analysts and fans, they can still accomplish their ultimate goal: winning a national championship.
If they do, their regular-season struggles likely will be forgotten. So the Terps’ focus now is on the future.
“It’s another start-over right now,” Trimble said. “Everyone going into the tournament, like I said, is 0-0, and we just got to look forward ahead and not look back at the games we already lost.”
Senior staff writer Ryan Baillargeon contributed to this report.
