Dez Wells sat and stared blankly into the distance on the Terrapins men’s basketball bench at Madison Square Garden in New York as the seconds ticked away in a National Invitation Tournament semifinal loss to Iowa in April.

The forward pulled his jersey up over his face as coach Mark Turgeon came over to comfort him after he fouled out in the final game of what had initially been a promising Terps season.

Eight months earlier, Wells wasn’t even a Terp. Nine months earlier, this university couldn’t have been farther off the radar for the Atlantic 10 All-Rookie Team performer from Xavier.

But his expulsion from Xavier for an alleged sexual assault launched a domino effect that landed Wells with Turgeon and the Terps and eventually saw him assume the top leadership role for a storied basketball school.

So when Wells took his seat at a table in Comcast Center for Tuesday’s media day, he was once again peppered with questions about distractions — this time stemming from a lawsuit he filed against Xavier in August — affecting the Terps once the season tips off at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Nov. 8.

Wells, though, was steadfast in response.

“I’m a competitor; stuff off the court doesn’t affect me on the court,” Wells said. “When I step in those four lines, I don’t care about what’s going on in my personal life. Issues or whatever’s going, it’s going to be there off the court, that’s all I care about is winning that game.”

And given Wells’ performance last year and his goals for this year, there’s no reason for anyone to worry about the junior. He sees potential to etch his place in Terps lore among the likes of Len Bias, John Lucas and Juan Dixon. That alone is enough for him to shift everything off the court out of his focus.

“I look at a lot of film on Lenny,” Wells said. “He was so great, man. I hear stories about him all the time. That’s one thing I really, really look forward to and really think about is legacy. His legacy that he left behind on the court was great. Juan, Steve Blake, those guys, the legacy left behind on the court was great and that’s something that I look forward to leaving behind whenever my time is up here, after I graduate.”

Wells already had a few classic moments during his year with the Terps. He contributed to an upset of Duke in what was likely the teams’ final meeting in College Park for the forseeable future. He endured taunts of Northwestern fans in putting up a then-career high 23 points on the road in November. And he dropped another 30 points on Duke in an ACC tournament upset in March.

It’s not good enough for Wells, though. The Terps still missed the NCAA tournament for the third consecutive year, falling back to Earth after a 13-1 start to the season. The team struggled in ACC play before ultimately mounting a run through the NIT.

“I’ve only seen the Duke game once, and I didn’t see any of the points I scored,” Wells said. “I saw all the mistakes I made defensively. The games that stick out to me are Iowa, Kentucky and Carolina in the ACC tournament. Those were the games we really had a chance to do something special as far as like in a tournament type of thing or first game of a season and we came up short.”

In Wells’ lawsuit against Xavier, he alleges “severe emotional distress” over the past year because of the damage to his reputation caused by his expulsion. That rarely showed on the court last season. He leads the team by example, getting up at 6 a.m. to shoot jumpers at Comcast Center before the Terps’ 8 a.m. practices.

And Turgeon said he’s behind him 100 percent.

“I know it’s going to come up a lot,” Turgeon said. “Every TV game, but it’s not going to interfere with us, and I think Dez is a strong-minded enough person not to let it affect him. If he didn’t really believe in what he was doing, he wouldn’t be doing it, so I don’t think it’s going to affect us at all.”

This summer, Wells played pickup games against Dixon and other Terps alumni. While he learned different things from their play on the court, Wells realized the standard he has to live up to when he steps onto the court at Comcast Center donning the Terps uniform.

That’s the important thing to him: Everything else around him that isn’t on the basketball court can stay off the basketball court. He realizes the significance of the accomplishments of those who came before him, and he wants to honor them.

“This is their alma mater,” Wells said. “They want to come back and be confident and be boastful about what they did here and the team that they have here now. So we know we owe it to them — to those guys who won a national championship, who did great things, who were first-team All-Americans, second-team, third-team. We owe it to those guys to play hard every time.”