After one last afternoon on which it could not keep pace with a hot-shooting opponent, the Maryland men’s basketball team said a frustrated farewell to a frustrating season.
March Madness never dawned for Maryland, which lost nine of its last 12 games and will have no reason to tune in when the NCAA Tournament bracket is revealed Sunday. The Terps’ 87-56 loss to Wisconsin in the Big Ten Tournament wasn’t characteristic of a season defined by bitterly close defeats, but the shooting deficit — the Badgers made as many 3-pointers, 16, as Maryland attempted — was all too familiar.
A quick perusal of social media reveals just how dreary this season became for fans who hoped the program was turning a corner under second-year coach Kevin Willard. The 16-17 record, worse than any full season produced by Willard’s oft-maligned predecessor, Mark Turgeon, told only part of the dispiriting story. Despite standout individual seasons from fifth-year senior guard Jahmir Young and junior power forward Julian Reese, the Terps simply could not shoot well enough — 41.3% overall, 28.4% from 3-point range in the regular season — to keep up in a Big Ten that featured just two Associated Press Top 25 teams going into the conference tournament.
This was not the follow-up Willard, his veteran players or the program’s boosters expected after the Terps finished last season by winning an NCAA Tournament game before they fell to top-seeded Alabama.
That was a welcome step forward after Maryland dragged across the finish line, 15-17, under interim coach Danny Manning the previous year. Willard’s initial success with a roster he largely did not recruit seemed to portend even brighter days ahead, especially after he signed a top 20 recruiting class led by wing scorers DeShawn Harris-Smith and Jamie Kaiser Jr.
“To be perfectly honest with you, the roster was built — the way we built the roster, I felt was good,” Willard said after the final loss. “I was just really, really shocked at how much we struggled to shoot the basketball. I just think our inability to make shots led to nine three-points-or-less losses, and that adds up. It just wears you down a little bit. Wears you down as a player, wears you down as a coach, and I know it wore the fan base down.”
There are still reasons for optimism in College Park.
Analytics suggest the Terps were not as bad as their record; they ranked 351st out of 362 teams in KenPom’s luck rating (the difference between actual winning percentage and expected winning percentage based on underlying statistics). Between their Jan. 2 loss to powerful Purdue and their regular-season finale against Penn State, they went 16 straight games without a double-digit defeat. Willard said they were 20 points removed from a serious shot at the NCAA Tournament, and he was not wrong.
“It can come down to a free throw block-out or passing up on a missed shot to get a better shot,” Young said. “Little things like that separated us from maybe winning some of those games. Looking back, it’s tough.”
Maryland played fearsome defense, ranking 13th in KenPom’s adjusted efficiency (compared with 160th in offensive efficiency).
“Obviously, it hasn’t gone the way we wanted it to go, but how hard they’ve played, how well they’ve played defensively, the fact we’ve been in every game we’ve played and had a chance to win every game,” Willard said when asked how this team put its mark on what he’s trying to build. “It’s just that some of our offensive struggles have derailed the season a little bit. But I think the way they’ve competed has laid a great foundation.”
Willard made the NCAA Tournament five of his last seven seasons at Seton Hall, and that would have been six if not for the coronavirus pandemic. He’s not a fledgling coach trying to prove he can win at this level.
“Kevin Willard’s a great coach, so I don’t have any concerns at all,” ESPN analyst Jay Bilas said of the program’s big picture. “They did not have the best shooting team, so when you struggle to consistently make shots from the perimeter, teams can pack it in on you. That makes it difficult to run offense, but they were a good basketball team that just couldn’t make shots. I don’t think it’s a long-term concern; Kevin’s one of the best coaches out there.”
Not to mention Willard signed the one recruit, five-star center Derik Queen from Baltimore, he had to have. With his wide frame, soft hands and refined inside game, Queen will bring renewed hope all by himself come November.
In 2025, the program will move into a new $52 million practice facility that Willard (and Turgeon before him) has said will make it more competitive, on the court and on the recruiting trail.
“I feel like it’s only going to go up from here,” fifth-year senior forward Donta Scott said. “We may not have had the season we wanted to have, but they’re bringing in a couple of talented players for next year. … This program is really just looking up, especially with them making a new facility where [players] can be able to get away and actually work on their game a little bit better without having to go through some obstacles.”
Longtime booster Rick Jaklitsch, an Upper Marlboro attorney and former president of the Terrapin Club, said the practice facility is a step in the right direction, but he’s concerned Maryland is still lagging behind many top programs in money for name, image and likeness rights (NIL), the new battlefield in big-time college sports.
“A little bit of money from a lot of people would go a long way,” Jaklitsch said. “It has changed so much. Kevin has been frugal with the money, has done a really good job with what he has. But we should, as Terps fans, step up and give him four times the money he has and see what he can do. That’s the new game.”
He acknowledged the negativity from many fans coming off this season but said his confidence in Willard is undiminished. “As soon as there’s struggles, the whiners come out of the woodwork,” Jaklitsch said.
Maryland entered this season with high expectations — picked to finish third in the Big Ten by a preseason media vote — not just because of its 22-13 record last year, but because Willard persuaded Young and Scott, two of his top three scorers, to spurn the transfer portal (he could not retain guards Hakim Hart and Ian Martinez, who decamped to Villanova and Utah State, respectively) and reunite with the steadily improving Reese (St. Frances). They would be joined by a group of newcomers Willard called “the best freshman class I’ve ever had.” He was particularly bullish on Harris-Smith, whom he called “by far the most talented player, probably the most physically gifted basketball player, I’ve ever been able to coach so far.”
This consensus top 20 class was expected to give the Terps more perimeter firepower after they shot just 32.8% from 3-point range in 2022-23. In ranking the group No. 19 in the country, ESPN said Harris-Smith “distributes with accuracy and makes outside shots” while praising Kaiser’s “potent 3-point shot, body strength and strong bounce.”
Three straight defeats in November, however, revealed how badly the Terps would struggle to score efficiently against quality opponents. They averaged 54.7 points in those losses to Davidson, UAB and Villanova, shooting a combined 32.9% from the field and 25.7% from 3-point range. They would have better days, but the die was cast.
Maryland’s season peaked with a Jan. 14 win at then-No. 10 Illinois, in which the Terps shot a much healthier 46.2% while smothering the Illini defensively. Willard called it a “big-time effort” in the postgame locker room, and it seemed his team might have a promising blueprint for conference play. Instead, they lost five of their next seven, with those defeats coming by a combined 21 points.
For all its defensive toughness and ruggedness in generating free-throw attempts, the team never found consistent answers from outside. The season proved particularly frustrating for the touted freshmen, Harris-Smith and Kaiser, who shot 17.3% and 25% from 3-point range, respectively, in the regular season.
As Willard noted whenever the subject came up, freshmen across the country struggled in a “wacky world” packed with experienced performers playing extra seasons in the wake of the pandemic.
“They work so hard at it,” he said of Harris-Smith and Kaiser. “Eventually, it’s got to go in because you’re working at it. They make them at practice, they work at it. They’re in the gym every morning at 7 a.m. So I just keep telling them to shoot it, and you have to have confidence that the work they’re going to put in is going to come to the court eventually.”
Willard never abandoned his message that the team was “not that far off.” But Maryland closed the regular season with two of its weaker efforts, blowing a 16-point second-half lead at home against Indiana and falling by 16 to Penn State, which finished ninth in the conference. Home attendance dipped along with the Terps’ record from an average of 14,046 in Willard’s first season to 13,283 this year.
Maryland began the Big Ten Tournament with an energetic win over shooting-deficient Rutgers, but Wisconsin trampled any fantasies of an improbable run with its barrage of 3-pointers Thursday.
With nothing to look forward to as the rest of the college basketball world celebrates its signature month, Maryland can only look ahead to a promising but hazy 2024-2025 season. Queen, the Terps’ top recruit since Diamond Stone in 2015, will man the middle, but will Reese, who averaged 13.9 points and 9.7 rebounds, join him or look elsewhere in the transfer portal? Will Harris-Smith and Kaiser stick around and make significant strides? Can Willard find experienced guards in the portal to feed Queen the ball and create space for the freshman by sinking perimeter shots?
These questions will dominate the months ahead as Maryland licks its wounds.
“We’ll retool the roster, and we’ll be back,” Willard promised after the Wisconsin loss.
ESPN recruiting analyst Jeff Borzello does not see an unhealthy program given that Willard retained key players after last season and signed an elite prospect in Queen, who left Baltimore to finish his high school career at Monteverde Academy in Florida.
“Getting him to come back, I think that was a sign they still have a lot of cachet, especially locally,” Borzello said. “And when you look at the last class — freshmen, they don’t make the impact that they used to. I don’t see those two [Harris-Smith and Kaiser] not having All-Big-Ten caliber seasons as unusual. The key is going to be can they retain them and develop them so they take the next step next season? That’s going to be a thing recruits look at. Can I go there and succeed? Can I win, and will I get better?”
He expects Willard to be creative in finding a shooter and ball distributor from the transfer portal to help Queen make an immediate impact with his “college-ready” 6-foot-10 frame.
“I just think next year’s kind of a key season,” Borzello said. “For the program, for Willard, for their recruiting reputation going forward. If Queen goes there and struggles, if Harris-Smith and Kaiser don’t take the next step, then questions are raised. But I think I’d be pretty content right now with where they’ll be next year.”