MINNEAPOLIS — It’s 8:52 a.m., and Maryland’s men’s basketball coach is on stage at an arena in Minnesota, at a Big Ten conference media day. This might be a little weird pretty much always, at least for people who are more than a decade old. To those who think 60 years spent in another, more intensely geographical league meant a lot. But here’s Kevin Willard on Tuesday, credulously arguing that his second Maryland team actually looks like a Big Ten team instead of just fighting to seem that way, and a thought dawns.
It’s not weird, because everything is weird now. Which means nothing is weird anymore. Which means the last 17 months suggest Maryland is precisely where it wants to be, in about every way, if it has ambitions of being extremely good at basketball. “It’s probably the greatest move for Maryland athletics that ever happened,” Willard said, having moved from the big stage to a solo mini-podium, his first trade-down in a while.
The chaos of college athletics has buried tradition as the driving precept for any decision. All that matters is how big you can get and how good you can be. Maryland, then, wound up in the ideal spot to chase down the highest levels of good.
Its coach did things in his first season — 20-plus wins, a national ranking, an NCAA Tournament win — that none of the school’s previous coaches did in their first seasons. Willard subsequently upgraded the size of the roster for 2023-24 and signed the best freshman class he says he’s ever coached. Now he says he can’t run practices for more than 90 minutes because they’re too competitive and he’s worried he’ll grind his team into dust particles by March if he doesn’t exercise self-control. “You’ve got a lot of guys chirping at each other, just talking a lot of smack,” junior forward Julian Reese said. “Sometimes you have to tone it down a little bit because we get away from the task at hand. I feel like that’s great for a team. Teams need that grit, especially in a conference like this.”
A first-world problem, yes, but only if you in fact inhabit the first world.
Decisions made a long time before Williard arrived wound up putting the place ahead of a curve no one saw coming, as it turns out. The expanded Big Ten will have outrageous sums of media rights money to spend while the somewhat more hidebound ACC added schools from Texas and the Bay Area to try to play catch-up. Meanwhile, in a year and a half, the new basketball coach in College Park created a level of promise that meets the opportunity. The Terrapins were a No. 8 seed last March but finished 23rd in KenPom’s final ratings, suggesting more than met the eye.
The fellas on the set 😍@KevinWillard, @Flyymir_ and @Reese10Julian on @BigTenNetwork pic.twitter.com/mHTO29J5jn
— Maryland Men’s Basketball (@TerrapinHoops) October 10, 2023
They might not be a national championship favorite in 2023-24. They’re not even the Big Ten favorite. But the trend lines are what you want when you’re 20 years removed from the Final Four and expect to be there more often than that — and particularly when you’re in a league that will be extremely difficult but more critically set its members up with an enviable financial and competitive head start.
“I personally don’t think it has anything to do with the money,” Willard said Tuesday. “I think it has everything to do with who you associate with. We added four great West Coast teams. You have a conference that goes coast to coast. You hit every major media market. For your kids to be able to say, hey, I’m going to play in the New York City market, the Washington, D.C. market, and oh, by the way, hit Chicago, and then I’m going to go to L.A.? No other conference can offer that. Whether you’re a tennis player, a football player or a basketball player, it’s worked out great for the University of Maryland.”
Maybe he hasn’t been around long enough to know where the third rail is. Again: It doesn’t matter. Weird doesn’t exist anymore. Willard’s only concern is not wasting the advantages.
Hence the intrigue with 2023-24, and how it can set the table for the years to come.
Willard got more or less what he wanted in terms of mindset from his first squad; it’s not every year that a demanding first-year coach can create enough buy-in to finish 32nd nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency. But the late fade against Indiana in the Big Ten tournament and the loss to Alabama in the NCAA Tournament exposed, for Willard, the perils of insufficient measurables. “We just didn’t have the athleticism and the size to compete at that level. You have to have the physicality to withstand playing every other day.” As he notes, fifth-year cogs like Don Carey and Patrick Emilien were valuable … and also weighed less than 190 pounds, while also probably hitting their ceilings as players.
The offseason infusion of what Maryland was missing – 6-foot-3 guard Chance Stephens, 6-6 wing Jordan Geronimo and 6-11 Mady Traore out of the transfer portal, plus 6-4 top 30 recruit DeShawn Harris-Smith — instantly flips the dynamic and creates auspicious possibilities. Geronimo, in particular, may not appear to be an impact arrival after averaging just 3.8 points in three years at Indiana. But his presence and overall physicality allows Willard to think about shifting 6-7 Donta Scott to small forward and have Geronimo alongside the 6-9 Reese in the frontcourt. “That’s a monster lineup,” Willard said. “We did it when we played (on an overseas trip) in Italy, and I felt bad for the other team. Like, it got ugly.”
It permits Maryland’s staff, schematically, to exploit matchups it couldn’t a year ago. Willard says he’s added more wing ball screens and wing post-ups to the offensive arsenal, drawing on inspiration from Villanova during the Josh Hart and Ryan Arcidiacono years. It’s a fairly auspicious blueprint if you’re a Maryland fan. Scott, for one, could be a prime example of the benefits of flexibility; the Terrapins’ third-leading scorer a year ago (11.3 points per game) averaged .902 points per possession on post-ups, which accounted for a fifth of his usage. But how much more efficient can Scott be if he’s working against small forwards instead of power forwards, which was the case for most of 2022-23? “If you’re 6-1 trying to go one-on-one against a 6-6 guy, you’re probably gonna lose,” Willard said. “By going out and getting a little bit better athletes and a little bit better size, it gives us the opportunity to do different things.”
We’ll see if the theory manifests as results. But the intentions appear to be good. “Sometimes we’ll be focusing on a certain thing we’re trying to work on, whether that’s pressing or something else, but we get so competitive about winning the game that (Willard) has to stop us,” said Jahmir Young, at 6-1 now a relative runt on the roster while also being a unanimous preseason All-Big Ten selection.
It took three days of workouts for the Italy trip before Willard realized he had to take a machete to the last half-hour or so of practice plans. “I’m like, we won’t make it til January if I keep going at this level,” he said. Asked on Tuesday to identify the most difficult part of Maryland workouts, Reese very sincerely cited the walk-through periods. The portions when, basically, the Terrapins aren’t doing much of anything.
Because, he reasoned, it’s tough for this group to transition from beating on each other to, well, not beating on each other.
“When we slow it down, mentally our guys have to just stay there,” the junior forward said. “That’s the hardest part.”
Another one of those first-world problems. Exactly what Maryland wants. Exactly where Maryland wants to be.
(Photo of Kevin Willard: Matt Krohn / USA Today)
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Publish date : 2023-10-10 03:00:00
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