Turtledroppings.com – Maryland Football And Basketball Blog

I am a strong believer in giving people what they want.  Based on who our audience is for this blog, I am going to skip any mention of the Duke debacle.  Sure we can talk about it, and had this been a normal week, we probably should revisit the game to go over what exactly went wrong (though if you go back to Chris’s preview, I am amazed at how spot on he was with some of this stuff, well done old boy).  But this is not a normal week.  In fact from the Saturday Duke game to the Saturday Georgia Tech game, we will play 1/4 of our ACC season.

Just to peak ahead at this stretch, we all know tonight we have our make up game with UVA in Comcast.  Then on Wednesday the team will travel down to Raleigh to face NC State before once again coming back to Comcast to face the Yellow Jackets.  If I wanted to be optimistic, I’d say we can win all 3 of those, but then again this is ACC Basketball 2010, and you don’t know which version of which team you are going to see night in and night out (Explain to me again how Clemson couldn’t beat Boston College but had little trouble with us???).

But as the old saying goes, you have to walk before you can run, and today is our first step of this hell week.  Tonight at 8:00 UVA comes to town.  Luckily for us, it is a UVA team that is just as tired and has just as an important stretch of schedule coming up as we do.  So the playing floor will be level in that regard.  UVA has been both a victim and benefactor of steaks this year.  They started out the year looking like the ACC doormat with the lowet point possibly being the loss to PSU in the ACC-Big 10 Challenge. 

However, when conference play began, they turned it on.  They jumped out to a 3-0 start beating NC State, Georgia Tech, and Miami, they then dropped two to both Wake Forest and Virginia Tech.  At that point I started to write them off.  However, the Hoo’s had different plans bouncing back to beat UNC and NC State.  However that streak was then snuffed out by another loss to Wake, and most recently a loss to VT.  Now the Wahoo’s are 5-4.

UVA is led in scoring by Sylven Landesberg who is averaging 18 points a game.  He is also 2nd on the team in rebounds and first in Assists.  He is also shooting 34% from behind the arc.  Joining him is Mike Scott (not to be confused with the boss from the Office or the Houston Astro’s pitcher from the 80′s).  Scott is averaging 13.4 points per game and leads UVA in rebounding with 7.7 per game.  Sammy Zeglinski also likes to dish and is only 1 assist behind Landesburg for the lead.  Zeglinski however is most dangerous when it comes to steals.  He has 29. 

Now on to our biggest fear.  UVA is led behind the arc by Zeglinski who has made 48 with a 42.5%.  Jeff Jones (not the former coach) can drain them at 41.7%, but he shots a lot less than Zeglinski.  Overall UVA has 3 guys that are shooting over 40% from three point land (Mike Scott being the 3rd).  So this could be, and always will be, a concern for me.

Overall, I think we are facing UVA at the right time, they seem to be falling back to earth, while we are….well I don’t know what we are doing, and I guess that is what makes tonight’s match up all the more important.  Hopefully this team can bounce back because the week of Feb 14-21st is no time to sulk.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 15th, 2010 at 9:28 am and is filed under Maryland Terps Basketball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.