Turtledroppings.com – Maryland Football And Basketball Blog

Another second half comeback for Maryland fell short for the Terps at the Pallestra against Temple today.  It was an extremely sloppy game for Maryland and more importantly Alex Len left the game early in the first half with an ankle injury and did not return for the second half.

Terrell Stoglin was able to cut the lead to four, before Temple did what most teams do against Maryland.  You guessed it, got hot from three.  Temple connected on three threes to extend the lead back into double digits and all but finished off the game.

The problem of the game for the Terps was turnovers.  It was an extremely sloppy game that saw Maryland commit 16 turnovers.  Some of the killers where from James Padgett down low including one where he attempted to throw a no look over his head pass in the lane and one where he tried to throw it across the lane.  He had 4 on the game, Pe’Shon Howard had only had 2, but he also only had one assist.  In fact the team had only 8 (Faust led the way with 4).

If you want to put a recipe of success together for Maryland I think you would say defend the three, make free throws, and not turn the ball over.  Well we already discussed the turnover issues.  Temple hit 9 three’s (40%) and Maryland hit only 12 of 21 free throws.  If you put those stats in front of me before the game, I think I would have called it a loss, and sure enough that was what we got today.

Up next is a visit from Duke on Wednesday at 9:00.  You have to think that Alex Len’s ankle is going to have to heal very quickly if the Terps are going to have any chance of hanging with the Plumlee brothers at Comcast Center.

Overall, I think you have to like the way the team fights to get back into these games, but if they can cut down on mistakes they might not get themselves into such a desperation mode.  If they have that many turnovers Wednesday, Duke will light up the scoreboard.  However, it is Duke, and for the first and possibly only time this season Comcast should be packed.  Let’s hope people remember how fun it is to go to a game and decide to comeback for some other games this season.  That goes for you students as well!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 21st, 2012 at 1:09 pm 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.