Terps Sports

i'm not sure why people feel the need to compare gary and turgeon these days. it makes no fucking difference if gary had better or worse teams and had more/less success with them. who gives a shit?

my problem is that we haven't gotten any better, many of the freshman have taken steps BACKWARDS, our substitution patterns are mindless, we turn the ball over 50 times a game, and we look completely lost on offense more than half the time. how about instead of responding to the turnover questions with "that's who we are!" we address that problem and try to fix it? i see no progress so far and that's a huge problem. i'd have no problem with a NIT appearance this season if we showed that we improved throughout the season. it's pretty frustrating.

This is exactly why the "we're young" excuse is BS. Look at the freshmen over the course of the season:

Allen: Strong against nonconference minnows, completely overmatched against conference foes. This is a huge concern.
Layman: Improved as season has gone on, though seems to be struggling once again the last couple weeks
Mitchell: Bout the same as nonconference
Shaq: Bout the same as nonconference

I'm not going to discuss Len because he's gone, but Wells still turns it over 5 times a game. Yes, maybe the freshmen will take big strides between their freshman and soph years. Maybe Wells improves with a full offseason in the program. MAYBE. These aren't sure things. And you'd be hard pressed to say Faust and Padgett have greatly improved from one year to the next under Turgeon. We're banking on an awful lot on "maybe's" right now and that can't make anyone feel too comfortable.

Man, remember that guy Landon Milbourne who rode the bench his entire freshman season at Maryland and never got any better? Gary really blew it with him! That Milbourne guy never became a good player his junior and senior years. If only he had shown more improvement as a freshman! What was Gary doing??

And what about that guy Christian Watford at, I forgot what school, maybe Indiana. He was really inconsistent his freshmen season and shot like 25% from the field down the final stretch of games. I wonder what happened to him. No way he's an impact player on a title contender now, shooting almost 50% from 3. He's probably playing in Romania or something.

I'm not trashing or blaming anyone right now. We have a lot of raw talent and a bright future IMO. No one should be trashing our players or our coach at this point.

I think that young players improve with time in the system and overall maturity/working on their games more often than not. I see your maybes as probablys which is a large part of why I think we'll be improved next year. We knew or should have known that the rebuilding process would hinge on our young guys developing since Turge wasn't left with a bunch of skilled upper classmen. So I'm not sure what else could be expected for our future other than hoping that the young guys do develop into good players.

Funny you bring up Cal.

Here are his comments after losing to UGA last night:

"I am so disappointed in the job I've done with this team," Calipari said. "I've never had a team not cohesive this time of year. ... Every one of them had a will to win. Every one of them had a fight. Well, if this team doesn't have that, that's on me. What the heck did I do?"

Turge Comments after UNC:

“We really didn’t have a low-post game. They doubled the post. We got good looks; we have to knock them down. The first play of the game we made a bad decision. We had Logan [Aronhalt] open for three and Dez [Wells] turned the ball over trying to do something. Probably a few too many threes. We were right on the break, and Nick [Faust] instead of going in for a layup pulled up for three, which makes no sense to me. I have to keep coaching them the best I can. Carolina had to be good and they were really good, especially Bullock.”

The ''they're only freshmen" point...by now, they're essentially sophomores. Hasn't seemed to be much improvement over the season, no consistent outside shooting, no PG, massive TOs. Some of these are on the coach, while the in-game decisions (substitiutions, etc.) are certainly on him. Maybe the expectations were too high, but some of this is on the HC. Some guys improve over time (Landon, Rodney, Dino) some really don't i.e. James, PeShon. Future is still very much up in the air. I'm hopeful, in part since we have so many young guys, some of them have to improve.

Well, a good number of them are also young players. Young players often blow hot or cold from game-to-game. But, it is hard to just have faith that they will improve in the offseason. It doesn't always work out that way.

I despise cal for all the obvious reasons but you have to respect coaches who take the hits for their players, even if the players dont deserve it. Those defending Turge from criticism need to note that he is ready, willing and able to blame others publicly first so turnabout is absolutely fair play, as long as it is reasonable.

agree, the Landon, Rodney, Dino guys are a different animal and couldn't even break into the rotation to improve in game during their early years. Our guys are getting minutes and we should see some marked improvement...you would not expect to see a freshman Landon come off the bench in march to contribute because he's not playing 10-25 minutes a game!

again, the new age of basketball is to get the best players, over recruit positions and then get them good by the end of the year. That is the measuring stick now. If Turge had a roster full of Landons, dinos and Rodneys we would not be having this discussion.

One weakness of this team is a lack of confidence. I think it's an important part of coaching but rarely discussed. Coaches need to understand what motivates a player and conversely what breaks him down. Len, Faust, Allen, Howard and maybe Layman all underperform because of lack of confidence, imho. This concerns me about Turge. And yes, it is a big part of his job as coach.

"We talked about it, but we've got a couple of guys that are basically not real coachable. You tell them over and over and over what you want them to do, what we have to do, and they do their own thing. That's where we are. When they realize if we don't do this all together we're going to have many more of these, then (it will) change.”

“They deserved to beat us by 50 today,” Kentucky coach John Calipari said. “They played harder. They played rougher. They
executed better. They were stronger with the ball. We just had passive guys who did not want to make plays. (We were) tentative.”

Calipari "taking the blame" post 30 point loss to Tennessee

And here's Turge post Duke taking some blame for prior struggles:

"It has been a hard week. I take a lot of pride in my coaching. I don't do a lot of things well, but I like to think that I can coach a little bit, and I haven't done a very good job. It has been a hard week on my family, hard on my son last week. He had to leave the stands because the fans were so hard on his dad. This win was for my family and the fans. I know what this win means for our fan base and I really wanted to beat Duke. This means a lot to me. Over the summer I said if we beat Duke I am going to be in the stands with our fans."