Maryland men's basketball looking to silence road critics - again

Ahmed Ghafir
Jan 22
4 min read

After getting back to .500 in conference play with a narrow win vs. Minnesota, Maryland men’s basketball will now look to do what it has struggled to do under Kevin Willard: win on the road.

Maryland is 6-21 in true road games under Kevin Willard – third-worst record in the Big Ten ahead of only Minnesota and Ohio State, who ironically is one day removed from a road win against 11th-ranked Purdue. Against top-200 teams in KenPom’s rankings, Maryland is just 4-21 on the road over the last three seasons. In fact, Big Ten teams hold just a 35.4% win percentage against ranked opponents over the last three seasons as Maryland looks to move to 7-11 on Thursday night.

Six of the seven wins against ranked opponents came in College Park, though. The lone exception? Jan. 14, 2024, when Maryland stormed out of Champaign with a 76-67 win in what proved to be the most confusing game of the season. Fast forward one year and nearly two weeks later, Maryland will look to replicate that success after entering Thursday’s showdown standing at 1-4 against Quad One teams and 0-3 against ranked opponents this season.

As head coach Kevin Willard and his staff look to reverse trend on their road struggles, what’s been the biggest difference? Ja’Kobi Gillespie’s scoring.

Player scoring breakdown vs. KenPom top-150 opponents, home vs. away

Despite leading the team in the category in Big Ten play with 17 points per game, the Belmont transfer’s home vs. away split reveals a stark difference, averaging over 22 points against top-150 KenPom teams at home vs. 13 points on the road. In conference play, Gillespie’s averaging nearly eight points fewer on the road compared to at home.

After posting consecutive double-doubles in his first two conference games, freshman phenom Derik Queen is battling through his first rough stretch in his college career after coming off a season-low three points in 26 minutes against Nebraska, the fourth time in the last six games the heralded freshman has been held to single digits with Maryland 2-2 in those games.

And after his hot shooting stretch the week of Dec. 15 where he scored 48 combined points against Saint Francis and Syracuse while shooting 75% from the field, portal guard Selton Miguel has shot above 40% from the field in just two games.

The anchor for Maryland through January has been its most veteran player in the program: Julian Reese, averaging nearly 12 points and eight rebounds per game in Big Ten play. His 3.1 offensive rebounds per game also rank second in the Big Ten behind Oumar Ballo, the Indiana big man who will square off with Reese on Sunday, while his 8.7 rebounds per game rank fourth in the conference.

Once a top-ten lineup nationally in EvanMiya’s rankings, Maryland’s tweaked starting five has dropped to 37th nationally in observed efficiency margin – and comfortably remains the most efficient lineup so far this season. But Maryland’s depth has proven to be thinner than hoped with every top-150 KenPom opponent’s bench outscoring the Terps’ so far this season while the starters account for over 87% of the team’s scoring in conference play. Just two players average over ten minutes per game in conference play aside from the starters in Jay Young and DeShawn Harris-Smith while Tafara Gapare has proved to be a spark in the frontcourt, averaging 4.5 points on nearly 50% shooting from the field. The Georgia Tech transfer filled in through non-conference play while Jordan Geronimo recovered from a hamstring injury, who has since come back and posted double figures vs. Washington before looming large on the defensive end with a pair of blocks vs. Nebraska.

Still, Maryland will need more as they look to regain momentum heading into a pivotal stretch of the season with a lackluster NCAA Tournament resume. Thursday night marks the first of two games against ranked opponents this month with Sunday’s noon contest at Indiana sandwiched in between, and with Maryland trending down in bracketology predictions through the month, Willard will look to quiet the road critics once again.

“I think for us, you know, we've had leads late in the second half – we're up five against Purdue at Purdue, we had a lead at Washington, we had a lead at Oregon late in the game – is we've had some bad offensive possessions in all those games,” Willard said on Tuesday. “We need to have better offensive sequences because our defense has been good enough to win games. But we've done some things offensively that really hurt us on the road that we can get away with at home because of our crowds and playing at home. But on the road, we just got to execute a little bit better offensively towards the end of the games.”

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