ST. THOMAS, Virgin Islands — In their first-round game of the Paradise Jam against winless Marist on Friday, the Terrapins men’s basketball got off to another slow start. Seventeen minutes into the contest, the score was tied at 18, several key players were in foul trouble and the Terps couldn’t find ways to score.
The final 23 minutes of the game, though, yielded much better results for the Terps. They jumped out to a big lead in the second half and cruised to a 68-43 win at the University of the Virgin Islands on the strength of forward Jake Layman’s 16 points.
The reason the Terps were able to outlast the Red Foxes after a shaky opening couple of minutes? According to coach Mark Turgeon, it was Terps newfound commitment.
On Sunday, the Terps turned in a weaker defensive effort against in an 90-83 loss to Oregon State — the Beavers shot 59.6 percent from the field. But Friday, the Terps held the Red Foxes to 26 percent shooting.
“Defensively, we were pretty locked in almost every possession,” Turgeon said. “We were pretty good around the rim, which we haven’t been and I know they are not a great scoring team but we held them under their average and we really guarded.”
Turgeon also credited the play of his bench with their surge in the second half. He turned to former walk-on guard Varun Ram several times to spell Dez Wells and freshman point guard Roddy Peters, who had just been plugged into the starting lineup.
Ram responded with a defensive aggressiveness that helped force several turnovers, some of which led to fastbreaks.
“One thing we’ve really worked on is defense,” Ram said. “A lot of times, like today, it leads to offense.”
Despite Ram’s presence and the Terps defensive improvements, they couldn’t pull away from the Red Foxes early. Offense was the issue this time, though, as the team shot 35 percent from the field in the first half and struggled to break through against Marist’s zone.
The Terps’ early offensive struggles didn’t surprise Turgeon too much, however. On the heels of surrendering 90 points to the Beavers, the third-year coach stressed defense so much this week, that he didn’t give his team much time to practice their offense.
It showed as the Terps couldn’t pull away from Marist but remained in the game because the Red Foxes couldn’t patch together a run. Eventually, the Terps ended the first half on a 8-2 spurt sparked by five points from forward Jake Layman, and then Wells — last season’s leading scorer — sparked a 10-0 run to begin the second half and the Terps lead ballooned to 16.
“I had a feeling we were going to struggle offensively tonight, and we did,” Turgeon said. “Second half we actually executed a little better, passed the ball a little bit better.”
Wells and Peters bounced back from shooting a combined 0-of-7 in the first half to each find success in the final minutes.
And for the first time this season, the Terps got solid performances from both their big men, Shaquille Cleare and Charles Mitchell. The duo combined to shoot 10-of-11 from the field for 20 points and grabbed 13 rebounds.
It was especially relieving for Cleare, who has started each game this season, but struggled to produce. After the game, Layman and Ram mentioned that Cleare’s improved play helps open things up on the perimeter for the offense and set a tone for the defense.
“That’s why I continue to work hard, because the team is going to need me,” Cleare said. “I can’t hang my head.”
So the Terps saw contributions from across the board Friday, but the constant was their improvements on defense.
Five days after allowing 52-second half points to Oregon State, the Terps held Marist to 23 points in the final 20 minutes Friday. Because of that suffocating effort it’d be easy to forget that the Terps started so slow.
When the Terps play Northern Iowa in a semifinal of the Paradise Jam on Sunday, they’ll look to finally start a game off with a positive spurt. But even if they don’t, they have a formula to combat some early sluggishness.
“If we continue to guard like that,” Turgeon said, “we can overcome bad offensive nights.”
