Reese picks up slack in 1st-round win
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Perhaps not surprisingly, graduate student point guard Jahmir Young has led Maryland in scoring in a team-high 15 of 34 games.
No. 2 on that list? Sophomore power forward Julian Reese.
The Baltimore native and St. Frances graduate collected his eighth game in that department when he finished with 17 points (including 13 in the second half ) to power the No. 8 seed Terps to a 67-65 win against No. 9 seed West Virginia in an NCAA Tournament first-round game Thursday afternoon at Legacy Arena.
The 6-foot-9, 230-pound Reese also grabbed nine rebounds to lead Maryland (22-12) in that category for the 15th time and chipped in three assists and three blocks. It was an across-the-board showing that didn’t stun first-year coach Kevin Willard.
“I think anyone that’s watched us over the last month-and-a-half, two months understands how good Julian Reese is,” he said. “He’s had to play [Michigan’s 7-1 center] Hunter [Dickinson] twice, [Purdue’s 7-4 center] Zach [Edey] twice, [Wisconsin’s 7-foot power forward Steven] Crowl twice, [Nebraska’s 6-9 power forward] Derrick Walker. The bigs in our league are brutal.
“The Big Ten just prepares you for big teams. This was a big team. I just thought JuJu, he had been through the battles. I just have so much confidence in him.”
Here are three takeaways from Thursday’s outcome.
Maryland needs Jahmir Young to regain his shooting stroke — and fast.
Young’s struggles at the Big Ten Tournament continued.
After scoring a combined 27 points on 6-of-28 shooting and turning the ball over four times against five assists in games against Minnesota and Indiana last week, Young finished with 10 points on 1-of-5 shooting, three rebounds and three assists against the Mountaineers (19-15). He also committed six turnovers and drew four fouls.
After the game, Young noted how physical West Virginia’s defense was.
“They were doubling me off of ball screens and hedging hard and being aggressive,” he said. “There’s a lot of emotions going into the game, but I was able to slow down. And I’m good at handling adversity.
So just being able to get to the bench for a little bit and see it from a different perspective helped me out a lot.”
Willard said practicing against a scout
team trying to replicate Mountaineers coach Bob Huggins’ defense and press is quite different from the real thing.
“We have total confidence in him,” Willard said. “And I think once he kind of saw it and everybody saw it, it was like a boxing match. He got hit a couple times, and I think it just relaxed him.
“He was able to see it. And I thought he was pretty good the rest of the game.”
Can the Terps afford another subpar showing from Young against overall No. 1 seed Alabama on Saturday? Probably not against a Crimson Tide offense that entered the NCAA Tournament ranked sixth in the country in scoring at 82.2 points per game.
But the play of Reese, senior shooting guard Hakim Hart (14 points, four assists, three rebounds and two steals) and senior small forward Donta Scott (11 points, eight rebounds and two steals) are reminders that Maryland is more than just a one-man show.
“We’re great and talented across the board,” Young said. “I know my teammates are going to pick me up when I’m not doing well and having a tough time.”
West Virginia’s Kedrian Johnson was a wake-up call for Maryland.
Mountaineers fifth-year senior point guard Johnson made the Terps pay for overlooking him.
With the defense concentrating on fifthyear senior shooting guard Erik Stevenson, Johnson dropped a game-high 27 points on 8-of-13 shooting, including 4 of 8 from 3-point range. He scored 10 unanswered points on a pair of layups-and-ones and a 3-pointer-and-one in a 1-minute, 24-second span and then followed sophomore shooting guard Seth Wilson’s 3 with one of his own for 13 of West Virginia’s 16 points that gave the team a 47-38 advantage with 15:05 left in the second half.
On the flipside, Johnson scored only four points for the remainder of the game, but he still earned a measure of respect from Willard.
“That’s a bad man right there,” he said. “He’s a tough matchup.
“I’m a big fan of his. We went zone. We tried to take away the iso.”
As well as Johnson played, he’s not at the level that Alabama’s 6-9, 200-pound small forward Brandon Miller is. Miller became only the fourth freshman in the last 50 years to lead the Southeastern Conference in scoring, is the only player this season with 665 points, 280 rebounds and 100 3-pointers and is projected to be a top-five pick in June’s NBA draft.
Alabama looms as Maryland’s most difficult challenge of the season.
Matching up against higher-ranked opponents won’t faze the Terps. This season they have already defeated then-No. 3 Purdue (68-54 on Feb. 16), then-No. 16 Illinois (71-66 on Dec. 2), then-No. 21 Indiana (66-55 on Jan. 31), then-No. 21 Northwestern (75-59 on Feb. 26) and then-No. 24 Ohio State (80-73 on Jan. 8).
But none of those teams is as potent offensively and as dynamic athletically as the Crimson Tide (30-5), the SEC regular-season and tournament champions who earned the overall No. 1 seed from the NCAA selection committee. They have defeated seven ranked opponents, including a pair of former No. 1s in North Carolina (103-101 in four overtimes Nov. 27) and Houston (71-65 on Dec. 10).
Alabama has already set a school record for the most wins in a single season and thrashed No. 16 seed Texas A&M-Corpus Christi 96-75, even with Miller failing to score a point for the first time in his college career because of a groin injury that coach Nate Oats said he has been dealing with since the win in the SEC Tournament final Sunday.
The likelihood of Miller — whose name was included in court testimony surrounding the capital murder case of former teammate Darius Miles and another man, who are charged in the shooting death of 23-yearold Jamea Harris on Jan. 15 — repeating that outing seems unlikely. But Willard and Maryland have demonstrated an ability to limit an opponent’s top offensive weapon.
Still, can the Terps turn upside down thousands of brackets that already have the Crimson Tide playing for the national championship April 3 and escape from what is sure to be a heavily partisan crowd with the program’s most significant win in recent memory? Only time will tell.