Feature photo by Greg Fiume and courtesy of UMTerps
It was 6:30 a.m., hours before the No. 3 Maryland Terrapins’ game against Ohio State, when forward Robert Carter Jr. entered the Xfinity Center.
The Terps’ gameday walk through practice wouldn’t start until an hour and a half later, but the redshirt junior was ready to go.
“I love this game, a lot,” Carter Jr. said. “It’s really my joy to just play at this level. I enjoy every moment of it, anytime I get in the gym and get extra shots up, I love to do that, it’s fun for me.”
When head coach Mark Turgeon arrived at the team’s morning walk through, he noticed that Carter Jr. was the only one to break a sweat. Whether it had anything to do with his extra preparation in the morning or not, Carter Jr. had success on the court against the Buckeyes.
Carter Jr. set a new career high with 25 points and converted all four of his three points attempts as the Terps steam-rolled Ohio State 100-65 in front of a sellout crowd Saturday afternoon.
“Robert is a mismatch problem,” guard Rasheed Sulaimon said. “Not many [power forwards] in the country can guard on the interior end and guard on the perimeter, he has the talent to be very efficient at both levels.”
The Terps seemed to have found their stroke against Ohio State. They shot 62 percent from the field and 52 percent from three.
And early on, it was all Carter Jr. He scored the team’s first eight points and ten of the first 13 points. At halftime, the transfer from Georgia Tech had 15 points.
While Carter Jr. paced the Terps offensively, many contributed to the team’s win.
Sulaimon posted a season high 22 points on 9/10 shooting from the field and dished out five assists. Despite not scoring until early in the second half, point guard Melo Trimble finished with eight points and nine assists.
Over a five minute and ten second long span late in the first half, Sulaimon scored or assisted on 16 consecutive points. The Buckeyes scored only seven points during the run.
After forward Jake Layman forced a steal late in the first half, Sulaimon rushed down the court and finger rolled the ball into the hoop as the clock expired, giving the Terps a 48-30 lead at halftime.
The Terps’ 48 point mark at the break was their highest of the season. In the first half, the Terps shot 63 percent from the field and made seven of ten threes.
Maryland started the second half on an 11-3 run. During that span, Carter Jr. scored five points and assisted Trimble’s first basket of the game.
During the game, Maryland led by as many as 44 points. With 37 seconds left on the clock, guard Jaylen Brantley hit a couple of free throws to help the home team reach the century mark.
It was the first time the Terps scored 100 points since 2012, when they reached that total against UMES. It was the first time they reached triple digits in a conference game since 2010.
Saturday’s victory came three days after the Terps suffered their second loss of the season at Michigan.
Maryland followed the defeat with their second biggest victory of the season. The Terps’ largest margin of victory this year came against Saint Francis, one game after their first loss of the season at North Carolina.
While some fans may have been surprised by the margin of defeat the Terps posted, Turgeon wasn’t taken aback. He pointed to the practices leading up to the weekend as signs of good things to come.
Turgeon called Thursday’s practice, the best “of the year,” but said that Friday’s brought up a sense of familiarity.
“Yesterday was the first day in a long time at practice that we looked like us,” Turgeon said. “…We shared the ball like we hadn’t in a couple weeks.”
On Saturday, with the Buckeyes in town, the Terps posted a season high of 23 assists. Seven different players dropped dimes, while ten different players scored and four posted double-figure point totals.
But it was Carter Jr. who started things off and recorded a career best 25 points.
The Terps have maintained throughout the season that any night, could be any player’s night. And if that rings true, today was Carter Jr.’s afternoon.
“Rob was on today,” Sulaimon said. “When we run our offense and execute like we did [today], it can be any one of us to get hot, and [today] it was Robert.”
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