Maryland Postmortem 2002-2003

Or, "Hey! We All Suck!"

It's easy to root for a team that makes everything look easy. This is why there are so many Yankee fans. But it's somewhat harder to empathize with such a team. After all, most of us spend most of our time failing, and I don't personally know anyone who's the best in the world at what he or she does. We do our best; occasionally, we have a success we can call our own and take pride in, and most of the time we have to take our pride in having made an attempt and held nothing back, if we can even do that.

I felt a lot more empathy for this past year's University of Maryland men's basketball team than I did last year's, because they palpably struggled to get their own talent in line and play the basketball they were manifestly capable of playing. It was right and salutary, of course, that the year of my graduation, 2002, should be commemorated with Maryland's first-ever national championship. The 2002 National Champion Maryland Terrapins never made it look easy, exactly, especially with the memories of 2000-2001's numerous Duke-enabled collapses fresh in one's memory, but they certainly had a championship swagger that never left them, epitomized by the clutch play of Juan Dixon "Your Mouth" and Silver Spring's own Lonny Baxter. But this year, even if we had just as much experience as the championship team had, we had less talent; less was expected of us.

What was strange was how much better than expectations Maryland looked at its best, and how even with all the senior experience we looked immensely flustered and almost completely incapable at our worst. Drew Nicholas, even with his sweet stroke and the ice water in his veins, could not duplicate Dixon's heroics because he couldn't free himself up for his shot on the perimeter with the same flair; nevertheless, he had a good season. The other three main holdovers from the championship team, however, were maddeningly inconsistent. Center Ryan Randle could dominate shorter men but sometimes looked lost in the trees against teams with real frontcourts; power forward Tahj Holden continued to intermittently show a mix of skills (three-point shooting, turnaround jumpers in the post, a nice little drop step) that was almost identical to the mix that looked promising when he was a sophomore in 2000-2001.

Controlling this team, of course, was point guard Steve Blake, and it was his play that defined this season. Blake knew that Maryland wouldn't win if he simply reprised his role from last year, when he lived to make wickedly creative passes to the team's offensive stars, putting them in easy position to score and letting them bask in the cheers and chants. Now that those stars were gone, he would have to look more for his own shot, to pick up some of the offensive slack. But in addition, he no longer had Dixon, Baxter and now-L.A. Clipper Chris Wilcox making the moves once he got them the ball in position; the positions would have to be even better, the passes more creative and, thus, more risky.

Blake was definitely my favorite player this year to watch during the slack moments in the games. His eyes are set back in his head like a hawk's, and they scan the court with a similar predatory intensity. Yet he's conscientious to a fault about not telegraphing his passes with his eyes, to the point that his teammates are sometimes as thoroughly faked as his defenders. His facial expression never changes, whether he's just threaded the needle to a teammate cutting in the lane for an easy deuce or had his breakaway layup blocked by the rim, as he did in last night's season-ending loss against Michigan State. It's a piercing expression, the look of someone who knows exactly what he has to do, knows it won't be easy, and is prepared to do whatever it takes.

It's also an expression that invites spectators to project onto him, and I realize that is exactly what I'm doing in the next few paragraphs, but it seemed to me that, for this entire last season, Steve Blake was trying to make basketball feel consistently natural to him again. He had become exceedingly good at playing the way he had played before this year; Maryland indisputably could not have won the championship last year without him. But for his senior year he had to learn new skills, and even though he had the talent to do what he had to do, his execution of these new duties didn't always flow with that sweet unconscious ease that had distinguished his play in previous years.

Sometimes this year Blake made passes so creative that he was the only person on the court who saw how they could work; Randle and Holden don't have Baxter's soft hands, and more often than not the passes led to disheartening turnovers. Sometimes he made passes that had no chance of working at all, that were based on angles that didn't exist, but he thought if he threw it hard and sharp enough that it would lead to an easy score. Sometimes he felt the team losing its grip on the game and hoisted a three out of rhythm, because he sensed the Terps needed something and he knew a three was that, if he could make it.

And Blake represented the team as a whole: Sometimes the Terps came out and played absolutely brilliant basketball, with hounding, claustrophobic defense that led to easy transition baskets, scintillating passing around the perimeter and into the post, and shots that both went up and went down easily. And sometimes they would commit truly ulcer-inducing careless turnovers, or pass placidly round and round, in and out, until Blake or Nicholas had to take a deep three with the shot clock dwindling, or play defense almost entirely by fouling and then by being afraid to foul, which is to say playing no defense at all.

It was odd to watch a senior-laden team suffer this kind of multiple personality disorder, but then, they were trying on new personalities all through the season. Each man had to learn new skills for this team to succeed; Blake was the only senior who had started before this year. Sometimes the new personalities fit, and sometimes they didn't—but when they didn't, the Terps knew how they had played when they felt natural, and tried to play that way, and became more and more tentative and overaggressive by turns until something snapped and they remembered what they had been doing by forgetting everything else.

So I felt more of a connection to this team, because I don't often go for five months while only screwing up four times, as the 2000-2001 team did. More often, I spend only a bit of my time in that blissful state where the prose seems to lay itself out on the page clause by clause, the right words come off my lips with no cranial mediation while socializing, and I think of just the right thing to cheer myself up when I feel down. The rest of the time, I think about how I was doing it then, and laboriously construct and tear down and reconstruct my sentences, and hold my chitchat at bay for pre-speech inspection, and try and retry cheering-up methods. In other words, it's like that game at Clemson in which we scored nine points in the first fifteen minutes and were only down by twelve. You hang around waiting to feel natural again. I felt the Terps' pain this season, and I never got mad at them, just exasperated, in the same way I get with myself. (Of course, I don't have to do my stuff in milliseconds like the Terps did, and I didn't have to do it on national television either.)

The Michigan State game was typical: We played disheartening basketball in going down by 47-34 and then 54-40, sloppy and cautious and forced. MSU wasn't playing well so much as we were playing horribly. Then the 15-0 run, a burst of brilliance, steals everywhere, layins aplenty, the ball being taken hard to the rim out of offensive sets; then suddenly, a couple lucky shots later, Steve Blake is affectlessly, surehandedly, authoritatively taking the ball downcourt with all due speed to attempt a last-second three-pointer. It clanged off the back of the rim.

If Maryland had played at even 80% of the top of its game all year, the Terps would have been a three seed or better in the tourney, and would probably be playing tomorrow and next Saturday. They didn't, because that wasn't what they were accustomed to doing. But for a while, they got to feel what it was like to be at the top of their game. We all fail. I ain't mad at 'em. All our opponents still suck, and I will wait 'till next year, when a new crop of starters may well more consistently beat the hell out of them. After all, it's what they expect to be doing.

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