Wake Forest 65 - Maryland 63: Box Score of the Day

CHN now features a live scoreboard, stats, standings, etc.. here. Occasionally, we'll be featuring a box score of the day, with some commentary on why the box score is interesting. It might be involve a huge upset, a big personal effort, some odd statistical, occurrences, or other intriguing tidbit.

Box Score of the Day:

Today's pick is.. Wake Forest's 65-63 win over Maryland.

In my estimation, this was a make or break game for Maryland. Up 7 at the half, and 6 with 6:16 left, it looked like Maryland was going to make it. But then a pair of Wake threes and an untimely 5-minute scoring drought may have broke Maryland's season barring some kind of heroic ACC Tournament effort. This loss drops them to 4-10 against Top 50 teams, which along with a 4-7 record away from, doesn't bode well for an at-large bid.

Maryland's big win over UNC and their close losses to Duke & Wake all featured solid defensive efforts. They held UNC to 38% shooting, Duke to 43%, and Wake to 40%. The Terps simply don't have many offensive weapons, so the increased defensive pressure at least kept them in these big games.

The reason they were able to topple UNC, but not Duke & Wake? Greivis Vasquez. He went off for 34-points against UNC, but averaged just 13 on 34% shooting against Wake & Duke. In each of the recent big games, Maryland got a good secondary effort from a support player, 19 from Neal last night, 19 for Milbourne against Duke, and 22 from Tucker against UNC. But ultimately they needed at least 20+ from Vasquez to have a chance.

Lastly, and this is nothing new for Maryland, but the Terps got crushed on the boards last night. The defensive intensity, which led to a good amount of forced turnovers, wasn't enough to overcome a -19 rebounding margin. This was even worse than the -12 against Duke and the -8 against UNC.