Big Ten Women's Basketball Preview: No. 1 Maryland
Dr. Maryland or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Terrapin
What a journey it has been. This is the last of an ongoing series of previews for all 14 teams in the Big Ten heading into the 2021-22 season. This one focuses on my projected No. 1 team in the conference.
Here is last week’s preview of No. 2 Indiana
Note for next week: These previews have been a blast to do, but they’ve also been very time consuming. Next week, I will still have two posts, but they will each be much smaller than normal.
Monday (Nov. 1) will just be a hub for all the previews with links to any you have missed. Thursday (Nov. 4) will only be the Top 25. It’ll be a quick refresh before the last Monday (Nov. 8) Hoopla ahead of the regular season. Thanks for reading.
Maryland
Last year’s record: 17-1 Big Ten | 26-3 Overall
Brenda Freese has been Maryland’s head coach for 19 seasons. She took over a team that had been to the NCAA Tournament just twice in its past nine years. Freese has had the Terrapins qualified for 17 NCAA Tournaments in her tenure with the team, and reached the mountain top with a national title in 2006.
Maryland came over to the Big Ten from the ACC for the 2014-15 season, and the Terrapins have won at least a share of the conference regular season title six out of seven times. They have followed five of those up with conference tournament wins as well.
This is the final boss at the end of a video game, this is the clear villain that is easy to root against simply because of the wreckage the team leaves in its path. Maryland has played 122 in-conference games as a member of the Big Ten. It has a 109-13 record in those games. That is a 89.3 win percentage.
Dear reader, I am simply asking if that is good.
But what also is true is that the Terrapins have not reached the summit a second time under Freese. That 2006 title has been followed by five Elite Eight appearances, two of which went to the Final Four in back-to-back years (2014, 2015). But that is as far has Maryland has went, and the team hasn’t even made it past the Sweet 16 since that 2015 run.
For as unbelievably dominant as Maryland has been since joining the Big Ten, it has made the conference look worse nationally that the same Terrapins team putting other top conference programs in a meat grinder cannot win more than two games in March.
But last year was supposed to be a “down” year for Maryland. Down probably meant a tournament appearance and a top-tier finish in the Big Ten, but the Terrapins lost five of their top six scorers in the 2020 offseason and had to go to the transfer portal to make up for that lost production.
And my goodness did they make up for it. Maryland was the nation’s top scoring team in 2020-21 with 90.8 points per game. The defense was merely OK allowing 69.0 points per game, but that was all it had to be.
Here are some offensive numbers with Maryland’s national rank next to them, per Her Hoops Stats.
Good lord.
I personally cannot overly sell you all on Maryland being the villain when a team is this much fun on offense. Much like UConn, who you should absolutely watch and root for because the Huskies are going to rock so hard this year, I would simply enjoy the Terrapins for playing basketball at such a high level.
It’s not just one player that runs the show either.
Maryland had six players average double-digit scoring last year and all six players return. Ashley Owusu is the most valuable of them all, as she is a terrific interior scorer, but most importantly, one of the best facilitators at the point guard position in the country.
Owusu has developed into a star in her first two years with the team, and Diamond Miller has done the same, making a more substantial leap in her second season. Miller went from 7.7 points per game on 40.9-percent shooting to 17.3 points per game on 50.6-percent shooting. Another leap like that would put her in Big Ten Player of the Year territory.
Chloe Bibby was one of many high-impact transfers the Terrapins had last season, with Katie Benzan and Mimi Collins being the others. All three started and combined for 36.5 points per game.
The fact that Benzan doesn’t make the top three here is terrifying. The 5-6 guard averaged 12.7 points and 3.3 assists per contest. She also hit a somewhat OK 93.8 percent of her free throws and, well, half of her three-point attempts.
She probably didn’t attempt that many threes, right? Benzan attempted 186 threes last year, the 16th-most in the NCAA. Her 93 makes ranked third, truly disgusting behavior.
Maryland will also have either the best sixth man in the country, or Bibby or Collins will move to the bench and compete for that spot. That is because Angel Reese is entering her sophomore year fully healthy after missing time and playing limited minutes even when she did return.
Reese was the No. 2 overall prospect in the 2020 class behind only Paige Bueckers and two spots ahead of Caitlin Clark. I am going to guess she will play a large role for the Terps this season.
Well, Maryland also isn’t losing a whole lot. Hell, even Zoe Young will be on the Maryland bench as she steps away from playing.
This is as complete a roster that you will see anywhere in college basketball, with a truly disgraceful top six players, plus players like Faith Masonius and Channise Lewis, who absolutely can play important minutes off the bench for this Maryland team.
The roster may just be 11 players deep, but it is filled to the brim with talent.
Let’s just add another near-five-star to the mix. Sure. Shyanne Sellers comes from Aurora, Ohio as a high scoring, strong rebounding guard who averaged 21.9 points, 10.6 boards and 4.6 assists per game in her 2020 season.
Emma Chardon is more of an unknown entity and likely won’t need to be a major impact player right away for this stacked Maryland roster. That being said, she has loads of experience on Switzerland’s national teams and also averaged a double-double overseas, so if rebounding ever becomes a concern, the two first-year players could see extra run.
If anything becomes any sort of concern for Maryland this year, though, it would be a surprise. This roster has the capability to score 100 a night with the range of scoring, shooting, playmaking and just overall nastiness that very, very few programs in the country possess.
Anything less than a Big Ten title and No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament would be a let down for this group, but it is what comes after all that happens that will be interesting.
Maryland has been this talented before, multiple times since that championship in 2006. South Carolina, UConn and Stanford all rank ahead of the Terps to start the year, but this team is, on paper, not lagging behind any of them by much, or at all.
This cannot be a roster that burns out in the Sweet 16, or earlier, for the sixth tournament in a row. I think Freese, and the whole team, knows that. Maryland is the villain of the Big Ten and there’s no doubt about that. But nationally, Maryland can also be the Big Ten’s savior, the team that can put on display the powerhouses that this conference truly has.
Next week, a hub with all 14 team previews as a slight break for my brain. Before that, I will have a new post on a random topic for you on Thursday.
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