Penn State basketball: Lions react poorly to Maryland adjustments in latest road loss
Six minutes into the second half of Penn State’s defeat at Maryland on Monday, the Nittany Lions found themselves in a good position, trailing by one on the road.
They were 5-8 from the field to start the second half, scoring on five of their 10 possessions in total. All five buckets came from some kind of ball screen action — Penn State’s bread and butter in year one under Micah Shrewsberry. With Maryland seemingly content to stay in man-to-man, why not keep going to the well?
Quite abruptly, the Terrapins took that away altogether. And the result, for the Nittany Lions, was ugly.
“They had a great game plan in terms of what they did and how they guarded us,” Shrewsberry told reporters postgame. “They showed some things that we hadn’t seen much of, and that’s kudos to [Danny] Manning.
“He did a better job than I did, I know that much. I need to be better for our guys. I need to help our guys. We’ll continue to get better, we’ll learn from it, we’ll grow from it. We need to be better playing on the road.”
After a Sam Sessoms three-pointer — resulting from a defender going under a John Harrar ball screen — made it a 40-39 game at the 14-minute mark, Manning reached into his bag of tricks.
The Terps went into a 3-2 zone defense on the next Penn State possession. The outcome was a turnover, as Dallion Johnson tried to force the ball into Harrar in the paint.
Maryland pressed the Nittany Lions the next time up the floor, and Jalen Pickett launched a long pass over everybody and into the crowd.
Then, they seemed to go back to man, and Johnson threw up a wild layup that went over the backboard.
RELATED: Three takeaways from Penn State basketball’s loss to Maryland
The Terps continued to change things up on a possession-by-possession basis, forcing Penn State to process what defense they were in and how to attack it. And Penn State came unstuck, turning it over nine times in the second half.
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“We got to play with more poise on the road,” Shrewsberry said on his postgame appearance on Penn State radio. “That starts with me and starts with me getting these guys ready. Maybe I need to be more poised on the sidelines.”
The Nittany Lions finally seemed to settle down around the eight-minute mark. By then, they trailed by 13.
That’s a difficult mountain to climb for any offense in college basketball. For a low-scoring Penn State team, it’s almost impossible.
“They took away a big part of what we do, what we’re trying to do,” Shrewsberry said.
“We tried some different things, but they did a good job of switching things up. I can’t totally give away what they were doing because other people are gonna study it and figure out what to do against us.”
Frustratingly for Shrewsberry and Penn State, when the Nittany Lions did hang onto the ball, they were efficient. PSU outshot Maryland 47 percent to 46, in the process posting its fourth-best field-goal percentage in Big Ten play this season.
But the defensive adjustments Maryland made forced the Nittany Lions out of their rhythm, resulting in turnovers that changed the game.
“We gotta take care of the basketball,” Shrewsberry said. “We’re standing with the ball above our head trying to force it into the post. Everybody knows you’re passing. Everybody knows there’s a mismatch in there. If they overhelp, now find somebody else. That’s where we got to be better.”
