COLLEGE PARK, Md. — After 45 minutes of basketball in their preseason opener, WVU head coach Ross Hodge saw a top-level version of his second roster at West Virginia and also a version that was susceptible to yielding second chance opportunities to an opponent. The end result of Sunday’s exhibition opener at Maryland was a 90-81 loss in overtime to the Terrapins in a game which saw West Virginia relinquish a 19-point first half lead.
“It is a great way to learn it. Hopefully you can learn from it,” Hodge said. “When you do it right, this is what happens. When you do it wrong, this is what happens. When you have a lot of success, it is not just because you are so good, you executed. When you don’t execute, bad things happen.
“I am thankful that we got a chance to get out here and do it against a quality opponent. Their physicality is real. You feel it. It is a great learning lesson to reinforce some of the things that we’ve been talking about. It is not like you are coming out of this with new messaging, just a reinforcement of the messaging.”
West Virginia built a 42-23 lead at the 3:37 mark of the first half, thanks in large part to torrid shooting from beyond the 3-point line. The Mountaineers connected on 8 of their first 11 shots from beyond the arc. Finley Bizjack hit four 3-pointers in the first half and Martin Somerville hit back-to-back triples as part of a personal 9-0 run.
“When you hit a couple shots, you feel good,” Somerville said. “I’ve got some great teammates who always support me and they uplift you.”
West Virginia led 46-31 at halftime.
However, Maryland quickly went to work on the deficit in the opening stages of the second half. By the first media timeout, the Terps had crept within seven points (50-43). With 10:25 to play in regulation, a 3-pointer from Mike McNair Jr. gave Maryland their first lead of the half, 57-56.
“The first four-minute segment out of halftime, I didn’t think our ball pressure and our intensity level on defense was good enough,” Hodge said.
“As a team, we kind of had it going in the first half,” Somerville said. “In the second half, they hit a lot of shots and they had a lot of physicality, a lot of offensive rebounding. At that point, it just kind of slows down your transition offense, your ability to get in the paint, kick out and get easier shots.”
“They had a whole lot of momentum. They were just rolling with the flow of the game, kind of like we were in the first half. They were kind of giving us a taste of our own medicine,” Bizjack said.
“They were denying me more in the second half, getting more closeouts and stuff. I thought they did a good job with that. I felt like I could have been a lot more aggressive to kind of open it up and make them more honest on their closeouts.”
Maryland owned a 75-70 lead with a minute to play in regulation before the Mountaineers collected two baskets and two defensive stops to force overtime. A corner three from Bizjack and a dunk from Brenen Lorient with 15 seconds left forced the extra session.
Maryland never trailed in overtime. The Terps needed just 2:27 in the extra session to build a six-point advantage and the Mountaineers could not chip into their deficit late.
“When you step onto a floor for the first time and you kind of don’t really know what it going to happen in a game situation, there is some excitement there and some anxiety and some nervousness,” Hodge said. “I have seen Brenen play in a Mountaineer uniform. But I hadn’t see anybody else play.”
Andre Mills (27 points) and Pharrell Payne (26) combined for over half of Maryland’s points while McNair (15) and Kaden House (10) also scored in double digits.
Bizjack paced the Mountaineers with 25 points. Freshman Miles Sadler scored 16 points in his WVU debut. Somerville and Seydou Traore each added 13 points.
The Mountaineers yielded 26 second chance points and then were outrebounded 48-36.
West Virginia will visit Glenville State Friday in their second preseason contest. Wheeling heads to Hope Coliseum on October 28 to conclude the exhibition season.