Everything ‘clicked’ in Maine win Balance helped Bears beat UMBC

In some ways, Saturday night’s game against the University of Maryland Baltimore County was the toughest game on the University of Maine men’s basketball schedule so far this season.

The game was the fifth straight regular-season game on the road for the Black Bears, and Maine – which has the youngest overall roster in America East with just one senior, six freshmen, and three sophomores – was trying to break a six-game losing streak to boot.

Oh, and they were trying to do it against an 11-5 UMBC squad off to an impressive start.

These weren’t the same UMBC Retrievers that were the conference’s new kid and doormat team the last few years. These were the Retrievers who were riding a three-game win streak, 3-0 in AE play with a big win over Vermont, and 8-5 against nonconference foes including Ohio State University, West Virginia, Wichita State and three Atlantic-10 teams. UMBC was also ranked 86th nationally in RPI (ratings percentage index) among 341 Division I teams.

By contrast, Maine’s RPI was 330th before the game against UMBC, which was also ranked among the top 20 NCAA Division I teams nationally in three categories: turnovers per game (second only to Texas with 10.4), assist-to-turnover ratio (fifth with 1.5), and 3-point shooting percentage (17th at 41.3).

“They’ve beaten quality teams and they have a very good starting five with four guys scoring in double digits and a fifth guy ranked in the top 10 nationally for assists [point guard Jay Greene ranked sixth with 7.1],” said Maine coach Ted Woodward. “They make you play everyone. You can’t just concentrate on any one or two players.”

Quite a tall order for a young team mired in a losing skid. Maybe doing their best to ignore it paid off for the Bears.

“I don’t even look at that. We don’t talk about that stuff,” Woodward said. “The big thing for us is we’ve been on the road for awhile, so any time you can get a road win in our league, it’s big.”

Saturday’s 77-74 victory couldn’t be much bigger for the Bears, who evened their league record at 1-1 and are 5-10 overall.

“It really all kind of clicked in for us,” Woodward said. “We came out of the gate with great focus and played 40 very good minutes. We also had some key plays down the stretch.”

The Retrievers committed just four turnovers to Maine’s 14, but Maine had its best all-around scoring effort this season with five players scoring 10 points or more. The Bears also outrebounded the Retrievers 36-27 and outshot them 64.4 (season high) to 40 percent.

“We shot very well and I think a big part of that was the way we moved the basketball around by making the extra pass and letting guys put themselves in good position to score,” Woodward said.

It’s an encouraging sign for a team Woodward expected to go through a lot of growing pains.

“Everybody going in knew they had to play as well as they can and we’ve been working on growing up all year in a number of aspects in the game,” he said. “It’s a fluid process, but I do think we showed signs of various guys stepping up into leadership roles.”

Woodward will be looking for more signs Wednesday when his Bears host league power Vermont at 7:30 p.m. at Alfond Arena in Orono.

aneff@bangordailynews.net

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UMAINE MEN’S BASKETBALL

January games

16 – Vermont, 7:30 p.m.

19 – New Hampshire, noon

21 – Hartford, 7 p.m.

23 – at Albany, 7 p.m.

30 – Boston University, 7:30 p.m.