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Maryland men’s basketball overcomes slow start in 96-67 win over Bucknell
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- Maryland men’s basketball overcomes slow start in 96-67 win over Bucknell
With Maryland men's basketball facing an unexpected early test from Bucknell in its 2026-27 season opener, it needed an offensive spark.
Andre Mills was there to deliver.
With a minute remaining in the first half, the redshirt sophomore drained a 3-pointer and grabbed a steal, going coast-to-coast for a layup. Following the break, he had seven points and six rebounds in a seven-minute stretch, en route to a 22-point, 11-rebound double-double that paced the Terps.
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Mills brought the necessary energy as the Terps survived an early scare and toppled the Bison, 96-67.
"Their zone caused us problems," head coach Buzz Williams said. "We were prepared for it. We didn't execute very well, but we were just a little sped up at times. Not from malicious thoughts or actions. Just a lot of first game stuff."
The first points of Maryland's first 2026-27 game came via the same pair of hands: Mills spotted up in the corner and loosed a 3-pointer that hit nothing but net on its way down.
Bucknell immediately responded with a 3-pointer from Aleksander Pachucki, a sign of the resistance to come. Pachucki finished with a game-high 23 points on 7-of-11 shooting from beyond the arc.
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Unlike their season opener last year, the Terps had the luxury of picking from a seemingly full complement of players. Mills, DJ Wagner, Mike McNair Jr., Tomislav Buljan and Pharrel Payne combined for a daunting starting lineup, but seven more Terps came off the bench to contribute.
That included Tennessee transfer Bishop Boswell, who some insiders had suggested was out indefinitely with a back injury but ended up playing 17 minutes.
Williams allowed a secondary squad — Boswell, Robert Jennings II, and freshmen Kaden House, Austin Brown and Baba Oladotun — to get a run early in the first half, but that group of players struggled to keep pace with Bucknell.
Oladotun in particular had a difficult showing early. The five-star recruit was culpable for a second-chance Bucknell basket in the paint in his first collegiate action, and going the other direction, he forced an out-of-system 3-pointer that clanged off the rim.
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Boswell grabbed the rebound, and Oladotun drove into the paint — he drew a foul only to miss both free throws.
"The portions of Baba have zero to do with his work ethic, have zero to do with his character," Williams said. "Any 17-year-old that's supposed to be in high school, no matter who the opponent is … in game number one, he is going to be sped up. We had some 23-year-olds that were sped up."
An eight-minute field goal drought extended even as Williams restored the starting lineup to the floor, which allowed Bucknell to briefly take the lead twice.
After Payne and Mills went back-and-forth with Bison buckets, McNair's second 3-pointer of the day sparked a 10-0 run, restoring the cushion the Terps expected to have coming into the game.
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Maryland continued to apply pressure, with Boswell, Jennings and Mills splashing 3-pointers before the break as the lead ballooned to 14 points.
Williams continued to shuffle his lineups in the second half, running four or five-man line changes and bringing out experimental combinations.
Through the on-court turnover, the Terps maintained a decisive advantage on the glass. Maryland finished the game with 28 offensive rebounds to Bucknell's 15 defensive rebounds, earning enough second chances on offense to maintain the advantage.
Oladotun later found his footing, making two layups around the 6-minute mark to send the already exuberant Xfinity Center crowd into a frenzy. In the waning seconds of the game, the freshman fought for another layup on offense and got a block in isolation on defense to put an exclamation mark on the result.
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"I think we're ahead of schedule for sure," Mills said. "We're not in our November phase, team-wise. I think we're already in the December area for sure on progress."
Three things to know
1. Free throw folly.Teams coached by Williams tend to underperform from the charity stripe, and the 2026-27 Maryland squad appears to be no exception. The Terps went just 21-of-31 on free throws, showing clear room for improvement as the season progresses.
2. Ball security remains an issue.Last season, Maryland finished with a 0.84 assist-to-turnover ratio, worst in the Big Ten. That came with struggles on both sides of the equation: it committed 12.4 turnovers per game, second-worst in the Big Ten, and had just 10.5 assists per game, fewest in the conference.
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On Monday, the Terps gave the ball away 13 times while assisting 11 buckets for a ratio of 0.85 — a minuscule improvement for the increase in roster talent entering the season.
"You're probably going to be in the teens at the pace that we're going to play from a turnover percentage," Williams said. "You want to be in as low a teens as possible, and we haven't been great, transparently, in our three preseason games."
3. Payne didn't need to play a primary part.The Terps lost their behind-closed-doors scrimmage without star forward Pharrel Payne, and the early performance suggested that the team would be at a significant disadvantage without his scoring in the paint. But Payne played just 24 minutes in this win — including just seven in the second half — and attempted just six shots.
It remains to be seen whether the Terps can work with those numbers against a higher-caliber team, but the offense flowed well later on with Buljan and Jennings at center.
