Five nights before Christmas, the visiting basketball locker room at Newark’s Prudential Center was a somber scene. Heads were buried into hands, eyes were fixed on the carpet and Maryland coach Mark Turgeon was leaning against a brick wall, having shed his suit jacket and opened the floor to his players. Then No. 7 nationally, the Terps had just lost to unranked Seton Hall, 52-48. Naturally, such a disappointing setback spawned some soul-searching.
A pair of predictable suspects talked first in the postgame postmortem: senior point guard Anthony Cowan Jr. and sophomore big man Jalen Smith.