Dez Wells’ last-minute putback leads No. 13 Maryland past Northwestern

The ball spun around the cylinder Sunday night and fell into the waiting arms of Dez Wells.

With less than three seconds left on the clock, and No. 13 Maryland trailing as it had for nearly the entirety of the game, Wells didn’t have much time to make a play. So he did what he could in the moment, grabbing the ball and throwing it back at the basket in one fluid motion before his feet touched the ground.

The crowd at XFinity Center went quiet for a beat, the fear of a heartbreaking loss and a two-game losing streak hanging in the air. Then Wells’ putback found nylon. The crowd erupted. That tension was gone.

Maryland won a game it had absolutely no business winning, defeating Northwestern, 68-67.

“It just shows our character,” Wells said. “Our true character as a team.”

There is a sense among the Terrapins (18-3, 6-2 Big Ten) that no game is truly out of reach, that any deficit can be overcome. It was there before they beat Michigan State in double-overtime in East Lansing, and it was still there Thursday night, despite a blowout loss at Indiana.

On Sunday night, that sense was in the huddle during a timeout when the Terrapins trailed by 11 points with 3:28 remaining. Coach Mark Turgeon looked around and asked his players if they still wanted to win. They said they did.

And then it happened.

“We almost had to be perfect after the last media timeout to win the game,” Turgeon admitted, “and we were close to that.”

Wells and freshman point guard Melo Trimble made sure of it.

Trimble scored seven points in the final 3:22 and finished with a game-high 27 points and four steals. Wells scored six points during that same span, including the game-winning putback off Trimble’s missed 3-pointer. He finished with 17.

Maryland was down by as many as 14 points against Northwestern, a Big Ten bottom-feeder that had won only one of its first six conference games. Led by freshman Bryant McIntosh, the Wildcats ripped the Terrapins’ defense apart in the first half, knocking down open 3-pointers and using backdoor cuts to create a number of wide-open layups.

Northwestern shot 69.6 percent from the floor and carried a 41-30 lead into halftime.

“We were lost defensively the first half,” Turgeon said. “We really worked hard breaking down their stuff, and we just were not alert and not very good.”

Things changed in the second half, when the threes stopped falling for Northwestern and the Terrapins put more effort into their defensive performance. Their offense followed suit, and an 11-point deficit shrunk to six and later five before ballooning back to double digits with less than four minutes remaining.

That’s when the Terrapins met for the timeout, and their resilient nature shined through.

“It’s almost, not in a cocky sense of expecting to win, but confidence-wise,” senior Richaud Pack said after a Jan. 16 practice. “Sometimes you play for teams where you’re down two with a minute left and you think, ’We lost.’ Sometimes you’re down two with a team and you know, ’Hey, we got this.’ I think we have that type of team where even if we’re down or it’s a close game or it’s back-and-forth, you can look around and we all feel like we’re going to win.”

Pack said that mentality has been instilled on a team level by Turgeon, and embraced by each player individually. Wells said it’s the result of adversity dating back to their summer workouts together.

“Just from battling through tough situations,” he said. “Through the summer, when we were going through some adversity, and in the games, when we’d go through adversity. We’d always take it and try to find something that we could use to help and motivate us to keep going. We just have a never-die attitude.”

It showed Sunday. The Terrapins finally got their first lead of the game with 20 seconds remaining, but Tre Demps made a jumper 12 seconds later to put Northwestern back ahead, 67-66.

The fans grew quiet. But their team knew it wasn’t over just yet.

“I keep telling you: I love this team,” Turgeon said. “They just kind of figure it out.”