Vasquez needed help

Greivis Vasquez likes to think he can do it all on a basketball court.

He's the man, it's his team and he takes responsibility when the Terrapin men's basketball team wins or loses.

But on most nights, it takes more than one player to win a basketball game, especially if the top gun is fighting to break out of a shooting slump the way Vasquez has been recently.

In the Terps' fall-from-ahead 76-67 loss against Boston College on Tuesday night, the Terps' supporting cast showed up and played great for a half as Vasquez continued to have trouble. But when Vasquez started to show shades of his old self after halftime, everybody else disappeared.

Despite their best player starting to play the way he's supposed to, the Terps turned a 16-point lead into a nine-point loss, an almost sure win into another head-scratching defeat.

Instead of starting to put the staggering loss at Duke behind them, the Terps dug themselves into an even deeper hole in the ACC, let most of their fans walk out on them before the final buzzer sounded, and let the increasingly noisy public's grumbles about the state of the program and about Gary Williams' coaching linger - and probably strengthen - for at least a few more days.

Things are starting to spiral out of control at Comcast Center, and the Terps need a better consistent effort from more than one player if things are going to get any better.

"I could tell you [what the problem is] if all you guys weren't recording," Vasquez said. "But the most important thing is just be tough. Be tough. Be tough. I can't describe it - be tough."

Things haven't come easily for Vasquez recently, and it's easy to see how he might be frustrated enough to say the Terps need to be tough four times in four seconds.

Since his infamous F-bomb game against Georgia Tech a couple of weeks ago when he shared some of his frustration with the Comcast Center crowd, Vasquez has struggled, averaging 10.3 points per game in the four games before he scored a game-high 18 Tuesday night.

While he was still unafraid to pound his chest or blow kisses to the crowd after scoring Tuesday, it looked in the first half like Vasquez had lost at least a little bit of his trademark confidence on the floor. He passed up a few open looks, and looked unsure of himself on some of the shots he took.

Fortunately, Vasquez was more aggressive in the second half and looked like he was starting to work his way out of it, and you pretty much know what he is going to give you the rest of the season.

It's the other players on the team who are going to have to step it back up.

"The second half, we just didn't come out with the same energy that we started the game off with," forward Landon Milbourne said. "We just gotta look at ourselves and figure some things out."

Milbourne's game best illustrates the difference in play in the second half compared to the first for everyone other than Vasquez and maybe guard Sean Mosley, who also played well.

Milbourne, who was the only player to show up in the Terps' epic failure at Duke on Saturday and has been the Terps' top scorer in ACC play, was the best Terp on the court again for the first 20 minutes Tuesday.

He scored 12 first-half points with a variety of midrange jumpers and layups inside, continuing to play the way everybody expected him to before the season and his slow start in non-conference play.

But the athletic forward was a non-factor after halftime, scoring two points on 1-for-3 shooting after shooting 5-for-10 before the break.

Adrian Bowie and Dave Neal also fell off after halftime, Eric Hayes wasn't that good in either half and Dino Gregory was OK.

That's just about everybody who got significant minutes because Braxton Dupree and Cliff Tucker don't anymore.

With Saturday's game against Miami looking like a must-win to stop some kind of mob from forming outside of Williams' office and a trip to No. 5 North Carolina looming next week, there isn't much time for the Terps to start sorting things out.

Greivis needs some help.

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