The one downside of Maryland basketball’s 68-59 win at Rutgers: guard Darryl Morsell twice had to exit the game with right shoulder issues. Mark Turgeon, whose team can’t afford to be without its senior leader for long, offered an update after the game.
“Quickly on Darryl, I’ll get it out of the way. Shoulder didn’t come all the way out. The term I heard is, like, ‘to the edge,’ and they popped it back in both times. The first time, he was really strong, he was in no pain. Second time, he was strong and no pain, but we weren’t going to play him again,” Turgeon said. “So he’ll go back he’ll see a specialist he’ll see a doctor tomorrow and we’ll determine where we go from there.”
Fortunately for Maryland, it has six days off until its next game, giving Morsell a break to see the doctor and recover. If you’ve watched him for the past four years, it won’t surprise you what the rugged Baltimore native’s reaction was after the second time. It was the same reaction he had earlier this season when he broke a bone in his face after taking an elbow from Michigan’s Franz Wagner, requiring surgery and sidelining him for a game.
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“He was begging us to put him back in,” Turgeon said.
By the time he left, though, Morsell had made his mark on the game. He’d totaled 12 points, three assists and three steals, and scored back-to-back baskets to effectively end Rutgers’ comeback effort. He also helped keep Scarlet Knights star Ron Harper Jr. to six points.
“Well, we started him on Harper and then [Jacob] Young got going, so we pushed him over to Young. And then Young wasn’t scoring anymore, so you know, he’s just special like that. He guards the go-to guards. And then yeah, we were really struggling, we couldn’t make a shot, their defense picked it up, we turned the ball over,” Turgeon said. “Young was kind of controlling the game with his defense and Darryl got the three-point play and then he got another layup in transition, which was good. Put us up 11. So yeah, we were really struggling, we just kept saying as a staff, ‘If we could just score a bucket, you know, I think we can pull away again.'”
