Party in the City Where the Heat is On

Hey gang, remember that Will Smith joint about that South Florida town known as Miami? Sure ya do! It was awesome, wasn't it? Big Willie Style was clearly one of the seminal achievements in rap history and indeed in the history of American Popular Culture.

But enough of my clever segue into this preview of the Terps trip down to Miami to face their ACC rivals the Hurricanes. Let's talk about how Miami isn't in Miami, but rather Coral Gables, FL. Or how Boston College is actually in Chestnut Hill. Or how Wake Forest is in Winston-Salem and not, oh, I don't know, Wake Forest. At least Clemson is actually in the town of Clemson instead of joining in this parade of falsification.

Er, anyway, the Hurricanes. They just beat Duke at home, although when you're the second team to do that in a matter of four days, it loses some of its luster. They uncharacteristically shot the lights out, particularly sophomore big man Dwayne Collins who went for 26 points. After failing to make a single FG against Duke a few weeks back, he made 12 on Wednesday. Go figure.

Offensively, Miami is built on toughness - they get to the foul line and rebound the heck out of the ball on the offensive end. They also shoot well from downtown at nearly 40% on the season though they shoot fewer three pointers than the majority of conference rivals. What they don't do well is score inside the arc. No ACC team shoots a lower percentage on two point shots than Miami - big man Anthony King shoots an abysmal 43% from the field and star scorer Jack McClinton shoots just 40%, lower than his percentage from beyond the arc. Against Maryland's stellar two point defense, first in the ACC, don't expect that to change. James Dews and McClinton are both quality scoring options, but the lack of a true point guard in the backcourt hurts the offense.

While Miami does enough to put together a respectable offense, the defense has not been very good at all. They are a very poor rebounding team, one of the perils of using a three guard set featuring three guys all at or under 6-3. Even with a small, quick backcourt no one on the Hurricanes gets steals and Miami doesn't force turnovers much at all which bodes well for the turnover prone Terps. The Canes do have the interior defense and physicality to neutralize James Gist and BOOM, but as a whole the defense should not be good enough to contain the Terps' attack if Maryland executes the way they have for much of the past two months.