The way Kevin Stallings sees things, one can look at the reeling Pitt men’s basketball team one of two ways.
Option A: “OK, we’re in last place, well that doesn’t feel any good to anyone. That doesn’t feel good to the fans, to the players, the coaches, the administrators, nobody. Even the media that has to cover the team, that doesn’t feel any good.”
Option B: “We’re in the process of trying to build something. When you look out there, do you have hope in what’s being built? And that’s an individual answer. For me, I certainly have hope.”
As his group sits at 0-8 in the ACC, still stuck on eight wins for the season after its first and only soul-crushing near-miss so far in conference play Wednesday night against N.C. State, Stallings remains steadfast that no one can question his players’ effort or their heart.
And though he has been at this for decades, 19 of those 25 years coaching in a major metro area in a power conference, Stallings gave a slight chuckle Thursday afternoon at Petersen Events Center as he noted that he’s “human.” Criticism of the head coach doesn’t just roll off his back, as much as he tries to steer clear of it, especially during a stretch such as this.
“I’m probably pretty sensitive to it,” he said after Pitt blew a 15-point lead in its 72-68 loss against N.C. State less than 24 hours earlier in the same building. “But I try to protect myself and try not to read much and watch much, only because I think that’s probably the healthiest thing that I can do.”
While these are unfamiliar circumstances for the Pitt program this century, it’s also foreign territory for Stallings himself. In 17 years at Vanderbilt, he never had a team start this poorly in league play. His worst SEC records were 4-12 in his second year and 3-13 in his fourth, both of which included losing streaks this long, but not until the end of the season. In fact, Pitt’s 1-9 start in the ACC a year ago, which included an eight-game slide, was the closest he’s come to this level of futility.
Still, Stallings admits he always has been a wreck the day after a loss. Thursday, he was glad no local TV cameras were present.
“Last night was hard on me. I had a hard time sleeping,” he said. “I look like crap, and I feel worse, but it’s the nature of this time of year. I just was really, really disappointed for those guys. I wanted them to win badly, and wanted to win for them badly.”
To that end, Stallings concedes he made some coaching mistakes Wednesday, joking that he wanted to hit himself over the head with a baseball bat for one play he called, though he didn’t elaborate on what it was.
On the bright side, he continues to hope his players are better at staying positive than he is. Stallings referred to them as a Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of bunch, but in a good way. They were crestfallen after they “gave the game away,” as freshman guard Parker Stewart put it Thursday, but the coach saw them be as attentive as ever the next day in practice, retaining their “youthful exuberance.”
“I want them to generate positivity out of anything that we can find, and I will say that it felt like the collective feeling was we let one get away we should’ve won,” Stallings said. “But I don’t think that it was a feeling of, ‘Hey, well, we competed much better.’ I think it was dejection of, ‘We should’ve won the game.’
“But I’m kind of glad that’s how they felt, because I want them to have an expectation of winning and I don’t want them to lose the expectation of winning or lose any of that. … It wasn’t a moral victory at all. It was just, maybe, proof to them if we play the right way, we can compete. If anything was validated, I think maybe that was it.”
Before Stallings unloaded any of those ruminations, he acknowledged one crucial caveat: That he won’t truly know how his guys are responding until he sees them play again. That will come at 4 p.m. Saturday against Syracuse, an atmosphere that perhaps will be buoyed by new retro uniforms, a pregame reunion of Pitt greats and a chance to upset a foe that also resides in the bottom half of the ACC.
Or it might produce a result that simply drills further into rock-bottom.
“Again, you can look at it at this point in time and certainly complain or be dismayed or whatever,” Stallings said. “Or, what I try to do and what I choose to do, is I think we’re in the process of building something that can be really good.”
First Published: January 25, 2018, 11:39 p.m.