“That wasn’t any fun,” Kevin Stallings said Saturday as he sat down in front of a microphone in Petersen Events Center’s media room, left yet again with the unenviable task of explaining another ugly loss in an increasingly ugly season for the Pitt men’s basketball team, this time after a 66-37 bludgeoning at the hands of No. 1-ranked Virginia.
He spoke for more than just himself. For weeks, the Panthers’ matchup against the Cavaliers loomed less as a late-season game and more as a doomsday scenario for the Panthers, a last-place (and winless) ACC team set to contend with the stingy juggernaut atop the conference standings.
The reality might have been even worse than the preceding nightmares.
Entering the game, Virginia was allowing just 89 points per 100 possessions against conference opponents while Pitt was averaging only 87.7 points per 100 possessions in those same games, meaning playing the Panthers could give any ACC team the statistical profile of Division I’s top defense. So what would happen when they actually had to play the sport’s most suffocating unit?
That question was answered in resounding and, for Pitt, dispiriting fashion, as it cobbled together an offensive showing that rewrote large swaths of the program’s record book in all the wrong ways.
The 37 points were the third-fewest in a game since the 1954-55 season. The Panthers’ 11 made field goals were tied for the second-fewest in a game in program history and their field-goal percentage (23.9) was the eighth-worst in a game in program history.
Those numbers were the product largely of a first-half performance that in real time became an object of astonishment and lampooning for those who follow college basketball. In the opening 20 minutes, Pitt made just one of its 22 field goals, giving it the lowest field-goal percentage in a half (4.5 percent) in program history. The one made field goal was the fewest in a half for any college team in the shot-clock era and Pitt’s seven points were the third-fewest in a half in program history, beaten only by marks of 0 and 2 points set in 1950 and 1906, respectively, the latter of which came 15 years after the sport of basketball was invented.
A team that has, for all its setbacks, been relatively composed and resilient was, as its coach saw it, intimidated in the opening minutes, rattled by the defensive prowess and intensity of a team they had barely taken the floor against. The game, in that respect, was decided before it even began.
“I thought we had like a deer in the headlights look in the first half,” Stallings said. “I didn’t anticipate that. I hadn’t seen that, I hadn’t felt that. Gosh, if anything, we don’t have anything to lose. We should just throw caution to the wind and play. That’s what I told them [Friday].”
The aura surrounding the Virginia defense exists for good reason.
Under coach Tony Bennett, Virginia has become one of Division I’s top programs on the back of what’s known as a pack-line defense, a variation of a man-to-man look in which one player pressures the ball while the four others stand behind an imaginary line about 16 feet from the basket. It’s a strategy that makes it almost impossible for an opponent to get consistent dribble penetration to the basket, short of having an extraordinarily quick and capable ballhandler, something Pitt doesn’t have.
It shortens games and limits possessions, at least the way the Cavaliers use it, often forcing teams unable to get good looks deep into the shot clock. Even when those scoring opportunities come, they’re often rushed by players unnerved by a defense that mentally erodes them.
It was, Stallings said, the best team Bennett has had in his nine-year tenure, armed with a defense he believes is devoid of weaknesses.
“There’s actually a couple teams that play defense the way they do, just not at the same level,” Pitt’s Jared Wilson-Frame said.
Those factors — Pitt’s hapless offense and Virginia’s smothering defense — combined to create an environment inside Petersen Events Center that was frustrated and resigned to the depths to which the program has fallen.
As Pitt players jogged and coaches strode to the locker room at halftime, with seven points and a single-digit shooting percentage to their name, they were greeted with a mix of boos and jeers. The Oakland Zoo, the student section that once helped make Petersen Events Center one of the sport’s most feared venues, was dotted with paper bags some fans draped over their heads as the Panthers finished the season with a 7-11 record at home, its first losing mark in the building’s nearly 16-year history.
It was a jarring, almost surreal scene that symbolized a season that has embodied both of those traits.
“To have the season we’ve had is disheartening,” Stallings said. “It’s disheartening for all of us. For anyone who cares about the program, it’s disheartening.”
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG.
First Published: February 24, 2018, 11:11 p.m.
Updated: February 25, 2018, 4:46 a.m.
