Kevin Stallings stepped up to the microphone, let out a brief exhale and said all he really needed to after Pitt’s game against Towson.
“That was a masterpiece, huh?” he said, a five-word statement soaked in sarcasm.
He wasn’t wrong. The Panthers’ 63-59 victory Friday against the Tigers was far from aesthetically pleasing and had one looked at the box score, including those like Stallings who see his team up close every day, few would have thought it would have ended as it did.
Pitt shot just 39.3 percent from the field and, for a squad recently reliant on outside shooting, was even worse from 3-point range, missing 21 of its 28 attempts from deep. Jared Wilson-Frame, the team’s leading scorer entering the game, was a ghastly 3 of 16 on a night so consistently frustrating and confusing that he at one point even air-balled a layup. The Panthers (8-5) finished with 21 turnovers against a team not particularly good at drawing them and made only 57.1 percent of its free throws. And, of course, all of this took place with their best player tethered to the bench in a walking boot.
Yet, despite most any measurement that would have one think otherwise, they won. For months, Stallings has praised his team even though he knew trying days were ahead, lauding their coachability, perseverance, toughness and willingness to claw, scratch and fight. Because of those traits, his team collected perhaps its most impressive win of the season, beating an opponent which was 10-2 and favored by four points.
It was, to Stallings, an embodiment of all he has grown to love about his remade team.
“They’re all in this together,” he said. “They’re for each other. They’re team guys. They were team guys the other night; we just weren’t a great team in the second half. We weren’t great tonight, but we fought great. Sometimes, that’s enough.”
It certainly was Friday, as it secured a much-needed win in a game in which trailed for nearly 28 of 40 minutes. It trailed by nine within the game’s first eight minutes and was down eight, 55-47, with 4:30 remaining. It was then, however, that an offensively inept team for much of the day found a spurt and, within just a few minutes, the score was tied after a high-arcing 3 from freshman Marcus Carr with 2:18 remaining.
With the score still tied, senior Jonathan Milligan, who entered the game only 27 seconds earlier, cut to the basket, received a pass from Carr and rolled in a floater over an airborne defender with 52 seconds remaining. Though they endured a handful of tense moments — shots from Towson that, on consecutive possessions, would have won or tied the game — the Panthers would hold on to that lead for good.
“I know I had to put a little extra air on it,” Milligan said of his shot.
The win was not only notable because of Pitt’s heralded fight, but because some of the factors that led to the victory have been what has plagued it for much of the season. It held the Tigers (10-3) to just 0.83 points per possession while hauling in 33 of their 40 missed shots and getting offensive rebounds on 15 of their 34 misses. A frontcourt that looked incapable in its first two games without injured forward Ryan Luther, the team’s leading rebounder, looked suddenly formidable, a sharp uptick exemplified by 6-foot-10 freshman Terrell Brown, who had a career-high 12 points and brought down seven rebounds.
With the win, the Panthers avoided its most losses (six) in non-conference play since the 1980-81 season, when it ultimately finished 19-12 and made the NCAA tournament.
For its opponent, playing its second game in 48 hours, it was a missed opportunity, a loss in a game it controlled and very easily could have won.
“You can have results or you can have excuses, but you can’t have both,” said Towson coach Pat Skerry, who was an assistant at Pitt in the 2010-11 season.
A contract signed between the two schools in November 2016 required that Pitt pay Towson $90,000 for the game, a common arrangement between larger programs and their smaller counterparts in which the former often trounces the latter. Though the game Friday was far from that, it offered a valuable glimpse at what the Panthers can become and the identity around which they can build.
The rigors of the ACC begin in eight days, with a home matchup against a top-10 Miami team kicking off its 18-game league schedule. The games only will get more challenging and even in games and on nights when it competes as fearlessly and tenaciously as it did Friday, it very likely won’t be enough.
Pitt’s players and coaches, though, see progress and see something taking hold among their youngest and most inexperienced players. Whether that will be enough in perhaps Division I’s most cutthroat conference remains to be seen, but they’re all about to find out.
“Everybody counts us out,” Milligan said. “That’s something we have in the back of our minds all the time. But we have the utmost confidence in each other and our ability as a team. If we keep getting better and keep competing, we’ll change a lot of peoples’ opinions.”
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG.
First Published: December 23, 2017, 2:34 a.m.