The question hadn’t been completed, but Jeff Capel already knew the answer to it.
As he was asked Saturday about the impact Kerry Blackshear Jr. had in No. 22 Virginia Tech’s 70-64 victory against his Pitt team and whether there was anything that could have been done to limit the effect of a 6-foot-10, 250-pound behemoth with a group of players lacking that combination of size and girth, Capel interjected.
Is there only so much you can do schematically when you’ve got a guy that’s just that much more, the questioner said before taking a quick pause, searching for the right word.
“Better,” Capel cut in to say.
“Bigger than you guys?” the questioner finished.
“Better,” Capel said.
In a game decided by a handful of plays across a handful of possessions, Blackshear was as omnipresent as he was destructive to whatever hopes the Panthers had of ending a losing streak that stretched to nine games Saturday at Petersen Events Center, doing whatever he could to get his team a win and doing so against a plainly overmatched Pitt frontcourt.
It was the defining theme of the most recent of those setbacks for the Panthers (12-14, 2-11 ACC). Blackshear was simply and obviously better, and because of that, his team was, as well.
Thirteen months after he scored 31 points on 12-of-16 shooting in an 81-67 victory against Pitt last season, Blackshear yet again had his way against the Panthers, albeit a different group of them, with 29 points on eight-of-nine shooting, along with nine rebounds, six of them offensive boards. He went 10 of 11 from the free-throw line, bullying through Terrell Brown and Kene Chukwuka, and drawing two fouls apiece on Pitt’s big men just 6:25 into the game.
With his performance Saturday, Blackshear, who was averaging 13.4 points per game in his team’s first 24 games, has scored 60 points and made 20 of his 25 shots in 70 minutes in two meetings against Pitt over the past two seasons. A player Chukwuka said was described on the scouting report last season as a big man who couldn’t shoot proved, in two games over two seasons, he could – and that much more.
“My whole thing was I was trying to give him no open looks like he had the first game,” Chukwuka said. “But he found ways of being effective.”
Capel went so far as to say he wasn’t sure if he could think of a better post player in the ACC than Blackshear, at least on based on the way he has been playing of late, averaging 20.8 points per game over the past four contests while making 60 percent of his shots.
“You have to play through him,” Virginia Tech coach Buzz Williams said. “He’s our best defender. He’s our best scorer. He’s our best passer. He’s our best playmaker. And he has the highest basketball IQ on our team. The issue is he can’t pass it to himself.”
Blackshear’s all-around excellence was the centerpiece of a strong offensive outing for the Hokies (20-5, 9-4), who shot 51.2 percent from the field, aided largely by Blackshear, and 47.6 percent from 3-point range. It negated what was a relatively strong showing offensively from the Panthers (12-14, 2-11 ACC), who shot 46.5 percent, though they only made 27.3 percent of their 22 attempts from 3. Their 27 free-throw attempts were their most since taking 46 such shots in a Jan. 14 victory against Florida State, which stands as the team’s most recent win.
Xavier Johnson scored a team-high 18 points, the 23rd time in 26 career games he has finished in double figures, and had five assists while Sidy N’Dir and Trey McGowens added 12 and 10 points, respectively. N’Dir also had a team-high six points and three steals.
Those contributions allowed Pitt to stay as close as it did for as long as it did, as it was within two, 48-46, with 7:28 remaining. From there, a Virginia Tech team that thrived beyond the arc did so in a flurry that gave it a decisive cushion. It began after a Johnson 3 that got it within two, when what Capel described as a defensive breakdown allowed Blackshear to hit an open 3. While holding their opponent scoreless, the Hokies got 3s on each of their next two possessions to go up 11 with fewer than five minutes remaining.
“They [Pitt’s coaches] are preaching fighting and playing smart,” Chukwuka said. “We did the fighting part, but we just didn’t…we played smart for parts of the game, but there were a couple out-of-bounds plays that we gave them 3s on that we just went through this morning and small things like that, mental lapses we need to clean up if we want to win.”
The Panthers had other opportunities to get themselves closer, whether it was a pair of missed free throws from McGowens that would have cut the deficit to five with 2:37 left, a layup from Khameron Davis that got his team within five only for it to be called a charge and taken off the board, resulting in a potential five-point swing with 1:54 remaining. They got one final chance with about 30 seconds to go, forcing a steal and getting N’Dir what seemed like an open look from 3 from the corner. Virginia Tech’s Wabissa Bebe, however, at all of 6-foot-1, came flying in to contest it and block it, with teammate Ty Outlaw securing the ball.
A seven-second threat, a brief moment of panic that could have turned a win into a devastating road loss, was thwarted and the Hokies did what they did for so much of the day, whenever it seemed like their young, fiery opponent was about to seize control. They persisted.
“It’s an example of a veteran team -- a team that has been together, a team that has some experience and a team, quite frankly, that is used to winning -- stepping up when we had the momentum to make plays like that,” Capel said.
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG
First Published: February 17, 2019, 12:06 a.m.
Updated: February 18, 2019, 4:39 p.m.
