The first official practice of the college basketball season, particularly heading into a season whose very existence once seemed in peril due to the COVID-19 pandemic, is a moment worth savoring for players and coaches alike.
Normally mundane tasks become exhilarating. Bodies weeks away from the strain of a season are fresh and energized. Dreams that would otherwise be dismissed as foolish or impossible seem within reach.
For Pitt, the start of the 2020-21 season marks a welcome departure from the shortcomings of its recent past, from the arduous early days of a rebuild of two years ago to the maddening late-season collapse of the 2019-20 campaign in which the Panthers ended their own season before even the coronavirus could.
The earliest days of practice are the easiest ones during which to tout a team, with games of consequence still six weeks from being played. It’s the kind of moment that allows a player like Xavier Johnson to speak earnestly about wanting to help raise a banner in the Petersen Events Center rafters for a program that has gone 30-36 the past two seasons and has just one NCAA tournament victory over the past nine years.
The prevailing sentiment surrounding the Panthers coming off their first practice Wednesday, however, is a plausible one. There’s a different feeling around Jeff Capel’s third team at the school, and with it may come different results, perhaps even a breakthrough for a program still working its way back to relevancy.
“This team is a more competitive team,” Johnson said. “They care about each other. This team is way more athletic than last year’s team and more talented.”
The pieces are in place to justify some of that hope, the product of a roster overhaul Capel embarked on when he took over a program coming off a disastrous 8-24 finish in 2017-18.
For the first time in Capel’s tenure, Pitt has all 13 of its scholarships filled. There are four players who he has coached for each of his two seasons at the school. Six talented newcomers have come aboard, along with a seventh player in guard Ithiel Horton who is eligible after sitting out last season due to NCAA transfer rules.
The makeup of the roster, at the very least, offers the potential for the Panthers to improve in some of the areas in which they’ve struggled so mightily the past two years. The full complement of scholarship players and a top-25 recruiting class give a previously thin team a measure of depth. A squad so desperately lacking size, and the inside scoring and defensive rebounding it helps provide, now has eight players who are at least 6-foot-6. One of the worst 3-point shooting teams at the Division I level last season now has a player in Horton who shot 40.9% from beyond the arc in his one college season (at Delaware).
“We have more size. We have more depth,” Capel said. “Now, it’s trying to figure out how to put that all together.”
On an individual level, Pitt’s six newest additions have excited some of the program’s veteran players. Johnson described 6-foot-8 freshman forward Noah Collier and Miami (Ohio) transfer guard Nike Sibande as “freaky athletic,” adding that the former can “really jump out the gym.” In freshman forward John Hugley, at 6-foot-9 and 240 pounds, the Panthers get the kind of big, bulky and talented presence they haven’t had on the low post in years. Freshman wing William Jeffress, at only 17 years old, is a top-100 recruit who will only continue to grow, both physically and metaphorically.
With more than half of the available scholarships claimed by players who will be in their first year of eligibility with Pitt, there has been a jolt to a program that languished as the season dragged on each of the past two years, particularly last season, when players openly lambasted those on the team with “personal agendas” as the Panthers lost eight of their final nine games.
“The new guys definitely bring a different style we haven’t really been accustomed to over the past two or three years,” Horton said. “They’ve got a good swag about them. They’ve got some grit that we really need this year and that we didn’t have last year.”
Though practices began in an official capacity Wednesday, the team has been together on campus since June 28 and has been working out with each other since July 20. The warm feelings that exist between teammates are natural. Pitt has yet to lose a game and some of the corrosive factors that can split up a team like it did last season — things like playing time and the number of shots players take in a game — have yet to test that cohesiveness.
But with the Panthers’ first game not occurring until Nov. 25 — at the earliest — there’s time to dream and an opportunity to think that a proverbial corner is being turned before they have to take to the court to prove that’s actually the case.
“I just want all of us to shine bright and do what we’ve got to do to get to the tournament,” junior guard/forward Au’Diese Toney said. “We’re always preaching about the tournament, but I feel like this year and this team is capable of doing that.”
Backyard Brawl extended
Pitt and West Virginia have agreed to an extension to their men’s basketball series through the 2023-24 season, effectively replacing the game that was scheduled to be played Nov. 13 that was scrapped due to scheduling complications stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.
Earlier this year, with a four-game series set to conclude with this November’s meeting, the two longtime rivals inked a two-year extension through the 2022-23 season. The 2020-21 college basketball season is set to begin Nov. 25 with all teams playing a reduced number of games — which, due to the start date and fewer available non-conference games, forced the Mountaineers and Panthers to bypass their scheduled matchup at WVU Coliseum.
West Virginia is Pitt’s most-played all-time opponent, with 187 meetings between the two. The Mountaineers lead the all-time series, 99-88, and have won the past four games, including a 68-53 victory last season at Petersen Events Center.
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG
First Published: October 15, 2020, 3:21 p.m.
