The roughly 36 hours that followed Pitt’s win Tuesday night against Duke were blissful, the hard-earned fruits of a rigorous game in which the victorious players left everything they had on the Petersen Events Center court.
A self-esteem boost was a thumb tap on a phone screen or a click on a laptop’s touchpad away, with social media overflowing with praise for the Panthers’ triumph. They could turn on the television and see their highlights airing on a loop. A walk around campus or a stop to grab food at a restaurant would invariably come with a flattering comment or a pat on the back, even in an age of social distancing.
After having a built-in day off on Wednesday, what greeted Pitt’s players at practice on Thursday wasn’t nearly as pleasant.
“Practice today, it was terrible,” junior guard Xavier Johnson said. “I ain’t gonna lie to you.”
Players were bungling defensive assignments. Walk-ons would, as Johnson put it, “fry us” as they tried to guard them. They weren’t themselves, or at least not the team that took the court fewer than 48 hours earlier. If what followed that win was a raucous celebration, the first practice back was the pulsating, unshakeable headache the following morning.
Better days may await and Thursday’s practice may be an aberration, but what Pitt is experiencing isn’t that unusual. Beating Duke, even when it is unranked, can be difficult to leave firmly in the past. It can elicit a feeling of accomplishment, even for a team like the Panthers whose season isn’t even halfway complete.
As they prepare to face Wake Forest on Saturday, they have to grapple not only with the victory against the Blue Devils, but with an 8-2 record that has earned the program attention and accolades after it spent much of the previous five years toiling in the proverbial shadows.
“We’ve always been the last-place team,” Toney said of his first two years with the program. “That’s something to motivate you and look back on. Every time you have a bad practice or something like that, you’ve got to look back on something like that. It feeds you.”
Toppling Duke — with its five national championships and as much name recognition as any team in the sport — is an achievement for almost any program, but moving on from a win against them might be just as much of a challenge.
In the six seasons before this current one, ACC opponents that had beaten Duke went 12-16 in their next game against an in-conference foe. In the past eight seasons, that mark has been 16-21.
“It’s such a big deal to beat Duke and you’re on such a high,” Pitt coach Jeff Capel, a former Duke player and assistant coach, said Thursday morning in an interview on 93.7 The Fan. “Afterward, you tend to let up.”
Whether it’s Duke or another one of their league’s elite teams, the Panthers haven’t done particularly well themselves after a big win in recent years. Actually, they’ve been pretty awful.
Since Feb. 2015, Pitt has won 11 regular season games against ACC teams ranked in the top 40 nationally by KenPom.com. In the previous 10 instances, with Tuesday’s Duke victory being the 11th, it lost its next game. Some of those setbacks were easy enough to explain. Three came against what were top-10 teams at the time and three others came against foes inside the top 40. None remains more of a head-scratcher than what transpired to open last season, when the Panthers beat then-No. 14 Florida State only to lose three days later to No. 273 Nicholls State. The last time it defeated Duke, a 76-62 win on Feb. 28, 2016, Pitt fell three days later at No. 88 Virginia Tech, which was 16-13 entering the matchup.
Even the Panthers’ last win following a top-40 triumph wasn’t exactly satisfying. Two days after beating No. 13 Notre Dame in Jan. 2015, Pitt struggled to beat Bryant, 72-67, in a game in which it trailed with 1:15 remaining against a low-major opponent ranked 236th nationally.
Wake Forest fits the profile of a team that could catch a surging opponent off guard. A once-proud program that has been firmly entrenched in the bottom third of the ACC standings for much of the past decade, the Demon Deacons were picked to finish last in the league’s preseason poll and are the lone ACC team without a conference win. Under first-year head coach Steve Forbes, though, they’ve shown vigor. Despite not having the talent and experience many other ACC teams possess, Wake Forest has lost three of its five ACC games by nine points or fewer. It has yet to win a game, but it hasn’t exactly been getting blown out.
“They’re 0-5, but we can’t look at it like that,” Johnson said.
Johnson knows the danger of Pitt’s current situation well. He was there last season for the Florida State and Nicholls State games. He also saw what happened his freshman season in 2018-19, when the Panthers knocked off a pair of top-40 teams, Louisville and Florida State, in six days only to go nearly two months until they got their next win.
Circumstances and fortunes can change quickly, but so, too, can players and teams. Past failures don’t dictate future performance. As Johnson sees it, this program and the players who inhabit it have changed, meaning what follows a notable accomplishment shouldn’t necessarily evoke dread and anxiety.
“We don’t have guys that overlook their role,” he said. “Back then, it was a young team. Everybody wanted the spotlight. We came back and we thought we were that, but we really weren’t. We’ve got to come with the same mentality and the same hunger every game. I think we’ve got that this year. We have three guys that have already been through that stage. We’ve just got to let the young guys know, ‘Y’all have got to bring it every game.’ Now, we’re the hunted. We’re not the hunters anymore.”
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG
First Published: January 21, 2021, 11:19 p.m.
