Jeff Capel loves Jay-Z, an affection that goes beyond the man’s music.
The Pitt men’s basketball coach has said before that he has a Jay-Z song or lyric that he can associate with almost everything there is. They tell stories and, in some cases, help explain the world. When it comes to Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, for example, he sees elements of his former coach and mentor embodied in the words of “Most Kingz,” a song in which the Brooklyn-born rapper bemoans life at the top of his profession, the attention and envy it can bring, and the metaphorical target it puts on one’s back.
As for Capel’s own team? Well, there’s a Jay-Z lyric for the Panthers, too.
It was all good just a week ago.
Nine days ago, as Pitt was preparing to play Wake Forest, it was in as advantageous a position as it had been in years. The Panthers were 8-2 after a win against Duke, keeping them just one game out of first place in the ACC standings. NCAA tournament dreams seemed more viable than they have in years. With a win against Wake Forest, it was quite possible they would find themselves ranked for the first time since Jan. 2016.
Since then, a once-promising season has taken an unexpected and equally abrupt nosedive. Pitt has lost each of its past three games after an 84-58 loss Saturday against Notre Dame, a setback that knocked it back to 90th in the NCAA’s NET rankings, an important metric used in determining the NCAA tournament field.
The loss to the Fighting Irish inflamed whatever concerns already existed, presenting distressing signs that didn’t previously exist. The previous two losses were explicable in some way. Wake Forest shot 47% from 3-point range, saw a player averaging eight points per game go off for 31 points and despite all of that, the Panthers were an open 15-footer away from winning. North Carolina, with two 6-foot-10 forwards in its starting lineup, was a terrible matchup.
Notre Dame, though? That was something much more distressing, a game in which Pitt lost by 26 to a team that was just 2-6 in ACC play entering the day. It was an implosion that went beyond numbers, seen in moments like the team’s starting point guard fouling out with nearly 12 minutes still to play and its starting shooting guard being hit with a technical foul in the final four minutes and, despite having just two fouls, walking off the court and back to the locker room after an exchange with coach Jeff Capel.
It was a mess reminiscent of some of the program’s lowest moments in its two-year run under Kevin Stallings. Maybe more alarming than that, though, are the fears such an uninspired showing elicited, especially after what has happened to Pitt around this point in each of the past two seasons.
Are the Panthers, for the third time in as many years under Capel, about to begin a prolonged, late-season slide?
“I try not to think about the first or second year,” Capel said Monday. “My focus has been on right now. We’ve lost three games.”
It’s a question that will be answered in the coming days and weeks, particularly in the next three games, all of which come against teams in the top five of the ACC standings. But how the Panthers got to this point in just over a week is worth examining. If these things can be improved, so, too, can their fortunes.
Their defense has fallen off a cliff
While Pitt’s defense wasn’t as good as some of the sport’s go-to metrics indicated — mainly because those numbers were boosted by opponents shooting uncharacteristically poorly from 3 — it was solid, reliable and consistent, at the very least.
In the past three games, it has been anything but. In those contests, the Panthers have gone from stingy and feisty to porous and shaky. Just take a look at some of their key defensive statistics in the past three games and compare them to their first six games against major-conference opponents this season.
Points per possession
First six games: 0.95
Past three games: 1.18
(At the pace Pitt plays, that’s the difference between giving up 67 and 83 points in a game)
Opponents’ field goal percentage
First six: 38.5%
Past three: 51.7%
Opponents’ 3-point percentage
First six: 25.3%
Past three: 43.8%
Opponents’ 2-point percentage
First six: 49%
Past three: 57.4%
“We have not played well defensively,” Capel said. “We have not rebounded like we did during the first four ACC games, the first eight or nine games we played before then. We have to be better on that end, on that side of the ball.”
Two of their top three scorers are struggling
A good deal of Pitt’s offensive success was built on a potentially fragile foundation — relying overwhelmingly on three players to produce.
When all three of them — Justin Champagnie, Au’Diese Toney and Xavier Johnson — were clicking, as they were against Syracuse, the Panthers were sublime. Even just two of them having a great game produced results worth celebrating. Over the past three games, though, two of them have been in a rut, and the effect it has had on their team is obvious.
During the three-game losing streak, Toney and Johnson have combined to average just 17.7 points per game while making just 21 of their 61 shots (34.4%).
Johnson’s turnovers, a lingering source of frustration, haven’t been that much worse in the past three games, as he’s only averaging 0.5 more turnovers per game in that time than he was in the first six Power Five games, and his assists have gone up in that time, from 5.3 per game in the first six to six per game in the past three.
Other splits have been more noticeable.
Toney
First six Power Five games: 17 points per game, 8.6 rebounds per game, 25 of 58 shooting (43.1%), 6 of 18 from 3 (33.3%), 8 free throw attempts per game
Past three games: 9 points per game, 4 rebounds per game, 11 of 32 shooting (34.4%), 1 of 9 from 3 (11.1%), 1.3 free throw attempts per game
Johnson
First six: 13.7 points per game, 21 of 68 shooting (30.9%), 11 of 34 from 3 (32.4%), 5.8 free throw attempts per game
Past three: 8.7 points per game, 10 of 29 shooting (34.5%), 1 of 7 from 3 (14.3%), 2.3 free throw attempts per game
While not speaking specifically about Toney or Johnson, Capel has been outspoken this season about how playing during a pandemic and all that comes with it has affected players, be it on his team or elsewhere. It doesn’t absolve players from their subpar play being examined, but it does provide context.
“I understand that everyone has a job to do,” Capel said Monday. “Certainly, these young people playing helps all of us. It gives work to do. It gives us things to do. But I imagine they’re at times judged like it’s normal. I don’t think that’s fair to them. I don’t know what’s being said about my team or my players or anything like that because I don’t read it, but I know I’ve read some things about other teams that are struggling, some things that are maybe negative. I understand everyone has a job to do, but at times, it’s like we’re trying to normalize this. Nothing that they’re going through is normal. I would hope the young people especially would be given some grace for what they’re trying to accomplish.”
They’re playing much slower
For a program that had been known for its grinding, unhurried pace for years, a number of which were overwhelmingly successful, the start to the 2020-21 season was a bit of a blur — quite literally, as the Panthers were among the 100 fastest teams in Division I, as measured by possessions per game. The last time they had finished in the top 100 in tempo? All the way back in the 1996-97 season, before the entirety of its roster was born.
They were doing well with that stylistic switch, but since the win against Duke, they’ve slowed down considerably. Of Pitt’s seven lowest-possession games this season, three have come in the past nine days. In that time, it has averaged 65.7 possessions per game, down from the 69.2 it averaged in its first six games against Power Five foes.
In those six games, it averaged 13.7 fast-break points per contest, a number that rises to 14.8 if a game against Louisville when Pitt was without Champagnie and Toney is excluded. In the past two games, it has just 12 fast-break points total. With the personnel and relative lack of size this team has, it’s at its best when it’s in transition, using the speed and athleticism of Johnson, Toney and Champagnie to create mismatches and score points.
If some of these differences seem small, they’re really not. They’re the kind of variables that turn a close, competitive game into a win or loss. And as Pitt has seen this year (and the past two), one loss can turn into five or more awfully quickly.
Note
On Monday, Champagnie was one of 20 players to be named to the Wooden Award late season watch list. The Wooden Award is given annually to the most outstanding player in college basketball.
He becomes the 16th Wooden Award candidate in Pitt history and will look to become the program’s first finalist for the honor since DeJuan Blair in 2009. Among the other players to make the cut was Minnesota guard Marcus Carr, who played his freshman season at Pitt before transferring after the firing of Stallings in 2018.
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG
First Published: February 1, 2021, 9:44 p.m.
