For months, Jeff Capel prepared for Pitt’s 2021-22 season with two players prominently in mind.
Over the span of just seven days in early November, with the Panthers’ season nearing tip-off, he lost both of them, with Nike Sibande tearing his ACL in a Nov. 1 exhibition victory and Ithiel Horton getting arrested following a late-night incident on the South Side on Nov. 6, prompting his indefinite suspension from the program two days later.
Thirteen games into the season, one of those players is now back.
While Sibande’s knee injury will keep him sidelined for the rest of the season, Horton was reinstated to the program on Dec. 30, hours after the four criminal charges he was facing were dismissed. The preseason plans Capel crafted around Horton can’t erase what happened in the season’s first two months — unfortunately for Pitt, those losses to The Citadel and UMBC aren’t going anywhere — but they’re suddenly relevant and helpful for the next two months.
As the vast majority of the ACC schedule awaits, the Panthers have one of their best offensive players back at their disposal.
“He gives us another guy with some pop,” Capel said Monday. “What I mean by that is he can get by you offensively, he can compete and he just has a different speed that we haven’t had this season.”
More than anything else, Horton provides Pitt with some of the outside shooting it has so obviously lacked for much of the season. The New Jersey native shot 37.1% from 3-point range last season, the second-highest mark on the team among players with at least four attempts. When asked before the season about that figure, Horton corrected the questioner by saying that wasn’t even that good of a mark. For him, it’s really not. As a freshman at Delaware during the 2018-19 season, he shot 40.9%. Now, he rejoins a team that is shooting 29.8% from 3, ranking it 297th among 358 Division I teams.
That extra shooting could remove some of the burden from leading scorer John Hugley, who has regularly been hit with double teams whenever he receives the ball on the low post, and give the 6-foot-9 sophomore another shooter to kick out to from the post if the defense collapses on him. Even beyond Hugley, opposing defenses won’t be able to pack inside the arc to the same extent they were previously, which could open up driving lanes, even if it’s only so helpful for a Pitt team without speedy dribble penetrators.
Of course, it will take some time to work Horton back into a team that had begun to develop an identity and a level of cohesion without him. Then there’s Horton himself trying to get himself back to where he was two months ago. While he was suspended, the 6-foot-5 guard was unable to work out with the team or its coaches. When Horton resumed practicing with the team last Friday, a day after his reinstatement, Capel said the junior exhibited some rust, which is to be expected given the circumstances.
“It’s great to have him back, but we have to be realistic right now,” Capel said. “He hasn’t played basketball in two months. He hasn’t played five-on-five in two months. As good as he is, I don’t care who you are, there’s a rhythm that comes with the game, from being under a whistle, with fans being in the stands and from all those different things. We know that’s going to take time.”
Horton’s reinstatement doesn’t come without some lingering questions. The district attorney’s office said last week that it expects the police officer that Horton allegedly hit to refile the charges after he had a scheduling conflict with the preliminary hearing last Thursday in which the charges were dropped. If that happens, the program would have to decide whether to allow him to continue to play or suspend him again.
“I can’t answer that,” Capel said Monday when asked what effect re-filed charges would have on Horton’s playing status. “I know that he’s with us right now. I don’t know anything about the case. We haven’t asked Ithiel about it. We’ve concentrated on the present. Those aren’t things we get involved with.”
Though Capel didn’t specify when Horton would be back on the court for a game — Pitt plays again Wednesday at Louisville — his return to the roster should provide a boost to an offense that has been respectable of late after struggling mightily the first month of the season.
In the Panthers’ past six games, they’ve scored 369 points on 363 possessions (1.02 points per possession) after scoring just 426 points on 439 possessions in their first seven contests (0.97 points per possession). In those six most recent games, they’ve averaged more than one point per possession four times, something they managed only twice in the first seven games. Though it came in a loss, Pitt put forth one of its best offensive performances of the season in a 68-67 setback Dec. 28 against Notre Dame, a game in which it averaged 1.12 points per possession and shot 45.1% from the field, the latter of which was its best mark in more than a month.
Hugley was instrumental in that effort, scoring a team-high 18 points and prompting Fighting Irish coach Mike Brey to remark after the game that “the big fella is just a bear.”
“He had 18, but it felt like he had 40,” Brey said.
It’s been more than just Hugley. Guard Femi Odukale, who has languished offensively much of this season despite being the team’s No. 2 scorer, has averaged 20.5 points and shot 56.5% from the field in the past two games. Over the past four games, guard Jamarius Burton, the team’s third-leading scorer, has averaged 15.5 points and shot 45.1% overall. Forward Mouhamadou Gueye has emerged as a capable and versatile fourth scorer, averaging 14.7 points per game while shooting 50% overall and from 3 over the past three games.
“He helps us with spacing,” Capel said of Gueye. “There are some things he can do athletically that we don’t have anyone else that can do. It’s imperative for him to be on the floor for us.”
Now, he’ll be joined out there by another player who’s just as imperative — if not more so — for a team that’s hoping to make what it can of what remains of its season.
Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG
First Published: January 4, 2022, 2:58 p.m.
