Pitt dropped a disappointing loss to fall to 13-7, 6-3 in the ACC in a 71-64 defeat to a 7-13 Florida State team. But what led to it could be bad signs of what could befall Pitt if those things aren’t fixed with coming opponents like Wake Forest on Wednesday and Miami on Saturday.
Good
The best part of Pitt’s game Saturday was how it came out of the locker room in both halves. To start the game, Pitt looked like it asserted dominance with runs of five and six points to help open up a 15-5 lead with 14:46 left in the first half. At that point, the Panthers looked like the better ACC team that would do what it was supposed to do against a lesser opponent.
“We got off to a really good start,” coach Jeff Capel said after the game. “We had really good energy to start the game in the first five-and-a-half minutes.”
The problem came when Pitt allowed a 20-2 run for Florida State just after the 15-5 start. The pace that was dictated by Pitt’s athleticism in the opening minutes was gone, and the Panthers got stuck too long in offensive sets that relied on their one-on-one play and killed their ball movement.
But out of the second half, the Panthers seemed to find their groove again. Blake Hinson had shot a combined 3 of 16 from the field across Pitt’s win over Louisville on Wednesday and the Panthers’ first half against Florida State. But in the second half, Hinson made four of seven 3-pointers, scoring three of them in the first seven minutes.
That’s the “convenient amnesia” Capel described as part of Hinson’s shooting game when he spoke about it after Pitt’s win over Virginia on Jan. 3.
Hinson’s shooting boosted Pitt to a 21-6 run to open the second half and retake the lead 50-45 with 12:34 left in the game. But again, Florida State got control of the game after junior guard Darin Green Jr. hit three jump shots, two of them 3-pointers, as part of his 24-point night that led both sides.
“He’s a really good player,” Capel said of Green Jr. “He shoots with range, knows how to move without the basketball and understands how to get open. There’s an art to that; whether it’s reading screens, getting lost in transition, off of turnovers, he does a really good job of that. And he hit some tough ones, too.”
The starts were nice, but Pitt needed to finish better, and it proved costly in a winnable conference game.
Bad
Pitt’s offensive attack has to learn to shift gears faster.
Bad shooting is one thing, but the Panthers’ inability to find good looks is a very fixable aspect of their game that led to Florida State’s biggest runs. Pitt only made two of its final 17 shots in the final 12:51 of the first half, and it was during that stretch that Florida State turned a one-point Pitt advantage into a 39-29 lead for the Seminoles.
“I didn’t like the energy we played with in the final 14 minutes of the first half,” Capel said. “We didn’t move the ball as well as we needed to in the first half. We tried to take advantage of their five switching, but we weren’t moving it after we had that. We just tried to play one on one. When we started the second half, we did a much better job of moving the basketball, getting off of it and finding guys.”
That pace of relying too much on one-on-one basketball was the weakness that reared its head in Pitt’s loss to Clemson last Saturday. It’s fine when Hinson, Jamarius Burton and Nike Sibande are able to score that way, but ACC teams will adjust to that and force Pitt to communicate better on offense.
The Panthers’ best moments came when their ball movement found open players for looks in the paint, where Pitt outdid Florida State for a 30-20 advantage. But it wasn’t enough.
Ugly
The Panthers’ defense crumbled in the face of terrific shooting from the Seminoles on Saturday. Some of the shots Florida State hit in the first half were just good shots in the face of contested defense. The Seminoles had to finish the first half with their final eight made shots being jumpers as the Panthers controlled the paint and only allowed three layups.
But in the second half, that changed. Florida State scored a combined five layups and dunks in the second half, each of them coming from late switches off poor communication from the Panthers.
“We allowed our inability to make shots to affect our defense,” Capel said. “We did not defend up to our standards and like we need to in order to win basketball games in this league. They shot 51% from the floor, 50% on 3-pointers. That’s not going to win you a lot of games. We have to do a better job there. We’ve been pretty good on that side of the ball all season.”
Pitt had allowed the second-lowest shooting percentage to opponents in the ACC coming into Saturday at 40.5%. Florida State’s 51% broke past that and set a different tone than Pitt has seen in most of its wins.
If the Panthers hope to hold up as a team that could make the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2015-16, that brand of defense must return.
Christopher Carter: ccarter@post-gazette.com and on Twitter @CarterCritiques
First Published: January 22, 2023, 3:00 p.m.
