Not good so far this evening for the Big East with Notre Dame and Marquette falling.
Hopefully that was just a Pac-10 aberration.
9:27: Okay, just ugly shooting so far. Neither team looks particularly comfortable. There’s a good amount of bumping and physical activity. Pitt down 4-2 but Sam Young shooting foul shots after the break.
9:39: Pitt down 13-12, 10:20 until halftime.
Pitt 6-6 on free throws. Shooting struggles continue. Pitt forced a short flurry of turnovers and that resulted in Michigan State starting to hold onto the ball a bit more rather than trying to move the ball more. Right now the Spartans are hitting shots and Pitt is not.
9:47: Right now, the question is whether Pitt can shoot above 25% from the field before halftime. On the stunning side, Pitt is 8-8 on FTs.
9:55: Crap, but Neitzel is shooting well tonight. I guess on the positive side, MSU has been hot while Pitt is cold this half. Yet it is still quite close.
10:08: Fields did nearly everything in that half. That steal was tremendous, and he finished this time. Of course, the rest of the team stood there and watched as Kailan Lucas took it all the way and right to the hoop.
Pitt down 30-28. All told, Pitt should be happy to be down only 2. 9-29 shooting and being outrebounded. MSU shooting fantastic. 12-25 shooting, 4-5 on 3s.
Pitt has stayed close because of getting turnovers and shooting 8-8 from the line.
The team has to shoot better in the second half.
10:35: How can Pitt still be missing these shots? More activity on defense, but no conversions on offense.
11:32: Sorry, Pitt finally went on a run when I backed off any posts, so I went with it. That didn’t last. Kiddie stuff then interfered with any more posting.
So the season comes to an end. Looked like the legs were finally giving out on the players. So many shots that just seemed to hit the front of the rim.
Michigan State made the tough shots. Have to give the Spartans credit. Neitzel had the hot shooting game, they needed. Kalin Lucas was able to attack off the dribble and was simply faster.
Pitt missed the open looks. Unbelievable number of open looks — especially from the perimeter — that Pitt left short. Pitt shot 2-17 on 3s, which was somewhat offset by shockingly good FT shooting — 18-19.
DeJuan Blair struggled with too much size inside from Michigan State, and being the only Pitt player inside all too often. When Levance Fields is the second leading rebounder, that never bodes well.
Hate to see Ronald Ramon and Keith Benjamin go out like this. Neither of them able to do much on offense.
…it’s not my intention to rub salt into our wound, but FCS the guy sounds like a GD prophet.
The site says this about Robinson “Slightly undersized, Robinson does not appear to be a low-post terror. Watch him in action, a different opinion will form. Despite playing against players at least two inches taller, he is a rebounding machine. Averaged 17.1 points, 11.3 rebounds, 3.9 assists, 1.6 steals and 1.1 blocked shots heading in the PIAA Class AAAA state playoffs.”
256 more minutes
3 more FG made
7 less 3s
16 less points
His defensive stats improved, but he was brought onto the team to be a pure shooter. He never provided the offense this year that we thought he would.
Then again, he was invaluable in some games. If not for him, we may have been swept by WVU.
Nevertheless, I don’t think he met expectations.
I’m already looking forward to football and hoops 2008-2009.
People talk about physical play in the BE, but nobody in the BE puts that many big bodies on the court at Pitt faced last night. G-town has Hibbert and Pitino plays Padgett OR Caracter, and Adrien plays alongside Thabeet, but nobody has a front line like Izzo put out there.
Suton could have posted Young all night and Blair had a ton of trouble shooting over whoever was near him. You combine that with some hot Neitzel shooting (which has been missing most of this year) and Pitt was in trouble.
I’ll take a BE championship any year, though, so I consider it a very successful campaign given the team Dixon had.
I’ll give him a ton of credit for winning as many games as they did with Blair basically playing alone inside. I mean, what were Young and especially Benjamin supposed to do in the lane last night with all the big bodies around them?
He needs to get some front-line recruits in to support DeJuan now. He got desperate with Diggs and McGhee and they’re not the answer, but I can see why he had to do that because Biggs and Wallace have been disappointments.
It’s no fun playing against a bigger, stronger team……..and I doubt Dixon wants to find himself in that situation again.
I certainly believe Pitt could have won more games in the NCAAs this year had they gotten a different 2nd Rd matchup, but eventually they were going to come up against a team that doesn’t have a 6’7″ center, a 6’6″ PF and a 6’1″ 3-man.
Looking at last night’s game in retrospect could Dixon have done some things different.
I know we are a man to man team but having your outside scoring threat (Ramon 50% from 3-pt range) cover their little gnat nietzel man to man after playing 6 games in in 10 days seemed to be a bad call.
It appeared to me that once the outside perimeter threat appeared non-existent the MSU team collapsed the inside and made a very good defensive team look great.
Could Dixon have implemented a zone to give Ramon some rest?
Could they have decided to man up Nietzel with someone else? If so who?
It seemed like a tactical decision…
btw, do you think Sam Young’s poor performance bought us one more year?
thanks,
DaveD
PS…wow what a lousy night to make matters worse during the game I am eating dinner and I was getting so frustrated I nearly bit my tongue off…talk about adding salt to the wound 🙂
Scottie, nice post.
I hope JD spends the rest of the spring and summer getting these guys into shape. 4 games in 4 days should not be a factor going into the NCAA’s. These are 18-21 year-olds who grew up playing 4 games in one day in AAU ball.
Just look at AG all of last year or most of his Pitt career for that matter. “Lumbering” comes to mind. Then he gets himself into phenomenal shape to enter the NBA draft.
We didn’t get beat by a better team yesterday. We got beat by a better conditioned team. They had their legs, we lost ours. It’s not like we even had a full practice on Friday. They watched film and had a shoot-around and obviously worked on their free throws.
All of our losses in the NCAA’s the past few years we’ve been flat and slow. This has to stop and if JD wants to make a run prepare the players to run a marathon by training to run 2.
Great season however. BE Champs is great for this team and they should hold their heads high.
Spring practice here we come.
Being the BE champs is nice but a deeper run into the tourney is something we all want.
Nietzel worked for his shots and he converted with someone in his face, also we had poor shot selection, wait until next year…..
Hell I went to the game, talk about a rocky mountain let down….
1. Thank you Keith and Ronnie for believing in PITT…great careers, thank You!
2. Michigan State put a lot of people on the floor and they hit the boards hard. They wore us down, plus the altitude (and playing only 7 bodies) all add up to a team that played hard, but just ran out of gas. The shots that continually hit the front of the iron are usually (not always) indicative of not getting the jump in the legs. Regardless, they never quit.
3. We had 4 assists, not a hallmark of a passing team. Too often, we had little motion in the offensive flow…again, that might be just due to tired legs.
4.I do look forward to next year for the men, and wish the women all the best the rest of the way.
5. It was a good year, filled with great highs, and tough lows (the injuries and last night’s loss)….but in the end, these are our Panthers, and I love them!
6. Again, thank you Ronnie and Keith..and best wishes in whatever you do in life…you are always PITT Panthers!
Hail to PITT!
-al-
A zone defense would not have worked for us- Neitzel would have shot all over it, and we would have been outrebounded worse. I was thinking the switching defense we ran against Vaughn in the BE tourney, but that may not have worked with Neitzel zipping in and out. I think we just played the best D we could and weren’t tall enough to rebound and not big/deep enough to box them out.
Great run though, team. Thanks!
These kids grow up playing multiple games a day in AAU. The fact is, demanding practices should always be tougher physically than games. Games are the fun part where the exhausting practices pay off.
These tournament games are 40 mins of ball broken up by about 25 interruptions for TV timeouts, coaches timeouts and halftime. Unless you’re playing a team like Tennessee, it’s hard to break a sweat during one of these half-court games.
For everyone who thinks that being tired had something to do with it, were they tired every other game where they couldn’t hit any of there threes? I doubt it. I just think we don’t have good enough shooters to be consistent game in and game out when it comes to knocking down shots. I could be wrong, but it seemed like most of our losses came when we couldn’t hit our shots.
Going 18-19 from the line doesn’t seem like they were too tired either. And it’s extremely difficult to hit your fouls when you’re tired.
Im not sure what all this talk about “big men” and crap is. They had 4 guys in the lane bothering Blairs shots – thats why he was missing “layups.” The problem is the lack of making a single jumpshot the entire night.
I think our two biggest problems next year are A) a repeat of this performance cause we have no shooting guard as far as i can tell, and B) no depth after our front line. Who here wants to see a McGhee, Wannamaker, some freshman, and a JC transfer as your bench?
We better pray our starting 5 are ready to play 40 minutes a piece. They will be as good as any other starting 5 in the nation, but after that…ugh.
I’m just pissed off we went out this way. Why couldn’t we just get beat by a memphis or a UCLA? I sure as hell wasn’t pissed off like this last year. This game was just disgusting. Miss 800 open shots…awful…we beat ourselves to death.
They packed in the lane, fouled us if we drove, and let us shoot wide open jumpers (except fields). We just sucked ass.
Maybe we should have switched Fields to the 2 and had Ramon run the point…he’s the backup PG anyways, and was worthless at shooting…other than that, i have no idea how to deal with what we saw. You just don’t get better looks than we got all night. You just don’t…
If Sammie has dreams of going to the NBA, last night showed he is not ready.
I too went to the game, in short they laid an egg over the last 9 minutes of the game.
They had open looks, they beat themselves by shooting poorly