6pm.

ESPN2.

Home game and Pitt is wearing retro (soon to be the regular) unis.

After getting absolutely destroyed by Clemson this past week, Pitt is going to look to play a little more defense and hope that their opponent doesn’t shoot 3s at a level they had not done the entire season.

Look, Pitt did not do well on defense against Clemson. No question the Panthers came out flat and basically let Clemson play downhill the entire first half.

Capel, the coach of what he called a “fatigued” Pitt team, said the Panthers offered “no resistance.” He compared Pitt’s defensive effort in the first half to “a shootaround.” A shootaround is a light practice where one team does nothing but casually shoot with no defenders. There may not be a worse indictment of a team by its coach.

Still find myself giggling that Jerry DiPaola felt it important to define what a shootaround is.

The thing is, even in a shootaround, Clemson wouldn’t hit 3s at the rate they did that night. To that degree, there isn’t much that could be done. You almost have to shrug it off when a team that came in at under 30% as a team and no single player better then 35% was hitting 3s — open and otherwise — at the rate they did.

Not that it is an excuse for the way they lost. Just as being worn down at this point is much of an excuse. The kids may not have fully known what was coming, but they had a good inkling. Still, there is patience and understanding at this point.

“If we play hard and we do everything we can control at our level, we’ll live with the result,” he said Thursday after practice. “For us, it’s not necessarily about just the result.

“It’s things in the game that we can control that we aren’t doing. Our level of concentration, our attention to detail, how hard we play in different moments, how mentally tough we are. Those are things we should be able to control, and we haven’t done that.”

The chief culprit at Clemson was poor defense.

“We were being selfish. People were getting beat off the dribble,” freshman guard Xavier Johnson said. “There was no help side. We have to get back to doing that.”

Capel recognizes his young team with little depth — now missing Au’Diese Tony (hand) and Terrell Brown (strep throat) — has a formidable task in the ACC, a conference with seven teams in the Associated Press Top 25. It doesn’t get any easier, even with unranked Syracuse (15-6, 6-2) coming to Petersen Events Center on Saturday. The Orange already defeated Pitt (12-9, 2-6), 74-63.

The difficulty of the schedule is part of the reason Capel didn’t lose his temper Tuesday at Clemson when an unranked team that had lost five of its previous six games led by 28 at halftime. He is trying to keep this season in perspective while starting three freshmen.

And some of it is simple realism. It’s not like Pitt can go “next man up” off the bench if someone is having a bad game. Or even struggling to stay focused in a game. There’s only so much flexibility.

And in comes Syracuse. A good team but not a very good team. A team that gets on the fringe of the top-25 most of this season. As much for its rep/coach as for what they have actually done.

They have more talent then Pitt right now. Especially inside. Their zone allows much better protection against penetration and drives to the basket. Their defensive strength is exactly the thing that beats Pitt’s offense this year.

A team that counts on driving straight to the hoop. Not crisp passing for open looks. Not finding someone in the middle of the zone. Hell, not even guards that shoot 3s. We all saw that a couple weeks ago. This new version of Pitt is the kind of team that Syracuse is built to beat.

So, for Pitt to win this one. The Panthers have to either find the space and movement to attack and penetrate. Or they have to have their own kind of Clemson game where they hit everything from outside.