Oh, boy.

That new team smell wore off real fast.

83-78 in OT. In front of a home crowd just north of 3,000.

The backcourt of Montana — their admitted strength — just destroyed Pitt. All game long. On offense. Forcing turnovers.

And those turnovers. They flashed a graphic showing that Montana had scored 30 points off of turnovers to Pitt’s 6. That’s in no small part because the turnovers by Montana often led to easier baskets. Easy transitions. Steals in the backcourt with no one able to recover. It was painful.

The Panthers (0-2) allowed their opponent to operate offensively with little resistance, as 28 of Montana’s 66 shot attempts were layups and exactly half of its 30 made shots came at the rim. Guard Michael Oguine, who averaged 11.9 points per game last season, embodied that onslaught, finishing with 29 points and making eight of his 15 shots from inside the 3-point arc. The most effective defense against him came not from Pitt, but from the free-throw line, where he went just seven of 12.

“I feel like maybe they weren’t expecting me to drive as much as I was,” Oguine said. “I feel like they were kind of playing off me. I was really able to get them at a stand-still, get them off balance with a couple of dribbles and go to the rim.”

Pitt tried making adjustments defensively, opting to trap or provide help defense when a player penetrated into the lane. As their defense collapsed to close those lanes, however, it provided the Grizzlies with open looks from 3-point range.

The defense has sieve-esque. Montana had no problem penetrating. They could crash the boards without an issue. There was a lack of urgency even in the waning minutes or in overtime from this Pitt squad. Not that they didn’t care, but that they just didn’t seem to have the awareness that another gear was needed.

My biggest concern is that this did not look like a team. There are players. And some good ones at that. But not a team. Yes, it’s loaded with freshmen and new faces. The only returning players were non-starters. One who was injured for half the season, the other a deep reserve. They simply don’t know each other and don’t yet know how to play together.

In a situation like that, the team has to lean heavily on the coach to get them to be a unit. That means constantly communicating from the bench — and it shouldn’t be hard to hear him when the attendance is that low. It calls for, dare I say it, some micromanaging from the bench.

To Stallings, all that comes with the maturation process will have to take a back-seat to the process itself.

“I can’t worry about records or if we’re this or if we’re that,” he said. “My concern is trying to help these guys grow and, at this juncture, helping them maintain some confidence and supporting them so they know their coaches are planted firmly right beside them. We’re going to do the best we can with this thing.”

That, though, isn’t Kevin Stallings’ style. He’s of the coaching philosophy of play and play fast. Let the kids make the mistakes on the court and learn from them. Not call timeouts and disrupt the flow of the game. (Watching last night, I couldn’t help but think Ben Howland would have burned through all the timeouts in the first 6 minutes of the game, and Jamie Dixon might have made it 15.) In practices, or watching game tape. That’s where he’ll try to make the improvements.

That leads to the things Pitt players and coaches talked about after the game.

Montana also outscored Pitt 42-40 in the paint and scored 30 points off 19 turnovers.

“Give some credit to them,” Luther said. “But a lot of that was bad decision-making. I had a couple bad decisions, so it probably started with me. We’ve got to take better care of the ball.”

Stallings lamented poor shot selection, as Pitt shot 44 percent for the game. After building a seven-point lead, the Panthers made just 2 of 9 shots over the final eight minutes in the first half.

“It felt like we were fighting it the whole night,” Stallings said. “We don’t value the right kind of shots.”
…
Luther’s emphatic dunk gave the Panthers a four-point edge with four minutes to go. Turnovers negated that momentum, though, and Michael Oguine hit back-to-back 3-pointers for Montana.

“We were way too inconsistent,” Luther said. “We had too many stretches when we didn’t play (defense).”

Not even going to talk about the attendance right now. That’s a different problem, that won’t be resolved this season.