Pitt Loses When Playing on Opponent's Terms

A blueprint to beat the Pitt Panthers is now on film and teams will use it until it stops working.

PITTSBURGH -- Flordia did more than just hand the Pitt Panthers their first loss of the season in blowout fashion on national television last week - they truly exposed what has become a glaring weakness for this team. 

Binghamton knew it. Florida Gulf Coast knew it. The Gators knew it and Missouri followed suit. Pitt is struggling to deal with physicality and lets other teams' toughness dictate how they play. The Panthers were able to survive these flaws against teams that were smaller and less talented but high-majors have taken full advantage and handed them two losses in three games that have sent early excitement crashing back down to earth. 

“We kind of watched the film on them and they kind of struggled a little bit with pressure," Missouri's Sean East II said. "So we wanted to bring our pressure that we bring every day to them and see how they would handle it.” 

For the most part, Pitt played through contact with relative ease in the first half. In fact, it looked like they had put together a plan of attack based on their previous encounters with pressure and it was working. 

Instead of simply taking the hits, Pitt absorbed rough contact from a physical Missouri team and thrived playing through it. They drew fouls and got to the free throw line, scoring five of their first seven points and 12 of 35 first-half points from the charity stripe to cover for a difficult first 20 minutes of shooting from deep. It's an old basketball adage that if shots aren't falling, the solution is to put pressure on the rim, draw some fouls and hopefully get easy chances at points from the free throw line. 

But their reliance on the free throw line to put points on the board proved a double-edged sword, because even though they fouled quite a bit, Missouri was able to take Pitt out of a rhythm, with fouls and free throws halting the flow of the game. The Panthers had to fight tooth and nail for every point and it was, while admirable, not an efficient effort. 

“Free throws matter, but that puts a kind of stress on any team to not see field goals going down," Gates said. "They got to the foul line, yes, but [Bub] Carrington, [Blake] Hinson - they’re good players - but we just wanted to play how we play and see what the results would be.”

Pitt went on scoring droughts of 4:55 and 2:56 and did not make a field goal for an astonishing 8:55 of game time in the second half. As soon as Missouri could smell blood in the water, they pounced and stretched a five-point lead to 10 while the Panthers went cold.

Basketball is not a stagnant game. In football, basketball, tennis and plenty of other sports, the end of a play allows for everyone to get lined right back up, hit a hard reset and continue with players on mostly even footing. Basketball is constantly live and susceptible to direct influence from the play before. How the ball bounces off the rim on a miss, whether a turnover is kept within the lines or bounces out, who controls the ball first on a change of possession - it all matters to how the next play materializes. 

That's a fact that had benefitted the Panthers earlier this season, as they smoothly translated good defense to easy offense. Now, a higher level of skill and size has taken them out of their element. This wasn't the first time the Panthers had struggled to shoot but they had recovered by turning defense into the offense. That didn't happen this time because there were barely any opportunities to play with speed when Missouri employed full-court pressure. Nothing came easily for Pitt and that was by design. 

"It's a catch-22, the game of basketball, when you have a team that scored 100 points twice and they don't see that ball goes in," Missouri head coach Dennis Gates said. "They can see it go in, but not as much and that takes the rhythm out of an offensive system and I thought that gave us leverage to hold a good team like they are to 10 field goals in the first half - no matter how it came, right? And then six in a second half.”

Head coach Jeff Capel thought his team created and took good shots from their half court offense that simply did not fall but the issues were in the backcourt, where the Tigers expertly executed a game plan that forced the Pitt guards to play slower and work harder from the moment they took the ball. Missouri took the air out of the game and the Panthers deflated with it. 

The Panthers are undefeated when they score nine points or more off turnovers and 4-1 when they reach double-digit points on fastbreaks. They need chances to let their length and athleticism out in space every night, but especially when there appears to be a lid on the rim, and those chances rarely came against Missouri. 

"The offense always becomes better with defense," Hinson said about how they can continue to produce points when shots aren't falling. "We get in transition and a lot of times, especially for us, offense starts to get going. So that would be a good way to do it."

Instead, Pitt second-guessed, pulled back and failed to counter an opponent's pressure with some of their own. Adversity on the offensive end made them hesitant instead of hungry and affected their entire game. Following the loss, Pitt dropped from 46th in the country in adjusted tempo to 79th, according to KenPom. A team that has been fast and athletic for most of the year failed to be that in this game. They played on Missouri's terms and, unsurprisingly, lost. 

The silver lining is that Pitt is young and it's early. Their season won't be defined by one loss or even two. But with a talented, seasoned Clemson squad coming to town over the weekend, the Panthers can expect more of the same until they stop it. They've got four days to figure out just how they can do that. 

"I thought we got great looks. It was just one of those nights where we couldn’t make a shot," Capel said. "And for the first time this season, we allowed that to impact the game. We allowed it to impact the defense. We allowed it to impact everything. So it’s a learning lesson for us. You hate to do it in a loss, but we’ll learn from it, we’ll get better from it and we’ll be ready for the next one."

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