Stallings in first year, second time around
Still believes in team despite roster overhaul
CHARLOTTE, N.C. — There were weeks in the summer when Pitt’s campus was largely empty and its basketball facility even emptier.
Jonathan Milligan occasionally thinks back to those days, when he and fellow senior Ryan Luther accounted for the entire men’s basketball team. It was, if nothing else, just a tad surreal.
“It was me and Ryan just sitting there,” Milligan said. “It was pretty bland.”
It was a development that, for Panthers players, came somewhat suddenly. For fans, the wholesale change was even more abrupt. But shortly after Kevin Stallings became Pitt’s coach, he knew this sort of a titanic shift was a possibility. Through the early games of the 2016-17 season, he quickly realized it was inevitable.
Stallings’ first season at the school saw a team with four senior starters — two of whom are among the top 11 scorers in program history — underachieve and limp to a 16-17 record. As much as he accepted that those were his players, even though he didn’t recruit him, that team was an outlier in Stallings’ overall plans.
This season, with 11 new players, is what he describes as “the second first year.”
“Last year was going to be whatever it was,” Stallings said Wednesay at the ACC’s men’s basketball media day. “I didn’t know what it would be. But I knew this year would be the beginning of our program getting established and our program getting footing and the building blocks being put in place of ultimately what we hope we could become.”
Stallings’ initial suspicions about the turnover he would face didn’t make him hesitant to leave Vanderbilt and accept the Pitt job, nor were they a product of a special sense of foresight. At least initially, it was tied to how the Panthers’ classes were staggered.
Lean recruiting years in the later part of former coach Jamie Dixon’s tenure made Pitt a top-heavy team last season, with four seniors among their six leading scorers and only two non-seniors averaging more than 2.2 points per game. Knowing he was set to lose 80 percent of his starting lineup, Stallings relied heavily on his more experienced players, particularly as some of the freshmen and sophomores didn’t show signs of development in game action.
Hecould understand their frustrations with not playing and knew many would leave because of that. It was then, in the final weeks of fall, he grasped the enormity of what he was about to face. Months later, it came to fruition, as five players transferred and another was dismissed.
“I was OK with that because some things needed to happen for us to get things going the way we need them to get going,” Stallings said. “While it looked bad publicly with guys leaving and all that stuff, sometimes there are just necessary evils to getting to a place where you can start building the way you need to build.
“For those that were close enough to the program, they could see that. One kid was kicked off the team. Nobody else was told they had to leave. They chose to leave because they knew it wasn’t the right level for them. They knew that. I think you could see that by where they transferred to. In a day and age where kids are all transferring up, we didn’t have transferring up going on with that.”
Rebuilt rosters in Stallings’ second season at a school have been the norm. His second team at Illinois State had to replace what he recalled to be five seniors and proceeded to win 20 games. At Vanderbilt, he lost four players from his first team, including a Southeastern Conference player of the year.
Such overhaul at Pitt has created skepticism, exhibited by the Panthers’ lastplace selection Thursday in the ACC’s preseason poll released. The influx of new players, however, has often been invigorating.
“You could get a group of guys that are young and immature, but you could also get a group of guys that are mature and they’re willing to work,” Milligan said. “I had a grace period where I got to feel out the guys and I got to be around them and got to get to know them. That’s a lot of the reason why I decided to stay, because of the group of guyswe had.”
“For the number of guys that came in, I think it turned out about as well as it could,” Luther said.
It can be difficult to find hope for a team so likely to struggle, but Stallings is trying his best.
He thinks back to his 200304 Vanderbilt squad, which lost several key pieces from an 11-18 team only to win 23 games and advance to the Sweet 16. A more recent, and perhaps more relevant, example comes from last season’s Georgia Tech team, which was picked 14th in the ACC preseason poll and lost its four leading scorers from the previous season before winning 21 games and advancing to the NIT championship.
Stallings doesn’t know how this team will fare, but he believes in the group he has assembled.
“Of course we’re hopeful,” he said. “Do we realize there are tall challenges? Absolutely. But do we think we have some good players? Yes, we do.”