First dose of adversity tests Pitt
Young team hopes to shake off 1-point loss to Iowa while also learning from it
As it flew over the snowcovered cornfields and frigid lakes of the Midwest early Wednesday, the plane transporting the Pitt men’s basketball team home from Iowa was quiet.
The stillness was less a symptom of players and coaches sleeping than it was of those same people mulling over what had unfolded hours earlier, when the Panthers fell to No. 14 Iowa, 69-68, in a game they just as easily
and perhaps should have — won. Even after they landed and players such as Malik Ellison arrived home, moving on wasn’t as simple as crashing on a bed or couch and letting a fatigued body drift to sleep.
“We felt like we were better than that team,” Ellison said. “There was just certain plays down the stretch that if we would’ve executed this better, executed that better, it would’ve been a better outcome for us.”
Over the first three weeks of the season, as his team raced to a 6-0 start, Pitt coach
Jeff Capel talked about the importance of being able to handle success, of an inexperienced bunch finding a hard-to-achieve balance between cherishing every step of their journey and maintaining a certain hunger that allows them to focus wholly on the necessary aspects of the game. Now, for the first time this season, those same players have to handle a setback, one that came in excruciatingly close fashion.
The result of that process won’t be fully clear until the Panthers’ annual City Game on Friday against Duquesne (4-1), but the first step of it was made when Capel met with his team in the locker room of Carver-Hawkeye Arena. In there, he saw a group that was far more dejected that it lost than content that it only lost by a point.
“First and foremost, I think they were very hurt,” Capel said. “It was a hurt locker room after the game because we felt like we were in a position to win. I was glad to see that. The thing I didn’t want to see was everyone just OK with being close because that’s not why any of us are here. I don’t think we have that.”
That pain came from a place of confidence, as Ellison said even before the game that Pitt felt like it was the better team. When players and coaches met the next day, the mentality, cliché as it is, was focusing on the next game — but not without taking something away from the previous one.
The game and experience, as Capel sees it, provided a valuable lesson. Mistakes were made that can be corrected in the future, from the 12 secondhalf turnovers to the occasional defensive breakdowns, the former of which Capel said is “hopefully an aberration” for a team that, despite its relative youth, is mindful with the ball.
More than anything, Capel believes his players simply have to learn to win games like Tuesday’s, ones against talented teams on the road in which a fleeting moment or two is the difference between a win and a loss. It’s something not even the Panthers’ older players are particularly familiar with, at least not at Pitt, which had previously never been within seven points in the final two minutes against a major-conference opponent on the road in any of the players’ time at the school.
Pain one day, they hope, will lead to prosperity another.
“At some point, we’ll be in that position again,” Capel said. “It could be tomorrow, where we have to learn from it. Hopefully, we’re better when we’re in a situation like that again.”
Against the Dukes, they will have the challenge of managing emotions against an often motivated rival from a smaller school and a smaller conference.
What will emerge from the aftermath of the Iowa loss, if all goes as planned, will be a hyper-focused, resilient group fueled by a cocktail of anger and excitement that will bring out the best version of a still-developing team. If it’s not anything close to that, a twomile bus ride from PPG Paints Arena could feel just as long, and be even quieter, than a 650-mile flight from Iowa.
“We feel that we’re the better team, so we’re going to go in there tomorrow thinking we’re the better team,” Ellison said. “We’re going to fight, and we’re just going to prove that we are the better team. We’re going to come out with a victory.”