Panthers roll over Dukes by 21 points
Duquesne disappears in 2nd half
“We really had to settle down. It was a tough loss, the Iowa game, but we had to bounce back and re-find ourselves.” — Pitt freshman Trey McGowens, on the Panthers’ second-half mindset
With just under 12 minutes remaining Friday night in Pitt’s annual City Game against Duquesne, coach Jeff Capel huddled his team around him.
For long stretches, he saw a disjointed and somewhat dispirited group, one that was exemplifying the worst fears he had after an emotionally draining one-point loss at Iowa three nights earlier. But as the game wore on, he noticed a change within his team and with their ears hanging on his every word on a break, he wanted to make that known. “Now our team is back,” he said. The Panthers were back to many things in the second half of a 74-53 victory at PPG Paints Arena. They looked every part of a rapidly improved defense. They played with a certain fluidity that has been evident in many of their first eight games. And, for the purposes of Friday’s annual matchup, they were back to doing what many Pitt teams prior to them have done this century — beating the Dukes, and doing so convincingly.
Freshman Trey McGowens scored a team-high 14 points, going 10 of 12 from the free-throw line to lead a group of four Pitt scorers in double figures. The Panthers defense held Duquesne to just 24 points on 34.6 percent shooting in the second half to give the Panthers their 17th victory in the past 18 meetings against their crosstown rival. Of those 17 wins, 15 have been decided by at least 10 points.
After looking so unlike itself early, or at least what it has been in this early stretch of the marathon-like season, Pitt, by the time the final horn blared, looked every part of the promising unit that has emerged through its first eight games.
“Don’t let one game beat you twice,” McGowens said of Capel’s second-half message to his players. “We really had to settle down. It was a tough loss, the Iowa game, but we had to bounce back and refind ourselves.”
A matchup between two ascendant programs with exciting young talent didn’t look that for much of the game.
The teams combined to shoot just 38.6
percent from the field and 20.5 percent from 3-point range, with Duquesne struggling in particular with sloppy play, ending the night with 22 turnovers, off of which Pitt got 28 points. Both squads struggled in the first half and the early part of the second to develop any sense of a rhythm, as they collectively had eight players with at least two fouls by halftime on a night occasionally defined not by squeaking shoes on the court, but the blaring screech of the referees’ whistles.
“I just thought we were out of it,” Capel said. “When I say ‘out of it,’ sometimes you can want something so bad and it just messes with you because you’re not together, you’re not connected. Some things can turn into individual agendas, me against this guy and other things like that. I thought we were dealing with a lot of that stuff early in the game. To be honest with you, I wasn’t surprised with the start. I kind of anticipated it being a little like that.”
In the second half, at least for Pitt, that lethargy turned into something else.
It outscored Duquesne, 42-24, in the game’s final 20 minutes, aided by some of its youngest players such as McGowens and Xavier Johnson, the latter of whom had 10 points and five assists, but also received a boost from the steadying presence of its more experienced players, like junior Malik Ellison (13 points), senior Jared Wilson-Frame (12 points) and graduate transfer Sidy N’Dir (nine points and four assists).
N’Dir made the City Game Sidy’s Game in the final minutes, scoring five points over a stretch of 2:31 to extend Pitt’s lead to 16 with 4:37 remaining and turn what had been a closely contested, plodding game for much of the evening into a relative rout.
In their opponent, Duquesne’s players and coaches, themselves part of a significantly reconfigured team, saw something much different than they did the previous season.
“They’re much improved with a different coach,” Dukes guard Eric Williams said.
“[Former Pitt] Coach [Kevin] Stallings is a finesse guy who is a little more offensively oriented,” Duquesne coach Keith Dambrot added. “This team is more like Duke [where Capel played and was an assistant coach].”
And with that — between the young players and two coaches that are early in respective seven-year contracts — the first chapter of a new, perhaps rejuvenated, rivalry was written.