Older players boost the offense as younger ones hit the wall
Over the past several weeks, as some of Pitt’s youngest players have been struggling as they hit the much-referenced “freshman wall,” some of the team’s oldest players have seen their production increase.
On a team thin on offensive talent, senior Jared Wilson-Frame has played some of the best basketball of his career over the past two weeks, providing the Panthers with what likely is their secondmost reliable scoring option, and graduate transfer Sidy N’Dir has started to emerge as a much more potent threat over the past handful of games.
Since a Jan. 14 win against Florida State, a game in which he played a season-low 10 minutes and didn’t attempt a shot, Wilson-Frame has averaged 14.7 points and 5.5 rebounds per game over the past six games, all losses, while shooting 43.6 percent from 3point range. While his overall shooting percentage of 44.3 in that time isn’t particularly high, it’s a product of a disproportionate number of outside shots, as 55 of his 70 shot attempts in that span have come from 3-point range.
In those six games, his effective field-goal percentage, which takes into account that 3s are worth 50 percent more than 2-pointers, is 61.4 percent (were that translated over the course of the entire season, he would rank among the top 80 Division I players in that category).
In an overtime loss Tuesday at Wake Forest, he was especially effective, making five of his eight 3-pointers (the second-best single-game mark of his Pitt career) while adding three assists and three steals.
If the setback against the Demon Deacons, disheartening as it was, represented a continuation of proficiency for Wilson-Frame, it was a breakthrough for N’Dir.
Coming off the bench, the 6-foot-3 guard tallied a season-high 15 points in a season-high 31 minutes. When he was off the court, his absence was felt, as the Panthers scored only 17 points on 24 possessions without him (0.71 points per possession), compared to the 59 points on 49 possessions they had with him (1.2 points per possession).
Wilson-Frame was mired in a slump over a nine-game stretch in late December and early January, making 28.4 percent of his shots while seeing his scoring average fall nearly four points. The 6foot-5 wing credited the turnaround with a discussion he had with coach Jeff Capel in the days preceding a Jan. 20 loss at Syracuse, a talk that helped remove some of the mental clutter and anxiety that had been building for weeks.
N’Dir’s problems were more out of his control, as a leg injury sidelined him for almost a month (thankfully for Pitt, it only had four games in that time). After being eased back in, with a combined nine minutes in games against N.C. State and Florida State, he hasn’t played fewer than 13 since.
As encouraging as the recent play from the duo has been, it matters little to a team that has lost six consecutive games.
Another bad loss
The loss to Wake Forest stung not only because of the fashion in which it came — in overtime, which was only forced after the Demon Deacons made a layup just before the regulation buzzer — but because of the quality of opponent.
Wake Forest is ranked 179th among 353 Division I teams by KenPom.com, making it the second opponent outside the website’s top 150 Pitt has lost to this season (the other being No. 299 Niagara). Since the start of the 2016-17 season, the Panthers have lost four such games, including those two. In the 15 seasons before that, back to when the website began its rankings, they had only suffered three.
X marks his spot
Point guard Xavier Johnson’s team-high 23 points against the Demon Deacons marked the eighth time this season he scored at least 20. That ties him with Ricardo Greer for the most 20-point efforts as a Pitt freshman.