Pitt in hindsight
A phrase that came up after Pitt’s season-ending loss: Personal agendas.
GREENSBORO, N.C. — For more than two minutes, Trey McGowens stood there silently.
As Xavier Johnson — his backcourt mate for the vast majority of his 2,030 career minutes and a player who committed to coach Jeff Capel four days after McGowens did the same — took questions about Pitt’s 73-58 loss Wednesday against N.C. State, McGowens stood to his left, rocking his arms back and forth in unison, and alternating between stares down at the floor and into the distance of the event level of Greensboro Coliseum.
When it came time to speak, though, the 6-foot-4 sophomore’s words resonated. He and Johnson, arguably the team’s two most important players, were both presented with the query that essentially defined the Panthers’ season: What were the differences between the team that had its season end with a secondround ACC tournament loss, and the team from a month earlier that was 15-9 with seven regular-season games to go?
“We were just together at that point in time,” the softspoken McGowens said. “Nobody had their own personal agendas. Everybody was just together and just cared about winning.”
The 27 days that elapsed between the start of Pitt’s seven-game losing streak and the end of its 2019-20 season, with a win against Wake Forest sprinkled in right before the end, served as an extended autopsy of sorts. What went wrong? Where did the season fall apart? Why did things happen the way they did?
McGowens’ words, blunt as they were, would seem to add a different dimension to the discussion, focusing more on the internal dynamics of a relatively young team almost entirely unaccustomed to sustained success. What, exactly, do “personal agendas” entail? Was it players worrying too much about their stats? About the number of shots they were taking?
“A little bit of everything,” Johnson said.
All-encompassing as those reasons, factors and variables might be, what they created was a sharp, easily identifiable break in Pitt’s season: a Feb. 8 victory against Georgia Tech, improving the Panthers to 15-9 and 6-7 in the ACC. In those first 24 games, including the win against the Yellow Jackets, there was hope. In the nine games that followed it, a stretch in which Pitt went 1-8, there was despair.
“We had our spurts, but, when we had our mental losses, dudes got caught up in themselves,” Johnson said. “Me, personally, I’ll be honest, we got caught up in ourselves, listening to outside people. That just broke us up completely.”
Even aside from those drastically different records, there are other numbers that paint a larger, gloomier picture of the Panthers’ final nine ACC games than their first 13. (See chart below.)
Those differences, small as they may seem at first glance, added up. It’s how a team not only lost nearly as many games in one month as it had in the previous three, but how it was largely uncompetitive in doing so, a sudden shift from earlier in the season when, even when it lost, it at least was in the game.
The Panthers’ final eight losses came by an average of 13.3 points, with six of those games decided by 10 points or more. Their first nine defeats came by an average of 9.2 points and only three of those setbacks came by double digits.
The discontent McGowens and Johnson alluded to wasn’t felt by every player, or at least wasn’t expressed that way publicly.
After the loss Wednesday, freshman Justin Champagnie, the team’s leading scorer and rebounder, was asked about the highlight of his first season of college basketball. He deferred to heaping praise on his senior teammates and other departing players, a group that, outside of graduate transfer Eric Hamilton, combined to score only 14 points this season.
“They played a big impact on my game and who I am as a person,” Champagnie said. “I look up to them. I think that’s just a highlight of my season, just being with them and getting to know everybody on a personal level. These are my brothers for life, so that’s the best part of my season.”
Ultimately, fatigue might have played one of the biggest roles in the slide, simplistic as it may sound or seem. When a thin Pitt team that had four players averaging at least 30 minutes per game was relatively healthy, had longer breaks between games and hadn’t yet been worn down by the rigors of a season, it excelled. When all that disappeared, it disintegrated.
“Those guys that stepped up and that played a lot of minutes, they didn’t get any rest, really,” Hamilton said. “Playing two games a week in arguably the best conference in college basketball, it puts a taxation on your body, especially considering it is a young team. If it was an older team, maybe we’d be a little more experienced with taking care of our bodies and being a little bit more professional. I’ve got faith that they’ll definitely learn that, either next year or as they get older.”
Now, with almost eight months separating them from their next official game, the Panthers will have more than enough time to rest. The team that will take the court then will be different, after the addition of three freshman signees, the eligibility of a touted transfer and other moves that come to fill a still-open scholarship or others that might become available with additional player departures. The Panthers will only wait for that day to come for so long, though.
“It’s time to work for real,” Johnson said when asked about what comes next and whether he’ll take time off. “It’s time.”
A statement like that is the result of a team that has now spent weeks thinking of how its season was squandered. And it might just be a sign that a group that needed to mature — and perhaps still does — is ready to do just that.