PANTHERS STUMBLE AGAINST LOUISVILLE
Champagnie, team’s leading scorer and ACC’s leading rebounder, is sidelined until February
When Tim O’Toole arrived with Jeff Capel in the spring of 2018 to piece back together a thoroughly broken Pitt men’s basketball program, the newly hired group of coaches knew right away that a culture that was unmistakably their own had to be established.
The ideal and the plan upon which they settled, as O’Toole explained, is built around four major pillars. First and foremost, appreciate what you have. Second on the list is keeping promises. The third is that, as O’Toole put it, “we show up.”
It was the fourth of those foundational tenets, those rules to live by, that O’Toole couldn’t take his mind away from following Pitt’s 64-54 loss against Louisville Tuesday night at Petersen Events Center. It ate away at him. That principle?
“We will make no excuses,” O’Toole said after the game. “None.”
The Panthers (5-2, 1-1 ACC), if they wanted, had every reason to do just that. They entered without Justin Champagnie and Au’Diese Toney, who had combined this season to average 34 points and 17.3 rebounds, but who both suffered injuries during a Sunday practice. Champagnie’s will sideline him for six to eight weeks and Toney’s, while not as dire, is being evaluated day- to- day. O’Toole assumed Capel’s role of talking to the media after the game and expounded on those pillars. It was a sign of how different things suddenly were around the program as he filled in as head coach after Capel tested positive for COVID-19.
On Tuesday night, without arguably the program’s three most
critical figures, Pitt was shorthanded, disadvantaged and limited in undeniable, obvious ways. O’Toole knew that and acknowledged it. But that’s as far as he would go.
“The reality is we’re down two men and Cape,” O’Toole said. “But this is part of it. You’ve got to be resilient. The word I use, especially when I think of this city, is the word ‘gritty’. There’s a toughness, but it’s passion and it’s perseverance combined. You can be tough, but with grit, you’re successful. What kind of hurt me tonight is we weren’t gritty enough to win.”
That sentiment aside, the glaring voids left by Champagnie and Toney were evident.
Without that duo, the team’s best rebounders, Pitt gave up 15 offensive rebounds, off of which Louisville got 15 second-chance points. The Cardinals, in fact, ended up with nearly as many rebounds off of their own missed shots as Pitt did ( with 18 defensive rebounds).
A Pitt team that was down its top two scorers looked the part for the game’s first 10 minutes. The Panthers were disoriented and disjointed offensively, appearing unsure and incapable of doing what they had for the season’s first six games.
They missed 10 of their first 12 shots and without Toney, the team’s best defender by a substantial margin, they weren’t much better defensively, allowing the Cardinals to bury 10 of their first 16 shots and put themselves on pace to score 50 points in the first half,
holding a 24-9 lead.
Pitt recovered, making seven of its next eight shots, with five of those buckets coming from Femi Odukale, who rattled off 12 points in that stretch. The freshman, who scored 13 points in his first six games (a total of 75 minutes played), had nearly matched his career point total in a span of just 3:53. Most importantly, he ignited a team in need of a catalyst, piloting a 19-3 run that helped get Pitt within two, 30-28, at halftime.
Though it occasionally got close, Pitt was never able to establish a lead at any point during the contest. Six straight Louisville points gave the Cardinals a sevenpoint advantage, 46-39, with 10 minutes remaining. The Panthers got within three at 46-43 but Louisville managed to pull away.
“I don’t think we played well,” O’Toole said. “Louisville did a lot of things that hurt us. The one glaring thing to me was about the backboard. Obviously, when you lose Justin and you lose Au’Diese, a lot of that physicality
and toughness that you had to rebound isn’t there. But the reality is we knew we needed to be tougher and we needed to be more physical and we weren’t all night long. That’s something we have to keep addressing because that’s been a point of emphasis since the Saint Francis game. We had been pretty good up until tonight. It’s disappointing.”
Without their top two scorers, Pitt shot just 40.4% from the field and 28.6% from 3-point range while scoring only 54 points on 64 possessions. It was carried offensively for long stretches by Odukale, who finished with a career-high 16 points, making seven of 15 shots while playing 30 minutes largely in relief of a foulplagued Xavier Johnson. Johnson was the only other Pitt player to finish in double figures, scoring 10 points.
Tuesday’s loss marked the end to a frenetic 72-hour stretch. Champagnie injured his knee and Toney his ankle in a practice Sunday.
“We were kind of depressed because those are our two big players,” Odukale said. “On top of that, they’re our brothers. We were torn. Half of the season is clipped due to injury, but after that, we can’t sulk our heads. Everybody has to step up now.”
Without two players around whom so much planning revolves, Pitt’s coaches and players had to adjust on the fly, and make preparations in a little more than a day with an interim head coach.
Tuesday won’t mark the end of that tinkering. While Toney may be healthy enough to return for the Panthers’ game Dec. 29 at Duke, Champagnie will be out for some time, likely until early February.
For the time being, and as their schedule only gets tougher, they’ll have to find a way to make it work, a challenge that’s far easier said than done.
“You’ll look at this film and the natural tendency for our young guys is to kind of feel sorry for themselves, but the reality is that as soon as we get back from Christmas, there’s absolutely zero feeling sorry for yourselves,” O’Toole said. “These are the things we did and we have to correct because what awaits you is Duke. Then after that is ND [Notre Dame]. Then I think it’s Florida State. It doesn’t get easier. There’s a mindset that you have to have— and I don’t care who you are in our locker room — that you have to bring tremendous value and you better be unbelievably tough.”