Capel hopes to wrap up slump

Pitt was riding a lot of momentum at 8-2

Jeff Capel loves Jay-Z, an affection that goes beyond the man’s music.

The Pitt men’s basketball coach has said before that he has a Jay-Z song or lyric that he can associate with almost everything there is. They tell stories and, in some cases, help explain the world. When it comes to Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, for example, he sees elements of his former coach and mentor embodied in the words of “Most Kingz,” a song in which the Brooklyn-born rapper bemoans life at the top of his profession, the attention and envy it can bring, and the metaphorical target it puts on one’s back.

As for Capel’s own team? Well, there’s a Jay-Z lyric for the

Panthers, too.

It was all good just a week ago. Nine days ago, as Pitt was preparing to play Wake Forest, it was in as advantageous a position as it had been in years. The Panthers were 8-2 after a win against Duke, keeping them just one game out of first place in the ACC standings. NCAA tournament dreams seemed more viable than they have in years. With a win against Wake Forest, it was quite possible they would find themselves ranked for the first time since

January 2016.

Since then, a once-promising season has taken an unexpected and equally abrupt nosedive. Pitt has lost each of its past three games after an 84-58 loss Saturday against Notre Dame, a setback that knocked it back to 90th in the NCAA’s NET rankings, an important metric used in determining the NCAA tournament field.

The loss to the Fighting Irish inflamed whatever concerns already existed, presenting distressing signs that didn’t previously exist. The previous two losses were explicable in some way. Wake Forest shot 47% from 3-point range, saw a player averaging eight points per game go off for 31 points and despite all of that, the Panthers were an open 15-footer away from winning. North Carolina, with two 6-foot-10 forwards in its starting lineup, was a terrible matchup.

Notre Dame, though? That was something much more distressing, a game in which Pitt lost by 26 to a team that was just 2-6 in ACC play entering the day. It was an implosion that went beyond numbers, seen in moments like the team’s starting point guard fouling out with nearly 12 minutes still to play and its starting shooting guard being hit with a technical foul in the final four minutes and, despite having just two fouls, walking off the court and back to the locker room after an exchange with coach Jeff Capel.

It was a mess reminiscent of some of the program’s lowest moments in its twoyear run under Kevin Stallings. Maybe more alarming than that, though, are the fears such an uninspired showing elicited, especially after what has happened to Pitt around this point in each of the past two seasons.

Are the Panthers, for the third time in as many years under Capel, about to begin a prolonged, late-season slide?

“I try not to think about the first or second year,” Capel said Monday. “My focus has been on right now. We’ve lost three games.”

It’s a question that will be answered in the coming days and weeks, particularly in the next three games, all of which come against teams in the top five of the ACC standings. But how the Panthers got to this point in just over a week is worth examining. If these things can be improved, so, too, can their fortunes.

Their defense has fallen off a cliff

While the defense wasn’t as good as some of the sport’s go-to metrics indicated — mainly because those numbers were boosted by opponents shooting uncharacteristically poorly from 3 — it was solid, reliable and consistent, at the very least.

In the past three games, it has been anything but. In those contests, the Panthers have gone from stingy and feisty to porous and shaky.

“We have not played well defensively,” Capel said. “We have not rebounded like we did during the first four ACC games, the first eight or nine games we played before then. We have to be better on that end, on that side of the ball.”

Offensively, Pitt is struggling, too. A good deal of Pitt’s offensive success was built on a potentially fragile foundation — relying overwhelmingly on three players to produce.

When all three of them — Justin Champagnie, Au’Diese Toney and Xavier Johnson — were clicking, as they were against Syracuse, the Panthers were sublime. Even just two of them having a great game produced results worth celebrating. Over the past three games, though, two of them have been in a rut, and the effect it has had on their team is obvious.

During the three-game losing streak, Toney and Johnson have combined to average just 17.7 points per game while making just 21 of 61 shots (34.4%).

Johnson’s turnovers, a lingering source of frustration, haven’t been that much worse in the past three games, as he’s only averaging 0.5 more turnovers per game in that time than he was in the first six Power Five games, and his assists have gone up in that time, from 5.3 per game in the first six to 6.0 per game in the past three.

While not speaking specifically about Toney or Johnson, Capel has been outspoken this season about how playing during a pandemic and all that comes with it has affected players, be it on his team or elsewhere. It doesn’t absolve players from their subpar play being examined, but it does provide context.

“I understand that everyone has a job to do,” Capel said Monday. “Certainly, these young people playing helps all of us. It gives work to do. It gives us things to do. But I imagine they’re at times judged like it’s normal. I don’t think that’s fair to them.

“I don’t know what’s being said about my team or my players or anything like that because I don’t read it, but I know I’ve read some things about other teams that are struggling, some things that are maybe negative. I understand everyone has a job to do, but at times, it’s like we’re trying to normalize this. Nothing that they’re going through is normal.

“I would hope the young people especially would be given some grace for what they’re trying to accomplish.”

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NOTE — On Monday, Champagnie was one of 20 players to be named to the Wooden Award late season watch list. The Wooden Award is given annually to the most outstanding player in college basketball. He becomes the 16th Wooden Award candidate in Pitt history and will look to become the program’s first finalist for the honor since DeJuan Blair in 2009. Among the other players to make the cut was Minnesota guard Marcus Carr, who played his freshman season at Pitt before transferring after the firing of Stallings in 2018.