Shooters have their way in season finale vs. Pitt

There are various points in a Pitt men’s basketball game when the coaches can be heard shouting “Shooter!” from the sideline while their team plays defense, an occurrence that has been amplified to the average viewer this season with a lack or complete absence of fans inside arenas.

It’s meant to remind players to keep an eye out on a player they identified in scouting as being a particularly dangerous outside shooter, the kind of threat who can destroy their hopes for a win with a single flick of the wrist.

In a 77-62 loss Saturday to Clemson, it’s a designation that may as well have applied to everyone on the Tigers.

Pitt wrapped up its regular season with one of its worst defensive performances of the season, allowing the Tigers to shoot 55.8% from the field and 48% from 3-point range. A

team that is 98th of 357 Division I teams and 12th of 15 ACC teams in offensive efficiency this season scored 77 points on 62 possessions (1.24 points per possession). Heading into that matchup, Clemson had scored more than 1.1 points per possession just once in its previous 21 games.

“They’re good, so I’m not taking anything away from them, but their movement, our zone, we didn’t get to the shooters ... we didn’t get to them on time and make them put the basketball on the floor,” Pitt coach Jeff Capel said. “At times, we over-helped on guys that are non-shooters and allowed them to get some baskets.”

The Tigers presented a difficult matchup, with a spaced-out, versatile offense in which its starting center, Aamir Simms, is shooting almost 40% from 3 this season. In virtually every lineup Clemson trotted out Saturday, players one through five posed a danger as an outside shooter.

It wasn’t a totally unfamiliar challenge — Notre Dame, Virginia and Georgia Tech were somewhat similar in that respect — but the Panthers struggled nonetheless.

Simms, a standout senior who’s one of the best players in the ACC, was a persistent problem for Pitt, a big man who could stretch the floor and draw slower defenders like Abdoul Karim Coulibaly and Terrell Brown farther from the basket. He wasted little time doing that, knocking down the first of Clemson’s 12 3s just 14 seconds into the game.

Simms personified the difficulties Pitt would face, but he hardly did the most damage. Al-Amir Dawes, a 39.4% shooter from 3 on the season, made five of the Tigers’ 12 3s, doing so on just eight attempts. Clyde Trapp, who had made just 15 of his 50 3s (30%) entering the game, buried two of his three 3s, both of which came in the game’s first six minutes. Hunter Tyson, a 6-foot-8 forward, made two of his three 3s, as well, and used that threat to bait Pitt players into pump fakes, which opened up uncontested mid-range jumpers or a clearer lane to the basket.

“We’ve got to get better at getting ourselves on the close-outs and being on the catch,” Pitt forward Justin Champagnie said. “But they can shoot.”

Those mismatches forced Pitt to over-help in some cases, crowding one particular side of the court or one player while leaving others open for an excellent passing team. It was evident even when the Panthers were in a zone.

Maybe their biggest issue, though, was poor rotation in its man-to-man defense, with some players losing track of their man and opening them up for a relatively uncontested look.

“I think it’s not being able at times to identify the shooter, nonshooter and what we’ve gone through in scouting,” Capel said. “I think sometimes, maybe it’s a little bit fatigue. When it’s a really, really physical game like it was today, you tend to get a little bit more tired quicker. I think it’s a combination of those things.”

It marked the 10th time in the past 11 games that Pitt allowed an opponent to average at least 1.05 points per possession, with the lone exception being the second matchup against a Wake Forest team that’s 199th in the NCAA and last in the ACC in offensive efficiency. It’s a defensive skid that has defined the Panthers’ derailment in those 11 games, a stretch in which they’ve gone 2-9.

“We won this game with some tremendous offense,” Clemson coach Brad Brownell said. “We made shots and executed really well.”

That’s putting it mildly.

Clemson has Pitt’s number

Pitt’s setback Saturday was its eighth consecutive loss to Clemson, its second-longest active drought against an ACC team, trailing only its 12 losses in a row to N.C. State.

While unusually long, that kind of skid against the Wolfpack, a program with two national titles and the 25th-most all-time wins of any Division I school, is somewhat understandable. But Clemson, a football-obsessed school which has one NCAA tournament appearance in the previous nine years (with a second on the way in a week?), that’s a little different.

To put that oddity into better context, the Panthers have beaten Duke and North Carolina, the ACC’s preeminent powers, a combined six times since they previously beat the Tigers March 8, 2014. They’ve beaten Clemson more times in football than they have in basketball in that time.

A balanced effort

During a game in which Champagnie was held to 13 points, tied for his third-lowest scoring outing of the season, Pitt had other players step up to help carry it offensively on a day in which it scored a respectable 62 points in 58 possessions. Some of those contributions came from unexpected faces.

After scoring just 15 points total over the Panthers’ previous four games, including one point in their past two games, Ithiel Horton had 11 points and made three of his five 3s (he was 2 of 11 from deep in the previous four games). Coulibaly had seven points, the third time in the past four games he has had at least that many points, matching his total from his team’s first 17 games. He also led what might have been the most methodical fast break in human history.

Then there was sophomore Gerald Drumgoole, who has appeared in only nine of Pitt’s 21 games this season and has averaged just 5.3 minutes per game in those contests. In eight minutes, he matched a season high with five points.

“I’ve known Gerald had that in him since the day I met him,” Champagnie said. “I used to go to the gym with him and play one-onone every night. I’m just glad he got the chance to step up and show he’s capable of playing and capable of making plays for this team.”