A bizarre end to Pitt’s prominence
Panthers basketball hasn’t been the same since this fouled-up game
“Still to this day, I can’t believe what happened.” — Ashton Gibbs, former Pitt guard
N• either can I, although Gibbs and I differ in this respect: He remembers Pitt’s miraculously soul-crushing, 71-70 loss to Butler in the 2011 NCAA tournament “like it was yesterday.”
I feel like it happened 8,000 years ago. I half-expected to find the YouTube video in black and white. Or maybe Sanskrit.
It almost doesn’t register that Pitt once was a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament.
Anyway, the truth is somewhere in between: The game occurred 10 years ago Friday. And more or less marked the end of an era.
In retrospect, that was Pitt’s last stand. The last truly prominent team of the Jamie Dixon/ Ben Howland run and the last we might see for a good while.
The Panthers’ streak of 10 consecutive tournament appearances ended the following season. They would move to the ACC in 2013 and after a good first season there … well, you know the rest. They’ve lost 89 games in the five
years since their most recent NCAA tournament appearance.
So it was with a mix of wistfulness and dread that I endeavored to look back upon one of the craziest games — craziest endings, anyway — in college basketball history.
First, I’d forgotten how good the Panthers were. They almost Gonzaga’d their way through the regular season, winning a historically brutal Big East that sent a record 11 teams to the NCAA tournament. the
Pitt was 28-5 going into the Butler game on March 19, 2011, in Washington, D.C. Its only losses had come in overtime against Louisville, on buzzer-beaters against St. John’s and Connecticut (Kemba Walker, anyone?), by five points against Notre Dame and seven against Tennessee.
Dixon’s veteran-laden starting lineup featured a bunch of bulldogs in Nasir Robinson, Gilbert Brown, Gary McGhee, Gibbs and Brad Wanamaker, who now plays for the Golden State Warriors. The three top players off the bench were Tray Woodall, Dante Taylor and Lamar Patterson.
“I think we had the most well-rounded team in the country,” says then-Pitt assistant coach Pat Skerry, now the head coach at Towson University.
Unfortunately for Pitt, Butler was a beast of a No. 8 seed, one that had nearly beaten Duke on a last-second miracle shot in the previous year’s national championship.
Granted, Gordon Heyward had graduated to the NBA but the Bulldogs were an unkind draw. They proved as much by advancing to another national championship appearance after surviving Pitt.
Imagine what it was like for Pitt to watch two teams that beat them at the buzzer (they had hammered Connecticut in the regular season) playing for the national title. They had to feel like they were every bit as worthy and could have won it all.
“You could make a case for it,” recalls then-assistant coach Pat Sandle. “But you have to get the breaks. The more and more you see it and watch the games, almost every team that wins has a game they should have lost.”
So let’s skip ahead, past a topsy-turvy affair in which two well-coached teams traded blows for the better part of 40 minutes.
Pitt led, 69-68, with the ball as the clock wound toward 10 seconds. McGhee broke open for a layup but nobody saw him. Gibbs launched a 3pointer after the shot clock expired. Butler then grabbed a one-point lead on Matt Howard’s layup with 2.2 seconds left.
That’s when a good game turned historically insane.
Butler’s Shelvin Mack made the first mistake, inexplicably fouling Brown near mid-court with 1.4 seconds left. As the referees checked the replay, Mack got in Brown’s ear.
“He was saying stuff to Gil, like, ‘No pressure,’ little stuff like that,” recalls Gibbs, who’d been teammates with Mack on an under-19 national team coached by Dixon. “I’m telling Gil, ‘Don’t talk anybody, just lock in.’ Gil, being Gil, is talking back to Shelvin.”
If Brown makes both shots, Pitt likely wins — and who knows what happens from there? But he missed the second, leaving the game tied for overti … OH NO!
Robinson committed what appeared to be a desperation foul on Howard 92 feet from the Butler basket, the kind of foul one would commit if he thought his team was losing. Robinson later denied as much, saying he merely acted on instinct.
Certainly, him and Brown let Mack off the hook.
“I had probably the worst foul in Butler history,” Mack said afterward. “But then the dude from Pittsburgh made up for me.”
With 0.8 seconds left, Howard made the first foul shot and intentionally missed the second. Pitt was finished, devastated by a late-game disaster for the second time in three years (we won’t mention Scottie Reynolds).
What I remember from the aftermath is Robinson’s incredible class. He was an outstanding player with a huge heart, a 6-5 power forward who would take on anyone. Teammates and coaches loved him.
When I asked Sandle what he thinks about first upon mention of the game, he said, “My man Naz, to be honest, just how bad he felt in that moment. I don’t even think about how it was for me. I remember our guys, each one, hugging him after the game and telling him it wasn’t his fault.”
Gibbs, now an assistant coach at Duquesne, remembers Robinson facing all kinds of vicious jabs on the quickly rising menace that was social media.
“Twitter was just coming out. Facebook was prevalent, so a lot of people were cursing him out, telling him he lost them a lot of money and messed up their brackets,” Gibbs recalled. “I felt bad for Naz at that time. Still do.”
A lot has happened in the 10 years since. Robinson played pro ball overseas before settling down in the Philadelphia area. Most of the key Pitt players also found their way in pro ball somewhere. Some are still playing. Brown had a great overseas career before going back to his Connecticut high school to coach. Woodall is an assistant at St. Bonaventure.
Taylor ran into some trouble with the law in 2017, although Gibbs says he has turned things around. Most of the players from that team, Gibbs says, are part of a text string and literally check in every day. Butler coach Brad Stevens now coaches the Boston Celtics. Dixon moved on to TCU.
Oh yes, and Gibbs wound up playing the next year — 2012 — in the World University Games on a team coached by Stevens.
Did the game ever come up?
“He mentioned it,” Gibbs said. “But it wasn’t a long conversation.”