Louisville has big edge on Pitt inside
game, the third-best average among Division I players) and 6-10 Ray Spalding (10.8 points, 9.7 rebounds and 2.2 blocks per game). The Panthers only have one player as tall as Spalding — 6-10 freshman Terrell Brown — and nobody within 2 inches of Spalding’s 7-6 wingspan.
The height disparity is enough of a hurdle, and for a Pitt team that has struggled rebounding and scoring close to the basket, those challenges are exacerbated by an opponent with a front line with the collective reach of Inspector Gadget.
“It was a little sticking to our principles,” Pitt junior Jared Wilson-Frame, the team’s leading scorer, said after the loss to Miami. “When you play against a team that’s that athletic, as most of the ACC teams are, and you’re not the biggest, tallest team or the highestjumping team, you have to stick to your principles and make sure you actually locate and box out every time. One slip-up and it’s a putback dunk or a secondchance kick-out for a 3. It’s just sticking to our principles because we’re not going to outjump anybody, especially in this league.”
The Panthers struggles on the boards, with only one player taller than 6-5 who had played a single Division I minute entering the season, have been well-documented and served as a semi-regular source of frustration.
On the season, Pitt is allowing opponents to come down with32.5 percent of possible offensive rebounds — 282nd among 351 Division I teams and the second-worst mark among ACC programs — while only getting 26.2 percent of possible offensive rebounds itself. Against four opponents from major conferences this season, those shortcomings have been even more pronounced, as those teams have rebounded 37.3 percent of theirmissed shots.
The most glaring overmatched the Panthers were in that area this season came in a November matchup against Oklahoma State, a game in which Pitt gave up 20 offensive boards on 41 missed shots, which led to 17 second-chance points in a six-point loss. The most alarming, and perhaps most ominous, things about Tuesday is that the Cowboys had a starting frontcourt featuring a 7-footer and a 6-foot-9 forward.
Some of Pitt’s shortcomings, according to players, can come down to something fairly simple.
“Tonight, they just kind of out-toughed us a little bit,” forward Shamiel Stevenson said after the Miami loss. “Usually, we’re pretty tough on the boards. That’s just something we have to stay consistent with. We could be a good rebounding team. We just let them out-tough us a little bit.”
The silver lining for the Panthers is that, despite its overwhelming size, Louisville has been a mysteriously bad rebounding team this season. While they are rebounding 33.1 percent of their misses, ranking them among the top 70 teams in Division I, the Cardinals are one of the 75 worst Division I teams at preventing offensive rebounds.
They will get something of a break facing what should be a depleted front line for Pitt. Forward Ryan Luther, the Panthers’ second-leading scorer (12.7 points per game) and leading rebounder (10.1 per game), is “doubtful” to play Tuesday against Louisville, according to coach Kevin Stallings, as the senior continues to deal with a stress reaction in his right foot.
If that remains the case, not only will the Panthers be without their best rebounder, but also their best and most physical interior scorer, as their four other players taller than 6-6 average a combined 7.6 points per game. That means a Pitt team that already gets rejected more than all but 19 Division I teams could have more trouble than usual getting points around the basket against a Louisville squad swatting 19.4 percent of opponents’ 2-pointers, the fourth-best mark in Division I.
Any talk of their demise, particularly against a team as inconsistent as Louisville, might be a tad premature, at least as far as their players see it.
“We miss Ryan, definitely,” Stevenson said. “He does a lot for our team. We do these things all the time. We’ve got T. Terrell can post up and we can throw it in there. I can post up. It’s something we’ve got to work on and stay consistent with. Ryan would help if he were here, most definitely, but it’s not something we think we can’t do, like we can’t post up.”