McGowens drops 33; Pitt’s ACC skid ends
After only a handful of minutes had elapsed in Pitt’s game Wednesday night against Louisville, Trey McGowens grimaced, hobbling to the Panthers’ bench while gripping his left knee after it had collided with the knee of an opposing player.
If Pitt were to do what it hadn’t done for so much of the past decade — beat the Cardinals — it would potentially have to do so without the best, healthiest version of its second-leading scorer and emerging freshman star, or perhaps without him entirely.
Or so it appeared. After a couple of minutes on an exercise bike behind the team’s bench at Petersen Events Center, McGowens reentered the game. And the rest, as they say, was history — although in Pitt’s case, that’s actually what it was.
Behind a career-high 33 points from McGowens, valiantly playing with an ailing body and with early foul trouble, the Panthers (11-4, 11 ACC) hung on in overtime to defeat Louisville (10-5,1 11), 89-86, snapping a 12-game losing streak to the Cardinals dating to 2010, when McGowens was 9 years old.
Additionally, it was Pitt’s first regular-season victory against an ACC opponent since defeating Florida State Feb. 18, 2017, an agonizing 690-day stretch that mercifully came to an abrupt and perhaps unexpected end.
Following his team’s 25point loss four days earlier against North Carolina, Jeff Capel, in response to what he anticipated postgame conversation might be, insisted that this wasn’t the “same old Pitt,” a team that would flail and do little in response to loss after loss, as it had done for much of the two years preceding his arrival at the school.
Wednesday, he showed it by earning the biggest win of his nascent tenure.
“Tonight was huge for us,” Capel said. “I’d be lying if I tried to play it down. It was huge for us. It was huge for this program at this moment.”
For McGowens, it marked the continuation of a blistering streak in which he has emerged as a clear No. 2 option to, or perhaps even the equal of, fellow freshman guard Xavier Johnson, who finished with 21 points, his 15th-consecutive game scoring in double figures, and 10 assists.
Entering the night, McGowens, the program’s highest-rated recruit in six years and its first player to win ACC freshman of the week honors, was averaging 19 points per game in the past three games and 15.4 points per game over the past sevens.
The 33 points were a Pitt single-game freshman record.
He spent much of the night deftly picking apart the Louisville defense, weaving through whatever seams appeared and finishing craftily at the rim, often over the reach of much larger defenders.
“Jared [Wilson-Frame] and all the other teammates who experienced it last year, they were just telling us how they didn’t want to experience it again and they didn’t want anybody else to experience it,” McGowens said. “We knew we were going to just come in and work. When we came in, last season was over. We’re here, we’re just going to work, and that’s not going to happen again.”
That work started early. Behind 20 points from McGowens, Pitt led by 10 at halftime and saw that advantage swell to as many as 16 in the second half.
Erasing the kind of history Pitt was attempting to seldom comes easily, though, and Louisville made sure that would remain the case.
Trailing by 12, 77-65, with 4:30 remaining, the Cardinals mounted a charge. As the Panthers went the final 2:50 without a point, their opponent capitalized, with forward Dwayne Sutton completing the comeback with about 30 seconds remaining, banking in an off-balance shot to tie the score and send it to overtime.
Once there, Pitt eventually did what it couldn’t do in regulation — it held on. Tied with 30 seconds remaining, the Panthers collected a missed 3 from Louisville’s Ryan McMahon that went long off the rim, getting out in transition and getting a layup from McGowens. After another McMahon miss, Johnson made one of two free throws to get the lead up to three with 16 seconds left.
Malik Ellison went to the free-throw line with a chance to ice the game with 1.5 seconds remaining after Jordan Nwora had missed a corner 3, but missed both. The Cardinals had one final chance to send the game into a second overtime, but a Steven Enoch 3 banged off the backboard and to the court.
With that, an arena that had understandably been consumed by a building sense of trepidation and dread began to erupt. A longoverdue party was on.
“We’re definitely going to look back at it,” sophomore center Terrell Brown said. “We don’t plan on this being the only victory we get this season. We plan on getting many more. Just seeing that one turning point in our season, because that’s what it is ... last year, we had a rough year. We got the first win in our second game, so now we’re 1-1. It opens the door for everything else.”