Freshman’s offense is no accident
His offensive fireworks no accident, but result of many hours in gym
The Pitt men’s basketball team would be flying to Raleigh, N.C., shortly after practice Friday afternoon, so freshman guard Trey McGowens had to adjust his work schedule. Make that his “extra work” schedule.
One of the keys to McGowens’ recent binge — he’s riding a 22.5 points, 4.5 rebounds and 3.3 steals average over the past four games into the noon tipoff Saturday at No. 15-ranked N.C. State — has been his sessions before and after practice with assistant coach Milan Brown.
“He has put in a lot of work,” coach Jeff Capel said Friday. “Today, it was before practice, because he knew we had to leave to fly out.”
“Increasing my bag,” McGowens called it after Pitt’s 89-86 overtime win Wednesday night against Louisville, when McGowens pulled out just about every trick in that bag for a 33-point outburst.
It’s good in the short term, certainly, for the Panthers (11-4, 1-1) as they prepare for their first ACC road test against a Wolfpack team that’s 13-2 and scoring 88.7 points per game. But it’s also Exhibit A of the culture Capel wants to create as long as he’s Pitt’s coach, a foundation that he hopes will carry this program to many a conference victory, at home or on the road, against teams ranked or unranked.
“I don’t believe that coaches make players better. I think coaches help players become better,” Capel said Friday after practice. “Players make themselves better because they have to put in the time, they have to put in the work, they have to invest.
“The guys that become really good, there’s no secret. There’s some guys that are just more talented, and maybe it’s a little bit easier. But the guys that become really good and become the best versions of who they can be are the guys that put in the work.”
At 6 feet 3, 185 pounds, McGowens might be an ideal intersection of that idea. He was a four-star recruit, so the pedigree is there, but he also has gone from averaging 9.4 points, after the first seven games of his college career, to 13.8. He had just seven points on 1-of-8 shooting in a rout of MarylandEastern Shore, but since then, McGowens is
hitting 65 percent from the floor and finding himself at the free-throw line nine times a game.
And for a player who started the season 1 for 11 from 3-point range, McGowens now is 6 for 11 from beyond the arc since Pitt’s nine-day break for the holidays. He’s a little later to the party than backcourt mate Xavier Johnson, but another freshman revelation gives Pitt opponents more to worry about in their scouting reports.
“We welcome that,” Capel said. “Terrell [Brown] played extremely well against Louisville. I’m sure there will be a little more attention to him in the scouting report from N.C. State and other teams going forward, because you see what he’s capable of doing. That’s why he’s got to work harder now. When you have success, you have to keep staying sharp.”
It all comes back to that now for Pitt, which got a conference-sized monkey off its back by edging Louisville. The Panthers are no longer the ACC cellar-dwellers, but they can’t let complacency set in.
Good news is that McGowens and Johnson should have some help returning in the backcourt at N.C. State, in the form of senior guard Sidy N’Dir. An experienced ballhandler who can lighten the load on those two freshmen, N’Dir hasn’t played since Dec. 15 but he practiced Friday after missing four games with a leg injury.
“Obviously, he was rusty and not in the condition that you need to be in,” Capel said. “So, if he is able to play, it will be in spurts.”
Still, Pitt might need those spurts from N’Dir against the Wolfpack. Second-year coach Kevin Keatts, a former Rick Pitino assistant at Louisville, has his deep group playing fast — the 10th-highest adjusted tempo in Division I — and creating the fourth-most turnovers per possession, per kenpom.com.
“We can’t play at their pace completely, because we don’t have the depth that they do,” Capel said. “We want to play fast, we want to take advantage of opportunities, but, at the same time, we have to have poise. We have to be smart about it. They create chaos, and we can’t be chaotic in chaos. We have to pick our spots.”
Fortunately for the Panthers, they have a couple of dynamic youngsters who have been picking all the right spots lately. Johnson got it started, and now McGowens is falling in line.
“I love the fact that he’s not afraid. To not be afraid of the moment [against Louisville] was big time,” Capel said of McGowens. “But there are a lot of things he can work. … He has a very high ceiling to grow.”