Double trouble
Panthers struggled at both ends of court in perplexing loss against Clemson team that had not been playing well
There were still 12 seconds remaining in the game Wednesday night as his walk-on point guard, KJ Marshall, dribbled out the clock, but Jeff Capel rose from his seat on the
Pitt sideline, buttoned his suit jacket and walked to the scorers’ table to shake hands with the opposing coaching staff and team. He had seen enough. There was much to take away from his team’s 72-52 loss against Clemson at Petersen Events Center — little, if any, of it good. The Panthers were dominated, overmatched and outmaneuvered by a team that entered the matchup on a three-game losing streak, sporting an 11-12 overall record and a 1-6 mark in road games.
Among the evening’s most discouraging developments was an offense that, much like the team itself, looked flat, uninspired and generally lost. Clemson is one of the best defensive teams in the conference, ranking 31st of 353 teams nationally in defensive efficiency. Still, Pitt averaged 0.87 points per possession, the lowest mark the Tigers allowed since a loss against Yale nearly two months ago.
There was no magical scheme or switch that befuddled the Panthers. They were bad against whatever it was they faced.
Clemson has, according to coach Brad Brownell, played man-to-man defense 85 to 90 percent
of the time this season. It has occasionally turned to the zone, though, and, after standout forward Aamir Simms checked out of the game about halfway through the first half, it began to utilize that scheme.
The Tigers finished the night playing zone and man almost evenly. On 26 possessions against the man, Pitt scored 21 points (0.81 points per possession). On 28 possessions against the zone, it got 20 points (0.71 points per possession).
“We kind of mix it sometimes when we think it can be helpful,” Brownell said of the zone. “(Wednesday), we felt like we wanted to use it a little bit, and it was a effective for a while, so we stuck with it.”
For the Panthers, it was a step back in their efforts against the zone. In a win Saturday against a Georgia Tech team employing a zone for much of the afternoon, they averaged 1.1 points per possession. A few days before that, against a Notre Dame team that also used zone for many possessions, they averaged 1.07 points per possession. In a Jan. 25 loss at Syracuse, college basketball’s quintessential zone team, they recovered from a slow start to score 40 points and shoot 53.6% from the field in the second half.
Clemson’s zone presented a different kind of obstacle, though. It was a two-three look, but in one of the zone’s traditional soft spots, the high post, the Tigers would have the defender anchoring the zone’s back line push up on an offensive player if he flashed to the free-throw line, which partially neutralized the effectiveness of a player like Justin Champagnie.
“We’ve never really seen that,” Champagnie said. “They wouldn’t sit there. They wouldn’t leave you in the middle. We haven’t really seen that. But we’ve got to be better about getting the ball to the corner and looking at the baseline for the lobs.”
Capel said he anticipated seeing the zone from Clemson, especially given some of his team’s struggles against it, and Champagnie said they had prepared for it in practice.
The biggest difference wasn’t the zone’s implementation or wrinkles, but how Pitt operated against it. The Panthers were slow, inactive and hesitant, three of the things a team can least afford to be against such a defense.
“There was no movement,” Capel said. “When you catch the ball and you hold it and you’re thinking and trying to see, then the defense can load up. If you’re not moving, they’re not moving. They’re standing there, waiting. If you try to drive, which we’re a driving team, and there’s no movement, then there’s probably not anywhere to drive. We weren’t intelligent with some of the things we were doing early in this game. We have to fix it.”
Porous defense
For all that bedeviled it offensively, Pitt was worse on the defensive end.
One of the ACC’s worst statistical offenses averaged 1.2 points per possession against the Panthers and made 13 of 22 3-pointers. In such a situation, blame can sometimes be hard to dispense. Was this a team that was riding a hot-hand and making contested shots? Or was it finding openings on the perimeter that it was regularly able to exploit?
In this instance, it’s more the latter. Of the Tigers’ 22 attempts from 3, 17 were open.
“These games, they don’t always have a lot of reason,” Brownell said. “It’s kind of a bad luck thing for Jeff and those guys because we shoot this well. We’ve had a lot of good shots in other games, but we don’t make any of them. We’ve had guys on other teams that shoot great against us and we watch them the next day and they can’t make a shot. Sometimes, there’s just no rhyme or reason for it. Sometimes, it’s just guys get in a good place and your team starts making a couple and it starts getting contagious.”
Though he finished the game with 12 points, the third-most on the team, Simms played a crucial role in creating some of those good looks. A versatile forward who is a strong ballhandler for a player his size (6 feet 9), Simms regularly drew double teams or, at the very least, attention from help defenders, whenever he received the ball on the low post. He was superb at passing it quickly out of those situations if he chose not to attack them directly, finding open teammates and catching Pitt on its heels.
It was just the latest sign of distress from what has been a devolving defense of late, one that has allowed its past seven opponents to average 1.08 points per possession.
“It was a combination of a lot of different things,” Capel said. “It was some breakdowns defensively, allowing middle penetration, which forces help, and them making shots there. When we tried to go zone, we tried to talk about keeping the ball out of the middle. They were able to get it there, which collapses the zone and gets it out to shooters. I think it was a combination of they made a lot of shots, obviously, but I do think a lot of it had to do with breakdowns in our defense. And they executed.”