STAYING POSITIVE
Pitt men’s basketball team is building on improvement in recent games
Like hundreds of thousands of people across the country over the past two years, Jeff Capel became a fan of the television series “Ted Lasso.”
In that show, an American college football coach with no soccer experience takes over the reins of an English Premier League club. Though his team is overmatched in most of its games, Lasso, the titular character, instills a constructive, buoyant culture in the locker room, with an approach and outlook succinctly summarized by a message on a yellow sign taped above the entrance to his office — BELIEVE.
While the circumstances surrounding his own team are far from identical — and as far as we know, there’s no such sign hanging somewhere around Petersen Events Center — it’s a principle that has guided the Pitt men’s basketball coach and his team throughout the 2021-22 season.
Through 17 games, and with a 7-10 record, the Panthers have endured any number of emotional lows. A season-ending ACL tear to one of its best players in an exhibition. An indefinite suspension to another one of its top returners. Doubledigit home losses to a pair of mid-major programs.
After starting the season 2-6, however, they’re 5-4 in their past nine games, with three of those victories coming against major-conference opponents. The most recent of those wins, a 65-53 pasting of Louisville Saturday, offered perhaps the most conclusive evidence yet in the belief that Capel has held, even when the evidence against it seemed overwhelming — that his team is improving and that the next two months of the season offer hope, not dread.
“The thing I’ve said about this team that I admire — I really do; it’s not just coach- speak — is they’ve shown up, man,” Capel said. “They’ve shown up every day trying to get better. It’s been hard. It’s been hard on them. It’s been hard on everyone with some of these heartbreaking losses. It’s what makes me believe, and I believe it in my core, that good things are on the horizon for us. It would be easy to jump ship. It would be easy to not show up or pout or feel sorry for yourself. Our guys haven’t done that.”
Those words aren’t the blind faith of an optimistic coach. There are numbers to back it up.
In Pitt’s first eight games, it scored 482 points on 492 possessions (0.98 points per possession) and gave up 528 points on 495 possessions (1.07 points per possession). In its past nine games, it has scored 580 points on 562 possessions (1.03 points per possession) and allowed 576 points on 568 possessions (1.01 points per possession). Against Louisville, it turned in arguably its best defensive performance of the season, holding the Cardinals to 53 points on 64 possessions and 33.3% shooting from the field.
It wasn’t just the Panthers’ biggest win of the season, as measured by margin of victory. It was their most impressive. Excluding a Dec. 18 win against St. John’s, which was competing without all-Big East star Julian Champagnie, Pitt’s triumph over the Cardinals was their first win of the season against a team that entered the matchup ranked among the top 100 teams nationally by KenPom.com.
“It’s just a big confidence booster, knowing if we do what the coaches tell us to do and we’re together then this type of outcome is possible,” guard Jamarius Burton said. “Today, you see the results. We look forward to building on it.”
Burton is one of several players who has improved over the course of the season and established a clearly defined role within the team’s overall construct. He has become the Panthers’ second-most reliable option beyond star forward John Hugley, averaging 16.4 points per game over Pitt’s past eight contests while making 37.9% of his 3-pointers and 31 of his 32 free throws.
More than that, he has been an uplifting, calming influence for a team with freshmen and sophomores accounting for four of its top eight players in minutes per game.
“For me, it’s just being positive at all times,” Burton said. “I’ve been in this position before, my freshman year. The biggest thing I took away from the seniors at that time was that they were always positive. They were always encouraging us to be better. I feel like that’s one of my biggest roles. Each and every day, I have to bring that to this team.”
He hasn’t been the only one to settle into a niche.
Graduate transfer Mouhamadou Gueye has become a surprisingly versatile force at 6-foot-10, averaging 12.7 points, 6.7 rebounds and 2.3 blocks per game over his team’s past seven games, all while shooting 39.4% from 3. Last year’s America East Conference defensive player of the year had four blocks against Louisville and Pitt outscored the Cardinals by 16 points while he was on the court, the highest plusminus of any Panthers player.
Sophomore Femi Odukale has remained solid as the team’s primary ball- handler and has scored in double figures in five of the past six games. Like Hugley, he has excelled at drawing fouls and getting to the free-throw line, as he sports the 19thhighest free-throw rate in the country, according to KenPom.
Beyond those numbers, Capel has been heartened by what he has seen on a day-to-day basis.
The players have maintained positive attitudes, allowing them to bounce back from a slew of gutting one-point losses and more lopsided defeats like a 16point setback at Syracuse last Tuesday. They’ve constantly pursued or even demanded extra individual work with coaches after practice, as well as additional film sessions. The season hasn’t gone the way they would have liked it to, but nobody, Capel said, internalizes those struggles more than those within the team’s facility.
Through it all, that belief has remained. And reasons for it are starting to show.
“It’s easy when things aren’t going well to slam down on people and talk negatively and things like that,” Capel said. “They get enough of that, I’m sure, if they read social media. It’s our job as the coaches, as the leaders, to pour into them and get them to believe and let them know we believe in them. I do. I really and truly do. … If I’m saying something to you, it’s something I feel. It’s something I believe. I think we can be a good team, but we have to understand the things necessary for us to be a good team.”