Panthers Halt Raiders
November 28th, 2008 | by The Prowler |Pitt is off to a nice start to the weekend, having beaten WVU in the Backyard Brawl for the second straight year, and now beating Texas Tech in Basketball 80-67. Pitt faces Washington St. tomorrow with the chance to make my Thanksgiving weekend perfect.
While Pitt won, and it was clear from pretty early in the game that Texas Tech’s entire offensive gameplan was to just chuck up any long range jumper that seemed even remotely unguarded; the game overall was pretty boring. At one point in the second half, Pitt went from a 7 or 9 point lead to like a 12 point lead, and I didn’t even notice. It was just a slower paced game that didn’t have much of the excitement that we might hope for from a Pitt game.
Then again, I may just be worn out from watching the football game earlier today.
There were bright spots and concerns for this Pitt team. On the bright side, Sam Young had another 24 points. However it came on 9-24 shooting from the floor. DeJuan Blair had a nice game from the floor going 5-8, but was a pathetic 5-11 from the free throw line. After missing his first 4, he did go 5-7 from the line the rest of the game, so that is a positive.
Overall Pitt’s free throw numbers looked bad. They went 15-27. But half of those misses came by Blair. The rest of the team actually shot fairly well from the line. As the announcers said, Blair needs to work on free throws just for the reason that he is going to get fouled. There is no way around the fact that he will be getting to the line. It is too costly to the team if he can’t make at least 60-70%.
Pitt out-rebounded Texas Tech 41-26 and had 17 assists on 30 total field goals. Three point shooting was simply average at 5-16.
Early on Pitt was getting a lot of easy points. Their first four baskets were layups. Pat Knight seemed to realize that every one of our starters was a mismatch (in our favor) vs. every one of their starters, so he switched early to a zone, forcing Pitt into more outside shooting. It was fun watching the mismatches, but once in the zone, they weren’t exploited nearly as often.
DeJuan Blair looked pretty solid offensively and finished with 11 rebounds. Jermaine Dixon had another decent game, including a sick layup that he flipped to the top of the backboard and somehow got it to kiss the glass and fall in. But the nicest surprise was Gil Brown off the bench for 10 points and 9 rebounds. He has a lot more spring in his step and is looking like he is at least pretty close to full strength. On more than one occasion, he came flying from nowhere to grab a rebound for a put back (though he didn’t get them all to fall). It was very heartening to see how good he looks. This gives us a nice 6-7 man rotation without having to rely heavily on the three true freshmen we have. If he and Wanamaker (7 points on 2-2 shooting) can keep looking good and improving, this is going to be a solid team all season.
Levance Fields was the only Panther to not have a particularly good night. He went 1-9 shooting and finished with only 3 points. He did add 5 assists, but many of his shots seemed rushed or just ill-advised. I love Fields, and it seems I am going to have to just accept that he is going to take a couple of contested, step-back three pointers every game. When he isn’t makeing them, it’s ugly. When he is, it looks something like this:
I was concerned about this game because of the fact that Texas Tech had scored 167 points in a game last week. It became clear that they did that against a much inferior opponent to Pitt. It was nice to see Pitt play solid defense and have a good reboudning day. Texas Tech’s offense often looked hurried and undisciplined. If it wasn’t for making a lot of long range shots, many of which should not have been taken, the game wouldn’t have been close.
Hopefully Pitt didn’t use too much against Texas Tech because Washington St. will be another tough team. It is nice to see Pitt play and beat some of these teams instead of just playing IUP and Robert Morris. This is a solid team, and beating these teams strengthens my feeling that this is the year Pitt takes the step.