Pitt head coach Jeff Capel met with the media after his team’s 56-52 loss to Monmouth. Here is a complete rundown of everything he had to say.

Capel: Congrats to Monmouth. King has done a great job with his team. They’re a good team. They’re older, experienced. They play with an energy, pace, and toughness and we didn’t have that, especially in the first 20-24 minutes of the game. Disappointing by us, and I’m not trying to take anything away from them, but it’s not the team we’ve been for the past week, week to two weeks. So it was disappointing. We mustered up some energy in the second half and were able to get back in it, but we had dug too deep of a hole. We defended well enough to win this game. If you look at their numbers, that’s good. It’s under what they had been doing for the year, but offensively in the first half we were really bad. I thought that led to our lack of energy or not playing with energy. We weren’t connected today, like we had been and that’s disappointing. We had been good after losses, we had enough of them where we’ve continued — you guys heard me say we’ve gotten off the mat and continued to show up. We didn’t handle the win well and it showed up today. Again, disappointed in that outcome but congrats to them.

You said you weren’t connected today, did that surprise you given how the past few games played out?

Capel: It did a little bit. I didn’t think we practiced well yesterday and I thought that led to what we did today. We weren’t full connected like we had been, so I was a little bit surprised. I was surprised by yesterday, by how we were in practice. It carried over into today, so it’s probably more disappointing than anything else.

Does this sometimes happen where things seem to be trending in the right direction and then one day it just doesn’t continue on that same path?

Capel: Yea it does. When you’re dealing with young people, that’s what tends to happen, especially us. We’re really young and don’t have a lot of experience together. So unfortunately, yes. I would love for us to continue the trend that we were on, and we didn’t today. But again they’re a good team, they’re 8-2 now. This is their eighth game out of ten on the road. They’re older, experienced, and they’re a good team. We knew that we were going to have to be completely locked-in, dialed-in in order to win this basketball game. Unfortunately we weren’t.

Odukale took some blame and said he wasn’t himself at practice. Did you see that or was that just him just taking some blame?

Capel: Well it was all of us. It wasn’t just one person. It’s not one person’s responsibility to take the fall. That’s on me as the head coach. I didn’t have our guys ready to go today, and that’s on me and so we all have to be better. Everyone has to be better.

You have now had a month adjusting to life without Horton and Sibande. At this point, how would you describe what this team is trying to do on offense?

Capel: I think prior to this game, the last three games we’ve been better offensively. We want to get good shots and we want our guys to have the confidence to take good shots. In order to do that we have to be together, connected, and understand that we have to score together. We don’t have a guy that can break someone down and create shot for himself and others. Like we don’t have that, that’s not who we are. But when we execute together and we do it with speed and pace and we screen and we work and do all of those things then that’s what generates shots for us. John, his ability inside is a guy that can generate shots. We know as a coaching staff teams are going to try to take that away, and what they’ve done is kind of pack the lane and dared us to shoot. That happened today and we missed a couple early and we stopped taking them. It’s like we didn’t have the confidence to continue to shoot. What we’re trying to do is trying to score together. We have to work together. We want to take good shots, shots that we think should be high-percentage shots and we want to empower our guys to have the confidence to take and make those plays.

Is there a fix out there? What kind of tweaks and adjustments…

Capel: We have to work together. We have to screen. We have to do things with pace. We have to have confidence to step up and make shots. To me, that’s what we have to do. We just have to keep working.

That could take some time, I guess?

Capel: I think I told you a few weeks ago, but yea. You don’t have a lot of time in what we do. We have a week before the next game, but we have a lot of work to do. I know that. I’ve known that we have a lot of work to do, and again prior to this game the three previous games we had shot about 37% from three. We shot about 6 1/2 to 7 in a game. That certainly would help. We did not shoot the basketball well at the three-point line tonight. Again we got some naked looks early in the game. We can’t be a team that if we miss a couple of shots wide open that we start shot-faking air - no one is there and that’s what happened to us tonight. For us as coaches, we’re trying to teach our guys what are good shops and what aren’t good shots. Now we have to work to get those shots and all the things that have to happen and then when we get them we have to shoot them with confidence. Like we’ll live with the results, if we don’t make them we don’t make them. I want to make them, they want to make them. We want to try to generate good looks for us offensively.

Hugley had a couple of errant passes tonight, but how much of his ability as a passer out of the post has been negated by the lack of shooting?

Capel: That's certainly makes things more challenging for him, the spacing. That makes it more challenging for him, but he’s continuing to work. He’s continuing to try figure out ways to impact our basketball team and he’s done a good job of that.