The Pitt basketball program finished last season with an 11-21 record. It was the sixth straight losing season for the program and the fourth under Jeff Capel’s watch.
The Panthers returned key pieces like Jamarius Burton and John Hugley, but they needed to retool the roster around those returning stars. Capel and his staff went out assembled almost a completely new roster headlined by transfer portal portal pickups like Nelly Cummings, Greg Elliott, and Blake Hinson.
When it was all said and done the roster Pitt pieced together was picked to finish 14th in the 15-team ACC in the preseason.
“We felt disrespected when it first came out,” Pitt guard Greg Elliott told reporters on Thursday afternoon ahead of Pitt’s weekend matchup with Virginia Tech.
The team is certainly showing why they felt that way.
That preseason prediction came out on October 18th and four months later on February 18th, Pitt will take the floor against Virginia Tech on Saturday as the top team in the ACC standings.
The Panthers have amassed a 19-7 overall record and a 12-3 mark in league play. Pitt is tied with Virginia in the league standings, but it currently holds the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Cavaliers by virtue of a 68-65 win back on January 3rd.
Elliott is part of a unique makeup for this team. Not one of Pitt’s regular five starters began their college basketball careers at Pitt. He is a graduate transfer from Marquette. Point guard Nelly Cummings is on his third school, as is Blake Hinson, who also had a two year hiatus from playing the game.
Burton is in his second year with the Panthers, but had previous stops at Wichita State and Texas Tech. Federiko Federiko is a junior college transfer, and sixth man Nike Sibande had a successful three-year run at Miami of Ohio before coming to Oakland.
The group here believed in itself from the start, even when the outside expectations bestowed upon them weren’t all that high. Elliott said the message to him and all the newcomers during the recruiting process was to come to Pitt and turn things around immediately and not just simply be the start of a rebuild.
“That’s what we were brought here for, us transfers, we all were told we’re trying to turn this around, nobody said we were rebuilding,” Elliott explained. “We knew we were coming in to make noise this year. We came in with that mindset, with that chip on our shoulder and then picked 14th only helped with that.”
The noise is certainly becoming louder with each passing win for the Panthers. Pitt has control of its ACC title destiny with five games remaining in the regular season. The Panthers have won six games in a row including a 77-58 decision over Boston College on Tuesday night, but much like in the preseason ACC poll, the respect is lacking in the current national rankings.
The ACC has historically been one of the best leagues in college basketball for decades and for the first place team to be outside the rankings in mid-February is a bit bizarre. Pitt fans and advocates have been vocal about the rankings on social media, but as for the team, they do not seemed bothered by it much.
“We don’t really sit in the locker room and talk about it much,” Elliott explained about Pitt’s lack of respect nationally. "We know about it, we just use it as fuel though, but we never just really sit and talk about it.”
The Panthers have turned that fuel into one of the best seasons for this program in recent memory. Pitt has already toppled its previous single season-high for ACC wins, and they are in the running to capture its first-ever league title this year.
The run to this point has been remarkable. After a 1-3 start out of the gates, something started to click for this team. Pitt is 18-4 over its last 22 games, and while it has been slow to process, the team is poised to crack into the rankings for the first time since 2016.
“It comes through with how connected we are with each other,” Elliott said to his team’s success this season. “We knew everybody on the outside was going to have their own opinion on what they saw after that 1-3 start, but at the end of the day we knew what our end goal was. We knew being older guys we had to stick together no matter what, so it all came with our connectivity.”
The lack of respect for this Pitt team has been about its overall resume. The computer rankings have not been kind to Pitt, but the Panthers have apparently assembled some very difficult wins this season under the radar.
Pitt has five ‘Quad-1’ wins this season, one of which came earlier in the season against Northwestern on the road. The Wildcats have had their own successful push of late and recently have taken out the only two ranked teams in the Big Ten in back-to-back games.
But remember, Pitt had little trouble with the Wildcats back in November and the ACC ultimately won the head-to-head challenge as well. Elliott saw that particular game as a turning point to what this team has ultimately developed into over the last few weeks.
“That was a game where I felt like everybody just had it going and we were on the road and honestly in that game it didn’t even feel like we were on the road,” Elliott said of Pitt’s 29-point thrashing of the second place team in the Big Ten. “We were so connected and I feel like we got the fans out of the game earlier enough that it was just another day at the office or practice.”
Pitt buried 14 three-pointers in that game which has been a regular occurrence for this team ever since. The Panthers lead the ACC with 9.5 made three-pointers per game. Elliott himself has had a huge hand in that outside shooting prowess. He has 62 made three-pointers on the year and is shooting them at a 42.6% clip.
Pitt’s season has come a long way since that preseason prediction of finishing 14th was released. The Panthers are vying for an ACC title, but they have a tricky game with Virginia Tech on Saturday.
The Hokies have a 15-11 record. Despite that overall mark, they have been especially strong at home with an 11-3 record inside of Cassell Coliseum. It will be a difficult task for this Panthers team, but with three senior starters and a world of confidence behind the team at the moment, they are ready for the challenge.
“I feel like we’re just going into every game the same way we’ve been going into all of them, even at the start of the season, with a chip on our shoulder,” Elliott said.
