Pitt looking to maintain momentum
It will be a role reversal for the Pitt basketball team as it takes on Wake Forest tonight in Winston-Salem for a 6:00 p.m. tip on the ACC Network. The Panthers enter the contest winners of three straight games and hold a 4-1 record in the ACC.
Conversely, Wake Forest is riding a six-game losing streak and is winless in the ACC. Pitt comes into this matchup as the favorite, and a team towards the top of the ACC standings, while Wake Forest will look to play spoiler against the Panthers.
In recent seasons, it has been Pitt looking to pull upsets against some of the top teams in the league. Now, the Panthers enter Saturday's meeting in a position none of these current players have been in during their careers.
Pitt has finished near the bottom of the ACC standings for three straight seasons. Senior center Terrell Brown was around for the 0-18 season during his freshmen year, while juniors Xavier Johnson and Au’Diese Toney compiled a 9-29 record in ACC play prior to this year.
Pitt head coach Jeff Capel has been constantly reminding his players of where they came from, according to Toney.
“That’s just something to motivate you to look back on,” he said. “And every time you have a bad practice or something like that, you’ve got to look back on something like that and that feeds you and makes you want to keep pushing and stay hungry for more.”
Pitt is riding high at the moment. The Panthers are coming off an impressive 79-73 win over Duke on Tuesday that improved the team's record to 8-2 on the season. That game created a buzz around this program that it has not seen in years.
It only took one practice for that feeling to go away. Johnson described Thursday’s practice as ‘terrible’ and Toney agreed.
“It was kind of rough,” Toney told reporters after practice on Thursday. "It was a slow start at practice. I don’t know if it was because guys were tired or anything, it was just our minds and our bodies wasn’t physically there and Coach had to wake us up from that.”
Both players indicated that Capel let the team know it during practice with added running throughout the session.
The attention from the Duke win was noticeable, however. National media members started to praise Justin Champagnie as an ACC Player of the Year frontrunner and Pitt is now being mentioned as a possible tournament team. Tweets were made, columns were written, and the team was being talked about on television - all very new things for a program that has not made the NCAA Tournament since 2016.
“It’s kind of hard not to pay attention to it,” Johnson said in the aftermath of the Duke win. “We all got social media. If you don’t have social media, it comes on TV.”
Toney and Johnson have seen fast starts and big wins turn into losing streaks in prior seasons and they are hoping to avoid that kind of letdown tonight.
Following an upset win over Florida State in 2019, the Panthers proceeded to lose 13-straight games. Last season, Pitt secured a big home win against Georgia Tech in early February, only to lose eight of the remaining nine games on the schedule.
The upperclassmen that have seen those failures before, and are instilling in the young players to keep focus on the task at hand.
“We preach to them that it’s not a good feeling to have, especially in this league anything can happen and the whole momentum can change, you can be winning and can just go on a losing streak,” Toney explained. “For us, we’re just telling them it’s not a good feeling to have to keep losing. It’s hard to bounce back from that and dig yourself a big hole like that and get out of the hole and they see it.”
The junior forward said this team feels different, from a culture standpoint.
“We just have hungry guys,” Toney said of the difference between this year and prior teams. “Everybody wants to do whatever they got to do to win.”