For the last month, Pitt played with fire. And not in the good way.
Ineffective defense. Inefficient offense. Sloppy turnovers. Poor rebounding. First-half deficits. Late-game flops.
The Panthers have done all of it since the full ACC schedule started on New Year’s Day. Sometimes, they got away with it. Other times, they didn’t.
But they kept doing it anyway. They kept playing with fire and only occasionally getting burned.
Monday night’s 73-57 loss to Virginia was a third-degree scorching with all of the flaws on display.
Pitt got out-rebounded by double digits (again). Pitt dug a double-digit hole in the first half (again). Pitt had a remarkably inefficient offense to start the game (again). Pitt turned the ball over (again). Pitt let an opposing player go off (again).
And Pitt lost again.
But unlike the Panthers’ previous ACC losses, four of which were Quad 1 games and one was a Quad 2 game on the road, Monday night’s defeat was a certifiable Bad Loss. Virginia entered the game at No. 134 in the NET rankings, having won just three of its 11 ACC games.
For a team like Pitt, who had won just one Quad 1 game - a victory at Ohio State in late November that feels like it might as well have happened last century - avoiding bad losses had become almost as important as earning good wins. And until Monday night, the Panthers had done that.
They avoided the bad losses, and that kept them in the NCAA Tournament conversation.
Now, though, Pitt has the dreaded bad loss on its resume, and given the totality of badness that was the Panthers’ performance against the Cavaliers, it’s not out of the question that more such performances could be on the way.
“This is probably as bad of a performance of any team I've ever coached,” Pitt coach Jeff Capel said after the game. “And it was embarrassing. And I'm sorry to the crowd, the students, the fans. It's my responsibility. I have to do a better job of making sure we're ready to go. I thought we were; obviously, we weren't. And we were bad in every aspect of the game of basketball. Turnovers, rebounding, defense, offense, everything.
“And our body language was bad. They saw it. They fed off of it. It gave them energy. Our inability to guard the ball in the first half, where they just drove us - it was a really, really bad performance from us.”
While Pitt has shown vulnerabilities throughout the season and, in particular, the ACC schedule, the Panthers have, by and large, played hard. It didn’t always translate to winning on the glass or locking down defensively, but the effort seemed to be there.
On Monday night, it wasn’t, and Capel didn’t have a great answer for what he and his staff can do to generate it.
"Great question. Great question,” he said when asked how to coach effort. “You know, we've given, for the most part this season, pretty good effort. But obviously, what we're doing right now is not enough. So we have to change some of the things we're doing in practice maybe, maybe look at a little different lineup. I mean, I'm open for anything right now. When we get back on Wednesday, we'll have a better idea. I tried, and I'm trying really hard right now - I try not to speak too much from emotion. I don't want to say anything crazy. That's how I feel right now. So I'm really trying to answer calmly. I don't think I will be on Wednesday when I see them. But we'll see. You know, I'll go back, I'll watch the tape. But obviously, what we're doing right now isn't good enough. It certainly was not good enough tonight.”
It won’t be good enough for the nights to come either. Pitt has a pair of road trips to North Carolina and SMU up next and then a pair of home games against Miami and Syracuse (home games that look a lot like the Virginia game looked before Monday night).
A trip to Notre Dame, a home game against Georgia Tech, trips to Louisville and N.C. State and a home game against Boston College round out the schedule. But really, the venues and the names on the front of the opponents’ jerseys won’t matter if Pitt keeps playing like it is.
“This is probably as bad of a performance of any team I've ever coached,” Capel said Monday night. “And it was embarrassing. And I'm sorry to the crowd, the students, the fans. It's my responsibility. I have to do a better job of making sure we're ready to go. I thought we were; obviously, we weren't. And we were bad in every aspect of the game of basketball. Turnovers, rebounding, defense, offense, everything.
“And our body language was bad. They saw it. They fed off of it. It gave them energy. Our inability to guard the ball in the first half, where they just drove us - it was a really, really bad performance from us.”
Unfortunately for the Panthers, while the performance was bad, it wasn’t altogether unfamiliar.
