The 3-2-1 Column: Feeling the momentum, ranking Champagnie and more
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In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re thinking about the momentum for Pitt hoops, where Justin Champagnie ranks and how these Panthers will fare in the coming weeks.
THREE THINGS WE KNOW
What’s happening
That’s not a question.
Of course, we’re all talking about Pitt’s 79-73 win over Duke on Tuesday night, a victory that passed pretty much any single-game outcome since...well, I don’t know what the historical reference point is. Last season’s season-opening win against Florida State loomed pretty large at the time, even if it got overshadowed by a loss to Nicholls State three days later.
Sweeping North Carolina was pretty impressive, too, even if the Tar Heels were decidedly down last season.
We don’t talk about it much anymore, but Pitt’s overtime win against Louisville in Jan. 2019 was pretty huge. The Panthers hadn’t won an ACC game in nearly two years, what with that whole 0-18 thing in the 2017-18 season, so knocking off the Cardinals in dramatic fashion during Jeff Capel’s first season created about as much excitement as we had seen from Pitt basketball in years.
That’s probably the last time I remember the hype being as considerable as it is now.
Here’s the big difference, though.
That win over Louisville was exciting because of the future it seemed to foretell. It was all about the freshmen: Trey McGowens putting up 33 points on 12-of-19 shooting and Xavier Johnson getting a double-double with 21 points and 10 assists.
That game was about the promise of a better tomorrow. That game was about potential. That game was about what could happen.
Tuesday night’s win over Duke wasn’t about what could happen. It was about what’s happening right now.
Justin Champagnie is happening. Au’Diese Toney is happening. Defense is happening. Rebounding is happening. Toughness is happening.
Winning is happening.
That’s an important one. Because while the Louisville win in January 2019 did lead to another impressive win over Florida State - ranked No. 11 - five days later, there was a loss at N.C. State sandwiched between the two wins, and Pitt followed the FSU win with 13 consecutive losses before closing the regular season with a win over Notre Dame.
Winning happened on two nights in January that season, but those were isolated incidents.
Tuesday night was not an isolated incident. It was Pitt’s fourth win in five ACC games, with the lone loss coming when neither Champagnie nor Toney was on the court. The next time the Panthers play will be at Wake Forest on Saturday, after which they’ll host North Carolina and Notre Dame. Those three teams are a combined 4-13 in the ACC this season.
Sure, the schedule also has games against Virginia Tech, Louisville, Clemson and Virginia, but the potential for Pitt to push into double-digit conference wins is very, very real. And that’s not a fluke. That’s not a hoax. That’s not fleeting.
That’s winning. And it’s what Pitt basketball is doing right now for the first time in a long time.
What a win, pt. 2
Let’s talk a little more about the game itself.
It seems to me that there were two games played out on Tuesday night. They don’t break perfectly into a first-half/second-half split, but it’s pretty close. I’d say the first half, as we’ll refer to it today, was roughly the first 24 or so minutes; the second half, which we’ll discuss in a minute, is more or less the final 16 minutes.
Within that separation, there were two themes, two defining characteristics of this Pitt basketball team. For the first half, I’ve considered the term “dominant,” but I don’t think that fully conveys the feel of the half.
I think “imposing” does it better.
Pitt’s lead at halftime on Tuesday night was nine points, which is a pretty strong advantage, even if it was three points less than it would have been if Wendell Moore Jr. hadn’t made a shot from beyond the arc after an Xavier Johnson turnover with 20 seconds to go.
Whether it was nine or 12 at halftime is inconsequential, though, because the statement was made in the first 20 minutes. Pitt imposed its will, winning the battle on the glass - albeit only by four - and, perhaps more notably, getting physical with Duke and drawing the Blue Devils into foul trouble.
Pitt attempted 17 free throws in the first half. That was 11 more than Duke had, and the Panthers’ nine-point advantage at the stripe was not coincidentally the same as their halftime scoring advantage.
The home team held a lead after 20 minutes for a few reasons, and getting to the free throw line was a big one. They attacked Duke and forced the Blue Devils to make more contact than Mike Krzyzewski probably would have liked. And by halftime, three of Duke’s starters plus one reserve were sitting on two fouls.
Au’Diese Toney led that attack, drawing an incredible eight fouls in the first half alone and making 8-of-11 free throws during that stretch. Justin Champagnie had a monster half, of course, getting the double-double out of the way right quick with 17 points and 10 rebounds in just under 19 minutes, but Toney’s performance should not be overlooked. He only shot 2-of-7 from the floor, but he went to the locker room with 12 points thanks to all of those free throws. And he added seven rebounds - three on offense, four on defense - to further emphasize the point that he was the most physical player on the court.
Toney really did sum up Pitt’s first-half performance: tough, physical and imposing. He didn’t care about the name on the front of his opponents’ jerseys. He just did what he does, and he did it with a lot of energy.
That’s what the Panthers did in the first half, and that’s how they ended up with a nine-point lead.
What a win, pt. 3
Things went a little differently in the second half.
I mean, they started off well enough. Pitt scored five unanswered to push the lead to 14, got it to 15 on a Toney three-pointer and held it at 15 as late as the 16:29 mark.
Then Duke started acting like Duke again. Specifically, star freshman Jalen Johnson started acting like star freshman Jalen Johnson. Coming off three missed games and just a few minutes played in the Blue Devils’ last game, the five-star recruit who ranked as the No. 10 overall prospect in the class of 2020 came alive in the second half.
Johnson hit 5-of-9 from the floor in the final 20 minutes and added seven more points from the free throw line to actually top Champagnie’s first-half double-double with 18 points and 10 rebounds. He was the best player on the court in the second half, even as Champagnie went 5-of-6 for 14 points and blocked four shots.
Johnson did what a player of his caliber does: he took over the game, dragging his team back into it and single-handedly giving them a chance to win. It was a bit of a surprise, given Johnson’s injury situation and the fact that he only scored six points in the first half, but you can never count out a great player, and we saw why in the second half.
But we also saw something out of Pitt in the second half.
Resilience.
As Duke chipped away at the Panthers’ lead, Jeff Capel’s squad kept doing just enough to hold on. After Pitt went up 55-40, the Blue Devils went on an 8-1 run until Champagnie hit a layup in the paint. Duke then cut the lead to six, but Champagnie drew a foul and sank two free throws.
The Blue Devils got it to six again, and once again Champagnie came up big with a jumper. Duke cut the lead to five with seven minutes to go and Toney made two free throws to stretch the lead back out. He did it again a minute later after a Jalen Johnson layup and a Matthew Hurt three off a turnover cut the lead to two. And Champagnie had another answer after the lead went down to three one more time.
And then, with Pitt clinging to a 73-71 lead in the final two minutes, when the Panthers absolutely needed a big play at the most crucial point of the game, it got one from Xavier Johnson.
It got two, actually.
First, Johnson drove hard between two defenders and laid in a huge bucket to double the lead to four. Next, after Hurt made a layup at the other end, Johnson drove again. This time, he kicked it inside to Toney who slammed home the exclamation point with 54 seconds left.
It was quite the finish to quite a game. Pitt was imposing in the first half and resilient in the second, able to control the game early and respond late. Duke is not what Duke has been in previous years, but the Blue Devils still have enough talent to be dangerous. And to me, this game was more about Pitt: Champagnie’s continued emergence as one of the stars in the ACC, Toney’s continued presence as one of the most underrated players in the league, Johnson’s ability to make some dazzling plays and the ongoing development of the supporting cast into one that can compete consistently.
TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE
Where does Champagnie rank?
Last year, when Justin Champagnie was emerging as Pitt’s best player, I pondered the question of who made for the best Pitt comparison to him. It wasn’t an easy one to answer. As you roll back through the years, there are outstanding big wings/combo forwards like Mike Young, Jamel Artis, Lamar Patterson, Sam Young and more, but none of those guys is Champagnie.
He shares characteristics with quite a few of them, but he plays in a way that’s different from all of them, really. The best comparison was probably someone like Ricardo Greer. Similar size, similar numbers. Not a perfect comparison, but similar.
This year, I have a new question. It was texted to me by a friend during Tuesday night’s game, and I’ve been considering ever since:
Where does Champagnie rank among Pitt players this century?
This question might be even tougher than the first one was.
At first blush, my reaction is to think he’s not too high on the list. Pitt basketball was great in the first decade of this century, right? It was a perennial Big East contender, consistently ranked in the top 10, ranked No. 1 multiple times, earned multiple No. 1 seeds and was generally one of the best programs in the country.
For all his brilliance, Champagnie can’t be on the level of the guys who got those teams to those levels, right?
Well, actually…
The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized that most of those teams in the 2000’s and into the last decade didn’t exactly have superstar players. They had really good players and some great players, but they didn’t have superstars like Champagnie is becoming right now. At least, there weren’t many of them.
Does that mean he’s No. 1? No, I don’t think so. I’m not entirely sure who is No. 1 - that’s probably a matter of personal preference - but he’s up there pretty high.
Let’s start this way: Who would you put above Champagnie? You can do the “Which players would you choose if you were building a team?” question, or you can simply ask, “Who was the best?” Either way, right now I think the only guys I can say for certain that I would put above him would be Sam Young and DeJuan Blair.
Picking those two guys probably says as much about me as anything else, but they were sensational players on the best Pitt teams of the century. So wherever Champagnie ranks, I think it’s probably behind those two, but not by much.
You may or may not agree with those two; we can debate that. Either way, the next question is the same: Who else would you put above Champagnie right now? Honestly, I don’t even know who’s in the conversation. Guys like Mike Young and Jamel Artis and Lamar Patterson and Brad Wanamaker were really good at Pitt, but I don’t think they’re in that top tier.
Then you have that crew of early players like Brandin Knight and Julius Page and Jaron Brown. Great players and key pieces in what Pitt built, but are they on the level of Blair or Sam Young?
Or Champagnie?
Levance Fields, Carl Krauser, Ashton Gibbs; varying degrees of excellence there, and certainly they are all important in Pitt history, but I would be hard-pressed to put any of them in the same category.
Am I suffering from recency bias? Am I over-influenced what I’m witnessing right now? With the passing of time, will a little more perspective come into play and temper this hype a little bit?
Maybe. But at this moment, I’m having a hard time finding too many guys - if any - who have played at a higher level than Champagnie is currently.
How do you measure Brandin Knight?
I mentioned a lot of guys in that last section, but I want to circle back to one, in particular:
Brandin Knight.
Knight’s name appears 156 times in Pitt’s 2020-21 media guide. It’s sprinkled throughout the record books for everything from steals and assists to three-point attempts and minutes played. But the impact counts for even more than the production; Knight truly was a foundational piece of the Pitt program as it was built by Ben Howland and Jamie Dixon.
In fact, you can make a good case that Knight wasn’t just a foundational piece; he was the foundational piece, and it’s very likely that the Panthers never reach the levels they achieved in the early 2000’s without him.
And yet, in the years since, Pitt has reached even higher and done so with seemingly better players. Knight’s place in history hasn’t been overshadowed, but he has, to some extent, been surpassed. So I started wondering:
Is Brandin Knight the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band of Pitt basketball?
(I hope you have an appreciation for the Beatles, because if you don’t, then the rest of this section is going to mean a little less to you. Also, if you don’t have an appreciation for the Beatles, we have other things to discuss before we get to Brandin Knight’s place in Pitt history.)
Everybody likes Sgt. Pepper. It’s great. Lots of good songs. And it routinely shows up at or near the top of those greatest-albums-of-all-time lists.
But how great is it? In my mind, it’s surpassed by the albums that came after it - the White Album and Abbey Road - and I would even say its two predecessors - Rubber Soul and Revolver - are on par with it, if not better as well.
And yet we still point to Sgt. Pepper as the key album. I can understand why. It’s a before-and-after moment, the spot where the Beatles fully blazed a new trail. Everything that came after Sgt. Pepper, both for the Beatles and for so much of popular music, owed some level of debt to it. There probably wouldn’t be a White Album or Abbey Road without Sgt. Pepper.
But while Sgt. Pepper is important, it’s not the best. If I have to pick a Beatles album to put on, it’s not my first choice. It’s not my second choice either. And it might not be third, depending on the day. I’m putting on the White Album, or I’m putting on Abbey Road, for starters.
Just the same way that if I was starting a team, I’m probably picking Sam Young or DeJuan Blair.
Again, this isn’t to say that Brandin Knight doesn’t deserve every bit of respect that he gets. He very much deserves it. There’s a reason his jersey hangs in the rafters, and like I said before, you can make a good case that the Pitt program doesn’t reach the heights it reached without him laying the foundation. More than any individual player, he was responsible for the rebirth of Pitt basketball.
But it’s hard to not feel like he was surpassed by some of the players that followed him, even if he was pretty great in his own right.
Where does Brandin Knight rank for you?
ONE PREDICTION
Pitt is going to take care of business
The next week and a half is going to be really, really interesting.
Pitt sits at 8-2 overall and 4-1 in the ACC. That’s a great start, sullied only by the season-opening loss to St. Francis but bolstered by the current three-game winning streak. Say what you will about Duke this season, but the Blue Devils have talent, and if you want to put yourself in the top half of the ACC, you have to win games like that.
But you also have to win games like the next three on the schedule. In fact, this stretch is absolutely crucial.
It starts on Saturday at Wake Forest. Then Pitt hosts North Carolina on Tuesday and Notre Dame next Saturday. Combined, those three teams have five wins in the ACC this season; four of those five are UNC’s, and it’s not exactly a murderer’s row of quality opponents. The Tar Heels beat Notre Dame (1-5 in the ACC), Wake Forest (0-6), Miami (2-6) and Syracuse (2-3).
Meanwhile, Notre Dame’s only conference win was last Saturday against Boston College, who is 1-6 in league play.
So yeah, I can’t say any of those three teams - Wake Forest, North Carolina, Notre Dame - looks all that dangerous right now. It’s not like Pitt has beaten the best in the league either, but the Panthers’ only conference loss was against Louisville, who is 4-2, and that game was played without Champagnie and Toney, so there’s a slight asterisk.
Here’s my point:
Pitt has to win these next three games. A home game with Virginia Tech will kick off the February schedule and the Hokies are 11-2 overall and 5-1 in the ACC, so that’s going to be a tough one. Going to Louisville a week later will be tough, too. As will a home-and-home against Clemson and a trip to Virginia.
There are some challenging games coming up on the schedule and probably a few losses, which means one thing above all else:
Take care of business when you can.
With the way Pitt is playing right now, the Panthers should beat Wake Forest, UNC and Notre Dame. But we’ve certainly seen plenty of instances of this program falling short in winnable games. We saw it in the opener against St. Francis. We saw it against Nicholls State last year.
ACC teams are a level above those opponents, but the underlying theme is the same: you have to win those games to truly separate yourself and take a step forward. If Pitt beats Wake, UNC and Notre Dame, the Panthers will be 11-2 overall and 7-1 in the ACC heading into the game against Virginia Tech. Both teams will likely be ranked and the primetime Wednesday night game could very well get national TV coverage.
That will be a big one. But only if Pitt does what it’s supposed to do between now and then.
I’m going to say it happens. I’m going to say the Panthers keep their heads and their focus. I’m going to say they don’t forget exactly what they had to do to come back for a win at the Carrier Dome and then crush Syracuse in the second half at the Petersen Events Center and then be the better team for 40 minutes against Duke.
They had to work like crazy to get those wins and they’ll have to work like crazy to get these wins. I think they’ll do it. I think the lessons have been learned.