The 3-2-1 Column: Hoops transfers, a new commit, guard depth and more

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In this week’s 3-2-1 Column, we’re talking hoops: two players have left, one has committed and the 2020-21 roster is coming more into focus.

THREE THINGS WE KNOW

The departures
We’re all restricting non-essential travel right now, but Pitt hoops been on the move this week.

See how I dovetailed current events with Pitt sports? Okay, it wasn’t exactly clever, but this week was a good example of how everything in the sports world may seem like it has stopped, but the reality is that there’s still a lot going on.

Like transfers: it’s transfer season in college basketball. It’s happening all over the country, and this week, it came to Pitt with two players deciding to leave the program.

You know the news by now: Ryan Murphy and Trey McGowens won’t be back with the Panthers next season. That’s probably all the attrition Pitt will experience this offseason - it’s all the coaches really needed to satisfy their recruiting needs - but I guess in this day and age you can’t rule anything out.

McGowens and Murphy aren’t exactly surprises in their decisions to transfer. Murphy looked like an obvious candidate as his minutes dwindled and his role was reduced down the stretch. We’ll talk about why that happened in a minute, but with a reduced role and Ithiel Horton lurking over his shoulder - Horton’s presence in the rotation next season would likely reduce Murphy’s playing time even more - it’s not hard to see why he decided to move on.

McGowens’ decision seems to have hinged more on wanting to play point guard, at least according to a statement he gave Craig Meyer of the Post-Gazette. That opportunity wasn’t going to happen at Pitt, where Xavier Johnson is the incumbent, Horton is waiting in the wings and Femi Odukale is coming in for next season.

Johnson will be Pitt’s point guard until he graduates, but Horton and Odukale can play the position, too, so McGowens was probably going to be primarily off the ball.

No matter why Murphy and McGowens decided to leave, the result is that they’re gone. We all knew there would be attrition; that was inevitable this offseason, and as Jeff Capel continued recruiting, it was clear that he expected some spots to open up. We all speculated on this name or that name, but in the end, we knew someone was going to go.

It turned out to be Murphy and McGowens, and while those departures are worth considering individually, the bigger picture is roster construction for the 2020-21 season. With those two joining Eric Hamilton, Kene Chukwuka and Samson George as scholarship departures this offseason, Capel has room to add six new players (five departures plus one open scholarship spot from the 2019-20 roster).

That’s a lot of room for a coach to work with. It’s not quite on the level of Kevin Stallings bringing in a dozen guys prior to the 2017-18 season, but it’s still nearly half a roster.

It would be ideal for Capel to not have that kind of turnover entering Year Three - you’d like to think he had worked up to some better roster stability - but the situation is what it is, and I don’t know if that number of departures is too concerning. Two of the five players leaving the roster didn’t contribute at all this past season and one other scholarship was left empty, so that’s half of the open spots to fill. Then you have the graduation of a one-year transfer, which is more “natural” attrition. And you have two guys who are looking for better roles elsewhere.

The number of openings - six - is big. But it’s an opportunity for Capel to continue rebuilding the roster.

One to remember
The news of McGowens’ transfer wasn’t terribly shocking; nor was I surprised at the response online.

In a lot of instances, Pitt fans seemed to be glad he is leaving.

I kind of see where that’s coming from. He was the ultimate hot-and-cold player over the course of his career, either dominating games when he was making baskets and getting to the free throw line or wasting possessions with ill-advised shots and erratic play.

McGowens struck me as being something of an introvert, but his emotions often seemed to get the better of him when he was on the court. And when Pitt’s seven-game losing streak to end the season overlapped with underachieving performances by McGowens, he took the brunt of the blame.

So a lot of fans were more than happy to advise McGowens against letting the door hit him on the way out. But I think those fans are forgetting - or ignoring - part of the story. Yes, McGowens struggled this season, but we can’t pretend like he wasn’t a crucially important of Jeff Capel’s rebuild at Pitt.

McGowens committed to Pitt in April 2018, roughly a month after Capel was hired to be the Panthers’ head coach. His commitment and the reclassification from the 2019 class to 2018 represented a double win for Capel, the first tangible evidence of the recruiting ability that had been touted since Capel took the job. McGowens was a big get for Capel, the first recruit to buy into what the new Pitt coach was selling. And he was a four-star prospect at that, a top-100 recruit who had offers from the ACC, the Big Ten, the SEC and the Big East, among others.

So getting McGowens in the first place was big. Then he got to campus and matched that impact on the court. When Pitt won an ACC regular-season game for the first time in two years, McGowens led the charge with 33 points. And when the Panthers got another ACC win two games later, he went off for 30. McGowens then scored 42 points over back-to-back wins at the end of the season, including a 26-point performance in the first round of the ACC Tournament.

Add it all together and you have McGowens averaging 26.3 points per game in Pitt’s four wins against ACC opponents as a freshman. He had as much to do with Pitt breaking the conference losing streak as anyone - more than anyone, actually.

Let’s not forget that.

I’m not saying you should ignore or overlook the other games, the times when his play was infuriating and went a long way in contributing to losses. When Pitt lost 13 in a row two years ago, he averaged 7.3 points and 2.5 turnovers per game. And that pattern was repeated this season: McGowens averaged 6.4 points and 3.3 turnovers while shooting less than 29% in the Panthers’ seven-game losing streak to end the regular season.

But he had one last flourish left in him, and while his performance in the first round of the ACC Tournament this season wasn’t a 30-point game, McGowens was Pitt’s second-leading scorer in the win over Wake Forest with 14 points and handed out four assists against just two turnovers while shooting 46.2% from the floor.

Of course, he finished his Pitt career by shooting sub-40% and committing more turnovers than assists in the season-ending loss to N.C. State, and that part of his story with the Panthers - the part where he just wasn’t consistent enough to be reliable - can’t be dismissed.

When Trey McGowens was good, he was really good. He battled as hard as anyone and didn’t back down from any challenge. But the consistency issue dogged him, and Pitt needed him to be more balanced than he was.

In preparing this column, I went back and looked at McGowens’ game logs from the last two seasons. I was looking for a correlation between his double-digit scoring games and Pitt’s wins. It ended up not being as strong a correlation as I expected: he reached double figures 37 times and the Panthers were 23-14 in those games. I thought it would lean more heavily on the win side of that column.

But then I thought about the overall record. Pitt has won 30 games in the last two seasons. So while the Panthers lost 14 games when McGowens scored in double figures, they only won seven when he scored less than 10.

A double-digit game from McGowens didn’t guarantee a win. But it helped quite a bit, and he was a big part of whatever success Pitt enjoyed over the last two seasons.

The other departure
I think there’s less of an emotional reaction to Ryan Murphy’s transfer. For one thing, it was probably the most commonly-speculated departure. But for another, he was a one-year player who came to Pitt as a complementary piece, a junior-college transfer whose strength was supposed to be his outside shooting.

Murphy was supposed to come to Pitt and give Johnson and McGowens a three-point threat, someone they could kick the ball out to when they drove to the basket. It was supposed to be a tried-and-true formula: drive into the lane, collapse the defense and dish to the outside for an open three.

That’s what was supposed to happen.

There was some success with the formula in the very early part of the schedule. He hit 3-of-6 from three in the season-opening win over Florida State and 4-of-7 in the loss to Nicholls State one game later. He was a less effective in the third game of the season, hitting 2-of-6 from three against Robert Morris, and then he went downhill rather fast.

Murphy didn’t make a three-pointer in either of the next two games. He finally sank a couple against Arkansas-Pine Bluff but he needed 10 attempts to do it, and that was how the rest of his season went. Outside of few-and-far-between flourishes, Murphy struggled to become the consistent threat he was supposed to be.

Over the course of 30 games played, he hit three or more three-pointers just seven times. And he had 12 games when he didn’t make a single shot from beyond the arc.

That included the final 10 games when he shot 17.6% from beyond the arc and averaged 1.7 points per game. He made just three three-pointers in those final 10 games, but we can’t talk about that stretch without considering what happened in there:

After getting blanked at Duke on Jan. 28 - zero points, 0-of-1 from the floor and no three-point attempts in 14 minutes - Murphy went to the bench through no choice of his own or the coaches’. He suffered a concussion in practice the following week and had to sit out three games before returning to action on Feb. 21.

Murphy came back on that date, but his impact was minimal: in the final nine games, he made just 3-of-17 three-pointers and scored a total of 17 points. His playing time lagged, too, as he didn’t see more than 16 minutes in any of those final nine games and played less than 10 minutes in four of the nine.

While I think the concussion did set him back, the writing really was on the wall for Murphy over the final month of the season. He had a job to do at Pitt, and even pre-concussion, he wasn’t really all that effective at doing it. With an allegedly better guard waiting in the wings, it made sense to move on.

TWO QUESTIONS WE HAVE

How about the one addition?
It wasn’t all departures for the Pitt basketball team this week, as Capel also landed a commitment for the roster.

That came from Femi Odukale, a 6’5” wing who is playing a post-grad year in Massachusetts but is a native of New York, which should be music to the ears of Pitt fans who have been longing for the program to add more New York City players to the roster.

The most intriguing thing about Odukale is his versatility. He can play point guard, shooting guard or small forward, and by all accounts, he made the most of his post-grad year, improving considerably and becoming more of a threat to hit shots from outside.

He’s not going to come to Pitt and serve as the team’s top weapon from beyond the arc, but having those shots in his arsenal will help him as an offensive threat. And it sounds like he is no stranger to playing defense, which will help him early in his career.

Odukale is, as you probably know, Pitt’s fourth commitment in the 2020 class, but he stands out from John Hugley, Noah Collier and Max Amadasun because he is a guard, and that’s not unimportant. Pitt brought in Murphy last year but no freshman guards. Gerald Drumgoole could possibly play shooting guard, but his game is more in line with small forward.

As such, Capel couldn’t afford to go back-to-back classes without any guards - especially not when two guards with eligibility remaining (McGowens and Murphy) were transferring out.

In that regard, Odukale is a really, really important addition to the class. Pitt needs every bit of Hugley, Amadasun and Collier (plus potentially William Jeffress) to help replenish the front court, but college basketball is a guard-dominated game. Capel got off to a great start when he landed Johnson and McGowens, but it was a long time between their commitments in April 2018 and Odukale’s verbal this week.

Capel can’t have another stretch like that. Jalen Hood-Schifino is a really good guard prospect in the class of 2022, but that’s a long time from now; Capel needs to build the guard depth between now and when Hood-Schifino arrives. It may be too late to get more for the 2020 class, but the 2021 class is probably going to need two guards.

In the meantime, Odukale is a really good addition. He’ll get minutes next season out of necessity, and having someone with his size and length on the perimeter should bring an interesting element to Pitt’s rotation and attack on both ends of the court.

Is Pitt right back where they started?
Continuing the discussion of guard depth…

As it stands right now, Pitt looks like it will have the same situation this coming season that it had this past season:

Not enough guard depth.

Not enough to rotate players for rest. Not enough to sub when players get in foul trouble. Not enough to get underperforming players out of the lineup. Not enough to weather an injury.

All of those factors came into play with Pitt’s back court this past season, and Capel had no real option for dealing with them. If Johnson or McGowens needed to get some rest for a stretch in a game, Capel couldn’t really do it because the reserves were walk-ons. If one of those guards picked up two fouls in the first half, there was a good chance they would log some more minutes before halftime because there was no depth.

If a guard was making bad decisions or playing poorly, he might come out for a few minutes, but Capel knew that it was a risk, that an underperforming Johnson or McGowens was still probably a better option than the walk-ons.

And when Murphy had to miss three games due to his concussion, Capel’s only choice was to put walk-on Onyebuchi Ezeakudo on the court (and even that plan fell apart when Ezeakudo got hurt at Notre Dame).

Pitt’s depth at guard last season was a mess because the Panthers only had three scholarship guards. But as of this writing, that’s exactly the number Pitt is projected to have this coming season.

Last year it was Johnson, McGowens and Murphy.

Next year it will be Johnson, Horton and Odukale.

There may or may not be talent upgrades on a player-to-player basis - we’ll see what happens when Horton and Odukale actually play in games - but the numbers are the numbers, and for now, they’re exactly the same.

That’s not good.

The numbers have improved in the front court. Last season, Pitt used three centers and two power forwards; this year, the Panthers will have about seven players for those two spots. That’s an upgrade, and the coaches will be glad to have more options for those front court spots.

But the back court is going to be thin again. Johnson’s role is locked in, but Horton better be as good as advertised, because he’s going to play a ton of minutes. And Odukale is going to see minutes simply because he’ll have to be in the rotation.

So while it’s good that Pitt added a new freshman guard and will have a transfer guard eligible, those additions are offset by the losses of Murphy and McGowens.

And that’s why I’m going to predict that…

ONE PREDICTION

Pitt will get a transfer guard
This isn’t based on any inside info, but it’s not hard to draw the conclusion:

Pitt has two open spots. One of those is reserved for Erie forward William Jeffress; that leaves one available scholarship.

Pitt also has a depth issue at guard.

So take an open scholarship spot, add a need for guards and throw in a transfer portal with plenty of options and - voila! - you have a simple solution to a not-too-complicated problem.

Like I said, I don’t have inside info on this matter, and I don’t have a list of names Pitt is looking at. But it seems obvious, doesn’t it? In fact, I would say it seems so obvious that it will be a bit of a surprise if the Panthers don’t go into next season with a transfer guard on the roster.

I would think a grad transfer makes the most sense, because they don’t really need another Ithiel Horton to sit on the bench and give the starters a good bit of competition in practice. They need someone who can come in and play right away, even if it’s only for one year.

Now, if you can find a transfer with multiple years to play and a clear path to immediate eligibility, then by all means, go get him. But the key is finding someone to step into the rotation at guard this fall.

Capel should have a lot to sell to a potential transfer. Johnson is back as a returning starter, but Horton and Odukale are unproven, so it shouldn’t be tough to make the case to an experienced guard that the opportunity to play is there. And you can also work the “We’re very close angle,” probably like this:

“Look, the biggest thing that sunk us last season was our depth at guard. If one guy got in foul trouble or one guy got hurt, we had to go to walk-ons. If you come here, we’re not going to have that problem. We’ll have really good guards to go with some exciting forwards and we can be dangerous in the ACC.”

That’s what Jeff Capel can say to a transfer candidate, and it’s not a stretch at all. A transfer upperclassman could slide into the rotation at the 1 or the 2 with Johnson and Horton, allowing Odukale to get minutes but not be forced into too many minutes as a freshman.

A transfer would turn a tenuous depth situation into a solid one and potentially boost the roster into one that could reasonably expect to win more than six games in the ACC.

It should be an easy sell for Capel, and I think he’ll make that pitch work and get someone in here to help in the coming season.

Assuming there is a college basketball season.