A nice summary of Troutman and McCarroll’s careers at Pitt. Both will be missed.
Bendel speculates that Taft might decide to wait a year if a whole raft of high schoolers and college freshmen and sophomores try to jump to the NBA ahead of an expected age cap of 20 years. I’m not buying it. Everyone thinks Taft is a lottery pick no matter how many kids come out.
In the weekly Q&A with Fittipaldo (apparently posted the morning of Pitt’s loss to Pacific), he points out that if Krauser and Taft go, the leading returning scorer on the team will be Graves. If so, a .500 season in the Big East would be about the best to be hoped in the centennial of Pitt basketball.
Finally, some more from Coach Dixon trying to spin and cover for his players.
The stoic second-year coach got hit with a barrage of questions from the media, and he tried to put a positive spin on each and every one of his answers. Not once did he buy into theories suggesting that the Panthers had underachieved or had a disappointing season. And, he wanted no parts of a conversation dealing with the drop-off in play by some of his younger players, even though freshman guard Ronald Ramon and sophomore forward Levon Kendall were clearly struggling by seasons end.
“We had a great year and were proud of what these guys accomplished,” Dixon said. “We’re a young team that improved as the year went on. We got better.”
…“Every team comes into the season with big hopes every year, throughout the country,” he said. “And we had a great year. We won a whole lot of games (10) in a very good league (Big East). The team got better, we were very young. ”
Perhaps Dixon is a man who is strong in his convictions and had no problem with the way 2004-05 ended. Maybe he saw enough positives in young players like Ramon, freshman guard Keith Benjamin, sophomore center Aaron Gray, sophomore guard Antonio Graves and Kendall that he is legitimately excited about their progress and the future of the program.
Or, it could be that he chose to avoid discussing his teams struggles in a public format. Only he knows for sure, but this much is certain: Most Pitt players openly said after Thursday’s loss that the season was a disappointment and most fans on talk radio echoed those sentiments 24 hours later.
I’m praying it was the latter. I’m reasonably sure of it, because Dixon in his 2 years as head coach has not really done any public calling out of his players. He has protected and shielded them. It’s part of why they like him. They know he has their backs.
Should be an interesting off-season for the b-ball program and the players
