Start with that. Pitt won. They didn’t have to come from behind in the second half. No one was injured in the game. Pitt used a lot of players and divided the minutes — as it should be with this many new faces on the team and it is too early to have a set rotation and bench depth.
The performance of Pitt in the game was uneven. Again, this is not unexpected.
Pitt (1-0) won by 11 points — 82-71 — but the score was not indicative of how dominant the Panthers were for the better part of the second half. The score was tied, 28-28, with five minutes to play in the first half but Pitt made 14-1 run to close the half and take control of the game.
The Panthers the began the second half the way they ended the first — on a 14-4 run and pushed their lead to as many as 28 by midway through the half. The Peacocks, led by shooting guard Keydren Clark, did make a late run and did get as close as seven, 77-70, but the Panthers again stepped up their defense and shut them down for good.
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“I thought we didn’t close the game like we wanted to but we did a lot of good things,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said. “I thought we passed well and we played good defense at times, but the challenge is to do so for 40 minutes and that is never easy. For an opening game, though, this was certainly something to build on.”
For almost 15 minutes (5:12 in the first half to 10:56 in the second) Pitt outscored St. Peter’s 37-9. At that point, with Pitt up 65-37, Pitt started doing a lot more wholesale substituting. Changing up to 3 players at a time. Of course that is going to change a lot of things with how the game is being played, and give the Peacocks some more opportunities. It is also, absolutely, the right thing for Coach Dixon to do.
This is mad scientist time. The starters will change from game-to-game. Time to see which players work well with whom. Who has the intensity and desire. Who will play hard at any point in the game no matter what the score or the opponent. Finding the chemistry and what does and doesn’t work. This isn’t like last season where going in, 4 of the 5 starting positions were established before the first game (Troutman, Taft, Demetrius and Krauser).
In the second half, there was a conscious effort to get the ball inside to Aaron Gray a lot more and have him take more shots. In the first half he only took 5 shots, making 2. In the second half he shot 10 times, netting only 3.
But the Panthers, thanks to the 7-foot Gray, controlled the glass handily, 46-32, and scored 12 second-half points.
“If we get the ball into him, it frees up shots,” Fields said. “Early on, I don’t think we did it enough.”
Graves added 15 points for Pitt, followed by Carl Krauser, 13, and Fields, 12.
Obviously, Gray needs to work on shooting in traffic, and he needs to be more aggressive on defense judging by the fact that Pitt was outscored in the paint 30-26. These are things, that can be corrected. The fact that Gray somehow managed to finish without any fouls probably reflects being overly conscious that he can’t be as reckless inside as he was coming off the bench playing only 10 minutes. He needs to find the balance.
The plus side for Gray, going 7-10 at the free throw line. Including 5-6 in the final minutes.
