Let me start by saying this is nowhere near a full recap. It’s just some random thoughts. Some of them from before the game, some from after. I just got home and haven’t read what the Pittsburgh papers and UCLA blogs have said.
The end of the season kills me. The cause of all of this might be the fact that the end of basketball season is a bit harder than football. The end of football means the beginning of another year at the Pete. The end of hoops leads to a few months of nothingness.
The Sweet Sixteen is the exact type of talent this team has. We’re certainly not a top 5 team (and how can you be without an amazing recruit?) but we are a top 25 team. I didn’t expect a national championship out of these guys. I do, however, expect players on a top 25 team to make layups. Point blank shots. Tip ins. They lost at least 10 points through missing those type of shots and along with losing those points, it probably end up costing the game too.
Gray (as well as much of the rest of the team) is careless with the ball. He needs to treat it like gold and doesn’t. When you get double teamed, you dish it back outside quickly. Instead, he held it for a while, let the defender get physical with his, and then toss it across the court.
There are all kinds of stats that I could look up for you that involve UCLA really overcoming their season averages. The most obvious one seemed to be free throw shooting. Coming in, the UCLA folks said they weren’t great foul shooters and Pitt fans know that we certainly aren’t. UCLA was 23-26 from the line. Good teams find odd ways to win sometimes — scoring a third of your points from the line is one of those.
Finally, the Dixon-Howland handshake, if you even want to call it that, was incredibly quick. Not sure about what went down.
Expect more breakdown on the ins and outs of Thursday’s game coming over the next few days.
link to sports.espn.go.com
That is pretty wierd. Can’t say I’ve ever seen a guy fresh off of his COLLEGE team get eliminated from the big dance just go ahead and sign with an NBA team in time for, possibly, the playoffs.
So this may be the first time a guy is in the big dance AND the NBA playoffs in the same year. Sounds wrong, probably is, but he exploited the loophole so good for him I guess.
But, with the talent we had on them team – and to me gaging from watching some early games and the Tourneys, the team just wasn’t that talented – that’s a pretty good year. No one player stood out, or was consistent enough to be counted on having a good game day in and day out. Forget about not having “NBA Talent” as I’ve read on this and other sites, they didn’t really have top notch college talent. I can’t see complaining about how it went given the circumstances – and, if anything, I think you have to give Dixon credit for taking them this far.
Not surprisingly, every team that advanced to the elite 8 had more top 50 recruits on their team than the team they beat.
I’m not a big Dokish fan, but it’s a good read none the less.
We watch the games because we’re Pitt fans. Unfortunately being a Pitt fan doesn’t make the players any better. They had the season all of us without outsized expectations thought they would have. I said all year they were a Top 15 team and that’s what they proved to be.
What was frustrating was watching Pitt get ranked in the Top 5 early and reading all the armchair analysts out there as they read statistics and somehow convinced themselves that Dixon had a Final 4 contender.
Obviously having talented players is important, but there is way more to this game (and building a successful program) than very unscientific recruiting rankings.
Here are some more statistical gymnastics for you. In Kansas’ three-point victory over Southern Illinois Thursday night their 8-0 elite-player advantage was worth exactly 0.375 points per top-50 recruit. The Salukis did not stand a chance 😉
Like I said – the future is much of the same with kids like Woodall (who never played point guard until this year) is going to come in and play the 1 at Pitt. More projects! Not any Dominic James.
Recruiting has already picked up. If we can land Eloy Vargas for the 2008 class, we are looking at a legit national title contender in 2 or 3 years. We would have Levance Fields, Sam Young, Tyrell Biggs, and Cassin Diggs as seniors, Gilbert Brown as a red-shirt sophmore, Dejaun Blair, Bradley Wannamaker, Darnell Dodson, and Gary McGhee as sophmores, Travan Woodall, Nasir Robinson, and Eloy Vargas as juniors. That is 12 scholarship players with at least four players with at least 4 stars (Young, Blair, Vargas, and Robinson). The future is bright.
Untill we start adding at least one 5 star in the mix, we are still behind. Also, I wouldn’t hold my breath on 4 star Vargas.
I think Dixon’s game-time coaching has improved, but I really do have my doubts about whether he is capable of making his individual players better, part of which is getting them to the point where the fundamentals are just ingrained.
Even by the end of the year, Gray still waited too long to make decisions in the post, particularly on the double team, and loved to bring the ball down. Sam Young still would take 3-4 terrible shots each game. Mike Cook would still over dribble or penetrate when nothing was there and turn it over, and throw lazy ass passes that got picked off or that took so long to get there that the half step advantage his teammate would have had was gone. Graves would still penetrate half way to the hoop and get scared and look for the kickout instead of taking strong to the goal. And Gray and Kendall NEVER took it strong to the hoop if there was a defender any where near the goal.
Perhaps this is common on every team – same players making the same mistakes – and I don’t recognize it because I only watch them once in a while but I watch almost every Pitt game.
I know he’s young and still learning, but I really do have serious concerns about whether Dixon and the coaches around him have what it takes to help their players improve throughout the season and from season to season. People will point to Gray and his improvement, and while it was significant, I think a lot of that was just losing the weight and adding a little (but not enough) strength, and he plateaued at the beginning of his senior year.
Next year will be telling. We’ll see if Young and Fields, in particular, start to show real signs maturity and improvement.
BTW, refs have now blown two calls at the end of NCAA tourney games that cost the losing team a victory: the flagrant foul that should have been called on Oden against Xavier and the travel that should have been called on Green last night. That’s shameful.
As for taking four star players over five star players. I don’t think it really makes too much of a difference. The spread between the talent of a top-25 player and a top-50 player is very thin. More importantly, there may be multiple 5 star players that play the same position. I wouldn’t really want three point guards on the roster even if they were all 5 star. No team is going to have a 5 star player at every position. Maybe Duke or Carolina but many of those players get the 5 star rating because they are going to those schools. Once you start recruiting and landing top-50 players and adding them to all of the overlooked upperclassmen, then you have a real chance to advance in the tourney.
I think Dixon is a fine coach but recruiting has been a question. Conversely, Wanny is an awesome recruiter but I am not sure if he is a good coach. Most people at his previous nfl stops as hc, were hapy to see him go. However, in college at some traditional powers, he was an outstanding asst. coach.
We have some decent recruits coming in next year-just look at this weekend’s championship games where pitt is represented. However, a glaring hole is at the 5 spot but maybe we can make up for it the way nova did last year.
I think Dixon is a fine coach but recruiting has been a question. Conversely, Wanny is an awesome recruiter but I am not sure if he is a good coach. Most people at his previous nfl stops as hc, were hapy to see him go. However, in college at some traditional powers, he was an outstanding asst. coach.
We have some decent recruits coming in next year-just look at this weekend’s championship games where pitt is represented. However, a glaring hole is at the 5 spot but maybe we can make up for it the way nova did last year.
He is stopping it soon anyway but unlike the rest of us-he actually is a sports reporter! Not for the sporting news or si, but plenty more than what some of you do (or even think you do).
The guy that runs this blog (Chas, I think) at least recognizes he’s a fan and not a qualified reporter-provides a nice service anyway, that I appreciate.
head coach.
Dokish was calling attention to the fact that it actually applied universally during that round of the tournament, which also isn’t too surprising.
We know — the next recruiting class for Pitt is always going to be the answer. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ll take those 4 and 5 star guys. Sure, there are always going to be total busts in there (like Biggs), but I’ll still take my chances with the higher-rated guys.
It won’t take much for Woodall to be better than Fields.
Think about the recent history of the Duke and UConn programs.
Duke and UConn are the two best examples of why having the higher-ranked recruits almost guarantees making it through the first couple rounds of March Madness. Coach K and Calhoun have been picking the cream of the crop and recruiting 5-star kids from across the country for many years and while there’s no doubt they are also great coaches, the single biggest factor in their long-running success has been the quality of their recruits.
Are they occasionally going to have blips where all their 5-star kids leave at once or they have a couple busts? Sure……but they regroup fast with another huge class of future stars. Duke, for example, has Singler and Smith coming in.
I wouldn’t mind having a couple of those overrated white players like Parks, Laettner, Redick and McRoberts. (McRoberts would have had a great career if he would have played alongside some normal Duke players, instead of the recent line of bums.)
Redick was the exact opposite. He withered under pressure and made it to only one final 4 despite being a #1 seed every year. The year he made it to the final 4, he wasn’t even close to being the best player on his team (Luol Deng, Chris Duhon, and Shelden Wiliams).
Your boy, McRoberts played with “great” talent like Redick and Williams last year and only made the sweet 16 (as a #1 seed). Overrated and will be lucky to get a second contract in the NBA.
Parks was a complete bum and I will leave it at that.
But Dixon’s recruiting of big-time talent aint happening even with Mike Rice. I mean cmon – Woodall? He’s another non-point guard that will play point guard at Pitt…thats a project out of high school for the Big East. Again, elite recruits (especially guards) aren’t coming. I find it hard to watch freakin VCU even have better, more atlethic guards than Pitt. But thats the truth.