Damn Penguins game meant Fox wouldn’t pick it up, so that means it can be viewed at the Pitt website.
DeJuan Blair explained how much it means.
“What do they call it, the Backyard Brawl or something like that?†Blair said with a serious tone.
That seemingly points to how much this game means to the No. 3 Panthers.
But Blair was likely kidding. Brown apparently challenged Blair not to comment on anything Duquesne in his remarks to the media Monday.
Gilbert Brown, also was a bit nicer about it.
“I wouldn’t say it’s as mean as the West Virginia rivalry,” Brown said. “But it’s just as big. It’s an inner-city rivalry. They are right down the street. We want to go out there and show something.”
At the same time, Brown indicated that he didn’t want the game to be as close as last year’s game.
The early dominating performances in games and Pitt’s defense keeps the team coming in for puff pieces.
What separates the Panthers, what makes them more than just an intriguing team as this season unfolds, is their bread-and-butter, backbone defense.
It’s as reliable as an old pair of sneakers, the foundation on which coach Jamie Dixon has built his program. Unintentionally, Dixon has modeled his team on the city it calls home. Pittsburgh citizens wear just one sort of collar — down-and-dirty blue. Their hometown team likes its basketball just the same.
And because the defense is indoctrinated like another strand of DNA upon arrival freshman year, it doesn’t go away and doesn’t take nights off. It’s in your face, unforgiving, downright nasty, and because of it, on nights when shots don’t fall, neither necessarily will Pittsburgh.
Not every team in the top 25 can say that.
“It’s the Steel City,” Levance Fields said. “That’s the place we call our second home and that’s how we play.”
Never was that more obvious than in the Legends final. In an avert-your-eyes, hide-the-children ugly game against similarly minded Washington State, the Panthers looked perfectly comfortable. They shot poorly the entire game — 35 percent from the floor, 23 percent on 3s — and never looked rattled. There was never a flinch or even so much as a grimace as one clang led to another against a Wazzu team that would have been perfectly happy to play this game in the 30s.
The annual concern of making free throws is well underway, though.
Once again it appears the Panthers will not be a premier free-throw shooting club. They are shooting 67.1 percent from the free-throw line, which is about on par with their percentages from the past several years.
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Still, it has to be disconcerting for Dixon that his two top scorers are the ones having the most trouble at the line.
Sam Young, a career 67 percent shooter from the line, is making 61.8 percent of his attempts through the first seven games. And Blair, who shot 62.4 percent last season as a freshman, is shooting 53.3 percent this season.
“I try not to think about it,” Blair said. “I just shoot them. I work on them. I come in at nighttime and shoot some with my friends and brother. They’ll eventually start falling. It’s not all that stressful on me.”
For those of us watching him take those FTs, however, it is more than a little stressful.
