Coach Dixon, Rick Pitino, Jim Calhoun and Jay Wright would like to thank USF for that upset of Marquette. Not because it opens things wider to win the conference regular season. No, it’s a tremendous object lesson that you never assume a win. All it takes is one bad night.
I actually watched that game (my son fell asleep on my lap so I had nothing else to do). It was a horrible shooting night for Marquette. The Bulls did not do anything different. They didn’t have an incredibly great shooting night. Marquette just had a collectively bad game. Horrible shooting from the perimeter. Shockingly bad free throw shooting — even from good shooters.
So with that happening, you have to believe Pitt will come out and take care of business against DePaul. Regardless of whether they are winless in the conference and may not have Dar Tucker.
“We’re not sure,” DePaul coach Jerry Wainwright said Thursday, “if he will be available.”
DePaul (8-15, 0-10) has lost 10 in a row and 15 of its past 19 games since a 4-0 start.
The news got worse this week when Tucker, averaging a team-high 18.5 points per game, suffered a sprained left ankle when he stepped on a teammate’s foot during the afternoon shootaround before Tuesday’s game with No. 8 Marquette.
Tucker, who scored a game-high 23 points against Pitt last season in a 98-79 Panthers victory, is being replaced in the starting lineup by 6-foot-10 senior center Matija Poscic.
“We’ve been practicing as if (Tucker) is going to play,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said.
Wainwright said his team showed positive signs in the Tucker-less 76-61 loss to Marquette.
Junior guard Will Walker scored a career-high 30 points, and freshman Michael Bizoukas recorded a career-high eight assists, keeping the Blue Demons close most of the game.
Jermaine Dixon is saying the right things about this.
“We’re not going to look past anybody,” junior guard Jermaine Dixon said. “We need every victory we can get. Even though they don’t have any victories in the Big East, they’re going to come out and compete. They’re going to play hard. We know that.
“A lot of their guys go hard. They fought Marquette hard. They took them down to the wire. They made a big comeback. We know they’re going to play hard, but we’ll be ready.”
The game is on ESPN FullCourt, MSG, MASN, and FoxSports Pittsburgh.
Consider this the open thread for the game.
While BE may be abit overrated, no other confernce is exactly distinguishing itself; i.e., Wake has 2 terrible losses in the past week. Long way to still.
have to be careful not to look ahead to WVU. this game is playing out similarly to the rutgers game, where they had to keep from looking towards g’town.
Sam Young needs to quit pretending he is a Harlem Globetrotter when he takes the ball up the court.
and to mention that pitt lost two games at tough venues is misleading. pitt had commanding leads in both of those games and would have blown the other team out at home or at neutral site. the home crowd was instrumental to both louisville and nova in those games. foul trouble was also a key factor.
pitt is every bit as good as any of the other top teams this year. whether or not pitt will get past the sweet 16 is beyond me, but the team is solid and has a very good chance to do so.
woohoo!!! AWESOME 2nd half!!! 🙂
They seem to play up or down to the their competition, and that may not be a bad thing. They often don’t get style points, but on the other hand, just two short weeks ago, I thought Duke was looking like the best team around.
Gruber, I guess my previous post made it looked like I was complaining … my point, which I didn’t make very well, is that while Pitt never comes out and blows a team out of the gym (like Duke did to Maryland 2 weeks ago), they are more than competitive every game (not like Duke which was just blown out by 27 pts)
in case somebody is unfamiliar with this, it means Hail to PITT!!
Levance was incredible today – 16 assists ties Pitt’s record. (and only 1 turnover).
the louisville seemed to be a game where the refs called a tight game and while i didn’t see the nova game i’m sure it was similar.
Omar – you’re right. Not too many other teams have proven much either, though some have definitely played some better out-of-conf competition than Pitt.
I think the article in the PG today kind of summed up my feelings about the state of college hoop right now. All the good players leave early or skip college entirely and it creates a general parity and mediocrity around the country. You realize it when you watch an NBA game and you don’t recognize half the players because they’re either foreign or they went from HS straight to the big time. The NCAA and the NBA have to get together and find a way to get the good players into college and keep them there for 2/3 developmental yrs, because the system right now is ruining the quality of the college game.
BTW, the 6 TOs and his yanking were written about in one of the PGH papers today if you don’t believe me.
About the guy in the PG talking about no elite teams in college bball. These guys just need to fill up space in the paper. Three months ago, everyone had already handed the national championship to Carolina, because they were the greatest team ever.
When you can put up > 90 points against teams like Robert Morris and Depaul, you don’t need much defense, I suppose. But can Pitt still buckle down when they need it, such as they might against Cincy and UConn?
Carolina is a perfect example of the problem. Some of the guys on that roster will play in the NBA, but nobody is a guarantee and none of them look like they have star potential. Contrast that with the days of Jordan, Daugherty, Perkins, Reid, Kenny Smith, Rasheed Wallace, Worthy, Felton, Jamison, Vince Carter, Lynch, Fox etc. etc.
If UNC can’t put together a team of obvious NBA players, including some future stars, that should tell you something about the talent pool and how it’s been affected.
If a kid chooses the NBA money over college ball then I wish him the best and give the scholarship opportunity to someone who wants it.
Call me old-fashioned but I’d prefer to see a bunch of equally talented college kids, well coached, and playing their guts out for every win on thier way to a tournament bid and maybe a national title.
If it’s all about equally-talented college kids playing their guts out, then you should be happy with Feinstein’s book and the Patriot League. (I’m not being facetious…..I love that kind of college basketball, but it’s not what I want to watch in March and April.)
The Florida nat’l championship teams of a couple yrs ago are a great example. They were a great exception to the current standard because they stuck together a while longer because they knew they had a chance to go back-to-back. Most of the time guys like Horford and Brewer would have skipped college or stayed one year and we never would have seen that team make history.
I want to watch a “bunch of teams of should-be NBA talent pound the heck out of” each other…………and that’s not what we get to see these days.
You are thinking about Lebron James-Kobe Bryant type players. They don’t come along that often. Remember there are only 24 NBA All-Stars and most of them are the usual suspects (KG, Paul Pierce, Kobe, AI, Ray Allen, Dirk Nowitzki etc.). NBA All-Stars don’t come along every year.
I don’t think any of us will really know much about how tough Pitt is this year until they play UConn (and Marquette). They really only have one good win so far this year (Syracuse and that was at home, and maybe FSU — but that’s a stretch) and neither of those is exactly marquee material. You can tell me all the RPI stuff you want……..I’ll reserve judgment until they beat a team that finishes in the Top 10.
Don’t misunderstand me………I’m not being pessimistic……it’s just that nobody’s proven anything yet this year. We’re all anticipating that this is finally the year they get past the 16, but it’s all conjecture at this point.
I know everybody’s going to tell me that the Big East is all good and now they’re just starting to beat each other up………but I don’t buy it. I think Pitt, UConn, Marquette, L-ville are good and possibly The Cuse and Nova are decent. That’s it……..G-town, WVU and ND stink and the rest don’t deserve mention. (I’m not even sure Marquette is good because they haven’t played anybody either….but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt because those guards are veterans.)
So let me repeat……before everybody gets up in arms…….I think (and hope wildly) that the Panthers might be better this year. But nothing they’ve done so far this year proves it. Tough place to play Louisville — loss. Tough place to play Nova — loss. Let’s hope that’s not a pattern.