The advantage of a team having multiple threats was on display last night. Austin Freeman has been hot as the shooting guard and for a good chunk of his time on the court was covered by Jermaine Dixon.
With good reason, Pitt was concerned with stopping Greg Monroe. Pitt’s frontcourt is undersized and Monroe has begun to grasp how much of a force he can be inside. That meant bringing help to slow him down and force him to pass out of the double team. Unfortunately, one of Monroe’s strengths is that he is an excellent passer. He passed right out of the double teams — when they weren’t late — and Georgetown moved the ball very well to take advantage of that.
Specifically Chris Wright found himself uncovered and able to show more of his game than you would expect in a Princeton offense.
“I’m a different type of guard for this system, so it’s a matter of me staying aggressive,” said Wright, a 6-1, 201-pound product of St. John’s Catholic in Washington. “Whenever I see an advantage, I try to take my man. There are different spots where you can take drives in our offense. You just try to read the defense, see where things develop — and attack.”
There’s never been a point guard as physically gifted as Wright running the Princeton offense at the college level. That’s partly true because so many of the point guards who ran the Princeton offense actually played for Princeton, but John Thompson’s been using it since he got to Georgetown in 2004, and Northwestern, Colorado and Richmond all use it, or variations.
Wright got off to a fast start when he got free on an eerily familiar well-executed inbounds play. Jermaine Dixon was actually covering him, but was bumped off on a hedge. Wright went right to the corner and drilled an open 3. Clark hit a 3 and then Wright drilled another one on an open look… and that set the tone for his game.
In toppling its first top-10 team of the season, Georgetown made a statement about the essence of its strength this season. It’s not Monroe. Nor is it Wright. Nor is it Austin Freeman — each of whom has notched a career high in the past month. It is the fact that the Hoyas’ offense spark can break out among any one of several players and, as a result, shutting down Georgetown on a night like Wednesday can be a daunting task.
It was a thrilling game, with the score knotted at 31 at halftime, 11 lead changes and an electrified capacity crowd of 12,677 at Petersen Events Center — most clad in gold T-shirts — that spent most of the time on its feet, hopping up and down, jeering Georgetown players and urging on their own.
It set up an easy storyline of a tale of two guards, proving an irresistible hook with the fact that Gibbs was also being recruited by G-town until Wright committed. Contrasting Wright with Ashton Gibbs.
Gibbs countered by going 3 of 16 from the field, including 2 of 8 from 3-point range, to tie his season-low with eight points. The smooth-shooting Gibbs picked a poor time for his worst-shooting performance of the season.
“Ashton had some open 3s that he normally knocks down, and he didn’t make (them),” Pitt senior Jermaine Dixon said. “He’s our scorer. We’re going to try to find ways to get him open and he’s going to knock them down for us.”
That Wright made them and Gibbs didn’t was a big difference.
Theirs was a game within the game.
Gibbs had a very poor game as I touched on last night. He has struggled in the past couple games against the really good defensive teams that have made stopping him a focal point. He knows he is supposed to score for Pitt, and last night he got frustrated.
Early he tried to wait for his opportunity. He didn’t take a shot until the 14:19 mark of the game — and even that was ill-advised. It was blocked.
Gibbs started forcing things before the end of the first half. In the final 2:44 of the half he took (and missed) 4 shots. He had taken 5 shots up until that point. The frustration was amplified by his missing 3 open 3-point shots in the course of the game. One is a seeming rarity. Three missed open looks seemed like an impossibility up until this game.
While Gibbs was a horrid 3-16 and 2-8 on 3s, the entire Pitt team struggled with their perimeter shooting. Going a combined 4-18.
Unsurprisingly, Coach Dixon wasn’t going to blame the offense for the loss.
“You have to win games with defense, and I don’t think we have with our last couple. We definitely lost this game with our defense.”
It’s admittedly hard to blame the offense when the team shot almost 46% even with Gibbs shooting 18.75%.
So the issue after the game was how Pitt’s defense wasn’t up to snuff.
The culprit, then, was the Panthers’ defense, or modest effort of it at times.
Georgetown (14-3, 5-2), armed with a thorough mix of strong interior players, athletic wings and quick guards, bounced from strategy to strategy as the Panthers (15-3, 5-1) scurried to cover all the Hoyas’ bases. They were 7 of 10 from 3-point range (Chris Wright made all three of his en route to a game-high 27 points) and shot 46.4 percent overall.
“We just (weren’t) there defensively as a group,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said. “We hadn’t played defense as well as we needed to the last couple of games, and it caught up to us tonight.”
I can’t help but think that part of the issue on defense was that Pitt was so focused on stopping the frontcourt for this game. Monroe, Vaughn and the others finished shooting only 9-27. Pitt was doing everything it could to keep the ball out of the post. It helped open things up for guards to drive and get better looks on the 3-point shots
Austin Freeman was checked mainly by his own foul troubles that limited him to only 27 minutes — but still shot 4-6 — as the Hoya guards ended up going 17-29 and 6-8 on 3s.
Jermaine Dixon was trying to stay philosophical after the loss.
“We still got a long way to go,” Jermaine Dixon said. “We’ve got a lot of games left. We were looking forward to going undefeated, but you don’t have a night off. One loss doesn’t mean anything.”
Given that Pitt had won 8 straight, started 5-0 in the Big East, and the level of competition faced in the conference; I agree that it is kind of hard to get too worked up over this loss.
It only becomes an issue if the team doesn’t bounce back.
Pitt won its past two despite, not because of, its defensive effort. So said Pitt coach Jamie Dixon. And Wednesday’s game needs to serve as a reminder that just because these Panthers aren’t expected to be 5-0 doesn’t mean they’ll be treated by opponents like they’re 0-5.
On the other hand, because of such a wonderful and completely unexpected start to the Big East season, the Panthers deserved a mulligan. In the grand scheme, one loss in the Big East, particularly to Georgetown, won’t hurt those NCAA Tournament chances. Besides, no Pitt team in the past eight seasons before this had made it to 6-0 in the Big East. Every one of those teams went to the Tournament, and a few won conference titles.
So was this an inevitable winter pothole on the Pittsburgh road, or will it beget the latest doomsday theory?
The Panthers must treat it as both. Now that they have successfully convinced most of the country that they are a good team, they need to convince themselves and show they can bounce back with a win over Herb Pope and Seton Hall on the road Sunday. This game is history.
But they also must take notes from Wednesday’s effort as to not be doomed by repeating it.
Yep. Next up a road trip to Seton Hall. They may have lost a lot of close games, but they are definitely the kind of team that can torch Pitt. Pressing defense, an unpredictable perimeter threat in Hazell. Size and versatility in the front court. They desperately need a signature win to get to those preseason expectations (and Gonzalez’s job security) of making the NCAA Tournament.
Lost in the, well, loss, was some of the good things Pitt did on offense. For much of the game, Pitt had excellent ball movement. When Pitt remembered to work the ball inside, Gary McGhee showed much better hands. He handled passes without fumbling or having to gather as much. Nasir Robinson continued to play with confidence that carried from the last game. But for foul trouble he would have been out there more.
Gilbert Brown had his stroke. 8-9 shooting, and not being selfish (though, in the second half he probably could have stood to be).
Wanamaker struggled to score, but was his scrappy self. He led the team with 13 rebounds and 7 assists. It was Wanamaker — not Gibbs or Dixon — who more often than not could get the ball inside and make passes.
