I’m not going to spend a lot of time on the ND loss. Mainly because Pitt has to quickly put it behind them and head to NYC for a Saturday Nooner at St. John’s. But also because I expressed most of my thoughts afterwards and little seems to have changed in my view.
Coach Dixon was irritated about the 3-point defense.
Instead, Notre Dame finished 10 for 18 (56 percent) on 3-pointers.”I didn’t think our defense was good enough but, at the same time, to their credit they made shots,” Dixon said. “We talked at the start of the game and really for the last three days we talked about stopping the 3s, that shooting the 3-pointer was what they would need to do to win the game and, sure enough, they came out and hit a 3-pointer on the first play of the game and was 6 for 8 on 3-pointers for the first half.
“That really set the tone, and then [with the lead in the second half] they obviously ran clock and held the ball and the times we did get a stop, it didn’t seem like we finished it off with the rebound. We need to play much better than we did.”
The players acknowledged their performance bit.
“We didn’t play good defense, we didn’t play average defense, we played bad defense tonight,” said Pitt senior Jermaine Dixon. “We let them get open looks at the 3-pointer and then when they did miss it, they got the offensive rebound, so it is disappointing. They outworked us, and that definitely hurt us.
“They run it down to the end of the clock, and coach Dixon told us to make sure they don’t rebound their misses, and that is something they did. That’s big because you don’t have a lot of time on the other end to play offense and then, when they make the shot after they get an [offensive rebound], that is demoralizing.”
Heck Coach Dixon was irritated at most of what Pitt did in the game.
“We got beat in pretty much every aspect,” Jamie Dixon said. “It’s one loss. It feels right now like a number of losses.”
And again the players couldn’t disagree.
“We didn’t have our stuff going today,” Pitt center Gary McGhee said. “We had a lot of mishaps on defense. We didn’t rebound as well as we wanted to. When those combinations go together, it’s usually a loss.”
Notre Dame feels a lot better about itself, believing it can now play defense. Sure it took all season, but they did it.
Onto MSG where Pitt will look to snap a 2-game losing streak — at the place not to St. Johns.
