Obviously there will be a liveblog tonight. Big Monday game starting at 7pm. It’s the best crew calling it with Sean McDonough, Bill Raftery and Jay Bilas.
I honestly vacillate with Notre Dame. The Pitt fan in me has fear with this game. Especially after the way Notre Dame beat Pitt twice last year. The ex-college basketball writer for a now almost-dead site of the past few years feels that Pitt has nothing to worry about and is almost contemptuous of Notre Dame’s chances in a road Big East game.
First, the Pitt players are playing up the “we owe them for last year” angle.
“I feel as though we kind of owe them from last year,” Pitt senior Gilbert Brown said. “They played us very well at their place and also in Madison Square Garden and came away with two victories. I feel like, you know, just going out, especially with this being our last year — me, Brad and Gary’s — we want to go out with a victory. So we’re very focused on the task at hand [tonight] and we’re looking forward to the game.”
Notre Dame held Pitt to its lowest point output of the season in the Big East tournament game in March. They limited the Panthers to 45 points as they played tough defense and bled the shot clock on every offensive possession.
And…
“This is very important,” senior guard Brad Wanamaker said. “Knowing what they did to us last year and how they had our number, we’ve still got that in the back of our mind, as we have with a lot of teams.”
Pitt (19-1, 7-0) lost to Notre Dame (16-4, 5-3) twice in a 15-day span last season, falling, 68-53, at South Bend in the regular season — the sixth most-lopsided loss in Jamie Dixon’s 262 games at Pitt — and again, 50-45, in the Big East quarterfinals in the Panthers’ second consecutive one-and-done at the Garden.
The losses helped to catapult Notre Dame into the NCAA Tournament after the Fighting Irish were left for dead following a 6-8 Big East start and an injury to All-American Luke Harangody.
“We have had success against (Pitt) before,” Notre Dame coach Mike Brey said after the Irish’s 80-75 victory over Marquette on Saturday. “We have to really control the tempo. The game we won in the Garden against them, we really controlled the tempo. We have to do that.”
Now the other side of all of this is that Notre Dame is a horrid road team in the Big East. They are 5-0 at home and 0-3 on the road, this season. They lost at Marquette by 22, at St. John’s by 18 and at Syracuse by 12.
This is nothing new. Last year they were 7-2 at home and 3-6 on the road. 2008-09: 6-3 at home, 2-7 on the road. In the last 7 years, they have only one season of .500 or better. In past four years and almost halfway into this season, ND has a respectable 48-30 Big East record. It does, however skew ridiculous: 35-5 at home, 13-25 on the road. (Pitt over the same period is 34-5 at home and 23-15 on the road, with only one year below .500 on the road. At the risk of oversimplifying, the difference between being a NCAA Tournament, respectable team and being a nationally ranked, top-seeded team is winning conference road games.)
Most years, this has been a consequence of a team that shoots a lot of 3s and jumpers. Unfamiliar and hostile settings, led to bad shooting nights where their porous defense killed them. They do a better job of penetrating and attacking this year, but unfamiliar settings still show up in below average 3-point shooting. Just as important, this ND team lives to get to the FT line this year. They are 9th in the country in FTA/FGA. Road teams don’t get quite as many calls as they do at home. In ND’s win over Marquette this past weekend, they shot 36 FTs (including 8 in the final 1:12 when Marquette was fouling). When Marquette blew out ND in Milwaukee, the Irish only took 17 FTs.
Who the officials are tonight will matter.
Don’t think that the Irish aren’t aware of the road struggles on top of playing Pitt at the Pete.
There would be no standard-issue practice plan Sunday. Notre Dame expected to wake up, hop on a plane, shoot around at the Petersen Events Center in Pittsburgh and call it a day. The taxed and battle-weary Irish needed their legs under them.
The most colossal test of the season — a game at No. 5 Pittsburgh on Monday — awaited them.
“I don’t think there’s any bigger of a challenge,” Irish forward Tim Abromaitis said. “That gym, that team — it can really show us what we’re made of when we go down there and play them.”
For the No. 16 Irish, it is difficult to conjure a more daunting task in Big East play. They have lost all three conference road games by an average of 17.3 points, while the Panthers have won 61 of 71 league games at the Petersen Events Center.
So coming in early to get used to the rims and court, along with practicing shifting their defense.
“We are going to leave at two and get into the Petersen Center (Sunday),” Brey said. “We can’t go live, just get up and down and shoot a little bit.”
Along with the new travel approach, Notre Dame will likely utilize the second-half defensive scheme it used against Marquette on Saturday. The Irish switched to a 2-3 zone early in the second half after the Golden Eagles hit 61.5 percent of their shots in the first half, including going 5 of 7 on three-pointers.
Notre Dame’s zone defense knocked Marquette off its rhythm as the Eagles were held to 30 percent shooting in the second half, and it kick started the Irish’s offense, which scored 44 second-half points.
The zone defense also allowed the Irish to control the tempo of the game, which Brey said will be critical tonight against the Panthers.
Against Providence, Pitt did struggle when the Friars kept shifting defensive styles on Pitt. Pitt showed great patience in attacking Syracuse’s 2-3 zone on Monday. They will need to do that again, as the only question with ND going zone is whether they break it out early or wait until they are trailing.
“It was no different than the Wisconsin or Georgia game where we’re down double digits,” Irish coach Mike Brey said. “We really don’t have any answers in man to man, so let’s try to change their rhythm a little bit. Their shots came up but in a little different rhythm. All of a sudden, it’s a little different shooting when the game pressure comes on you. Overall, I thought we did a good job knowing who the three shooters were.”
On the comments and live blog, people keep insisting we pound it inside, but the team is not built like that. Neither McGhee nor Taylor are talented front court destinations, capable of consistently creating their own shot. And neither have shown much proficiency at being low post distributors either. Their strength comes in getting last second looks from the guards, junk points, and most important, rebounds. Nasir Robinson is undersized for that kind of “pound it inside” play as well and he’s more effective in the high post as a distributor- like he did vs. Syracuse. Our front line is solid- but mostly as rebounders and a complement to the perimeter players. Every once in a while Robinson will have a big game because he’s versatile and smart.
And this is a team with many more cylinders than ND that will be warmed up and ready to go by tipoff.
We’re #2 and deserve to be.
Hail to Pitt!
Last but not least, Silver Panther is correct. Pitt runs several motion offenses, 1-4 and the flex, but this year they run many more scripted plays off them and seem to change them up play to play.
Love Pitt’s chances tonight. Pitt by 16
Just getting them the ball in those positions will at the very least keep the D honest, and could produce a few easy buckets or fouls. Yes, both McGhee and Taylor have bumbled away passes that have come into the post, or made the fatal error of bringing the ball down as they are trying to make a move, but to me it still seems worth the try when the opportunity is there. To me it seems to be a risk worth the potential benefits, particularly for Sleepy, who is showing some versatility down low as of late.
On a side note — what’s goin on in WVU, Dan Jennings quitting the team mid-game? If you forgot for a moment how big an *sshole Huggy was, read his comments about the kid. Jennings very well may have been a head case/whiner/egomaniac (i have no idea anything about him), but he’s a teenage. It doesn’t let the kid off the hook at all, but could you imagine Dixon/Wright, any other coach, even Calhoun, belittling a kid in the media like Huggy?
Pitt’s one of the most offensively efficient teams in the country, leads in assists, and is up there in offensive rebounds. I don’t think we’ve seen anything so far that reveals a need to dump it down to McGhee or Taylor any more than we have. But it’s nice to see McGhee’s occassional baby jump hook and now a couple of short range pops from Dante.
This year’s team really just seems to have set the bar so high in terms of offensive efficiency, unselfishness, etc. It’s almost as if we are really pulling for them to just continue to execute at this high level. I don’t see anything that needs to be tweaked dramatically in the half-court other than consistency.
http://tosh.comedycentral.com/video-clips/tosh-0–first–video