I’ll get to the Backyard Brawl I swear. Honestly, though, there isn’t much at the moment. Everyone seems to be low-key. I think both sides are doing anything and everything to avoid the bulletin board. In the meantime, some stories from the game last night and a couple others I’ve been meaning to link.

Game recaps focus on the outstanding block by Travon Woodall in the final minute. No one knew Woodall could sky like that. Last year, I recall stories where Ashton Gibbs claimed he could dunk. Still haven’t seen it. After what Woodall did yesterday, I believe Woodall can.

And of course, there was the attention to the turnovers.

La Salle, which had averaged 80 points in its first three games, shot 43 percent and had a hard time scoring against Pitt’s half-court defense. The reason the Explorers were in the game until the final minute was Pitt’s poor offensive execution and turnovers.

The execution had its problems. There was a large stretch starting at about the mid-point of the first half until under 2 minutes in the half, where Pitt only scored 3 points. In that stretch, Pitt had 4 turnovers and shot a dismal 1-8.

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No one is going to claim that Pitt has fixed things. There’s still a lot that Pitt needs to do to really be a top-15 team this year. There was good and bad in this game. It was a win. Pitt seemed close to busting it open a couple times and then LaSalle came right back and made it scary.

Just as we don’t know everything about Pitt yet, we don’t know how good or LaSalle really will be. They scared the daylights out of Villanova last week. They beat James Madison. They would appear to be better than they have been in a while, but how good? Probably not as good as they looked at Pitt.

In the fourth game of the season, we are starting to see some signs of a rotation being formed. Birch’s minutes went up. Zanna’s somewhat-inexplicably stayed consistent in minutes. Moore is getting a little more time. Cam Wright may be playing himself to a permanent seat on the bench.

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