Lots of achievements for individuals and the team last night.
Aaron Gray missed getting another double double, but was a perfect 9-9 from the floor. He was the first Pitt player in 15 years to shoot such perfection. Brian Shorter went 11-11 in 1990, also against Providence. Pitt is now 24-15 versus Providence since joining the Big East (24-16 overall). The second best winning percentage for Pitt against any BE conference foe (the best is against now departed BC — 28-15).
Pitt (20-3, 9-3) came out after the intermission and forced the ball into Gray, who responded with 16 points in the first 6 1/2 minutes of the second half. Pitt took control of the game with a 17-2 run. Gray scored 12 of those points, including a 3-point play with 14:45 remaining that gave the Panthers a 52-44 lead.
The Panthers were bringing a man up to the high post and working the high-low to perfection in the second half.
“We just really stressed getting the ball inside in the second half,” Gray said. “We were all making plays. That was the main difference in us winning the game.”
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“I thought we did a good job of attacking the zone in the second half,” Dixon said. “We had to do a better job of getting the ball inside in the second half, and we did that. Aaron is doing such a great job of keeping the ball up [after he catches it]. He caught all of the balls and never brought any of them down.”
Krauser had another slow start to the first half, not helped by being limited to only 9 minutes due to foul trouble. Still, Gray gave credit to Krauser for getting them going in the second half.
“It was our on-the-floor leadership of Carl Krauser,” Gray said, explaining what helped to hold Pitt together. “He’s the one who huddled us up at halftime and really took control, and coach Dixon came in and kind of cleaned it up. We realized that anywhere in the Big East it’s tough to steal a win, but we felt we could here.”
Providence played a zone defense for most of the first half and it seemed to confound the Panthers. But Pitt solved things in the second half, when the Friars played zone and mixed it up with a man-to-man.
“We weren’t playing very smart (in the first half),” Gray said. “But we made the right adjustments and were able to keep it going.”
Krauser scored 12 points, 10 coming in the second half. More importantly he had 6 assists in the second half (7 for the game), by being the guy able to get the ball to Gray. He became the first Pitt player with 1500+ points and 500+ assists. No other Pitt player has done that. On top of that, has 467 rebounds as a point and shooting guard. Krauser’s ability to get the ball inside to the frontcourt players is probably the most overlooked thing about him. It will be sorely missed. No other Pitt guard can do it quite so well, and is a big thing for Ramon and Fields to work on for next year.
Keith Benjamin had another excellent offensive performance, taking good shots and hitting them. Naturally, it is resulting in him seeing more minutes.
As previously noted, with this win the team has won 20 or more games and finished above .500 in the BE for 5 straight seasons. The first time ever. Jamie Dixon also accomplished a first for Pitt.
The victory gave Pitt its 20th in a season for a school-record fifth consecutive time and enabled Dixon to become the first in school history to win 20 games in his first three seasons.
Former Pitt coach Paul Evans won 20 in his first two years, but finished with 17 in his third.
In Providence, Aaron Gray was part of the story.
When all else fails, pure size can do an awful lot of damage in a basketball game.
The Friars found that out the hard way last night as Pittsburgh’s deep set of big men, and most notably 7-footer Aaron Gray, had their way inside to lead the Panthers to an 85-77 win. After talking at the half on concentrating on pounding the ball inside against PC’s zone defense, Pitt shot 60 percent in the second half and made 14 of 21 shots from the foul line. More important, the team’s defense overwhelmed PC’s inside game as Herbert Hill was held to eight points and Randall Hanke managed only six.
“They are good, and their big guys are very good and really run the floor well,” Pitt coach Jaime Dixon said of the Friars. “In the second half, we did a much better job inside and on the boards, and that helped us a lot.”
The notebook story also suggests that Pitt and Providence have the best Freshmen classes in the BE. That’s some home-cooking. I may be biased to Pitt, but I would say that Marquette has a better class than Providence. Or at least Marquette is winning more.
The other thing Pitt did, that they have done to so many this season — they just wore down the Friars with their physical play and deep bench.
The Panthers, now 20-3 and 9-3 in the Big East, simply outmanned a PC team that had gotten by with a crisp offense and just enough defense to win four of its previous six games. But with Pitt scoring 19 second-chance points and 34 points in the paint, it became very clear that the Friars don’t yet have the size and strength to push back against the biggest teams in the Big East.
“They wore us out with their size in the second half,” said PC coach Tim Welsh. “In this league, you have to defend the paint and rebound the basketball. The game is played in the lane and won inside, especially against a Pittsburgh.”
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Pitt’s offensive execution limited the Friars’ chances to rebound and crank its running game into gear. Even so, PC’s second half offense managed to put up 40 points. The problem was stopping the Panthers. Dixon tweaked his offense at the half by placing a forward near the foul line and making sure Gray took more than the one shot he attempted in the first half.
I should mention, since I can be quick to criticize bad writing, that the Providence Journal’s Robert McNamara is one of the best college basketball sportswriters out there. That observation about how Coach Dixon adjusted on offense to create more space for Gray is just one of the more subtle reasons why. Every other writer just would go with the stock line about how Pitt just made an effort to get the ball inside to Gray more. McNamara tells you how.
For Providence, Don McGrath was the only story. The Senior Guard, playing at the shooting guard this year after running the point in previous years (geez, that sounds like a familiar storyline), was doing all he could to get that first win over Pitt in his career — the one team he has never beaten. He gets one more shot next Saturday.
