Losing a game won’t be the end of the world. Georgetown lost to Old Dominion today. Kansas lost to Oral Roberts earlier this week. UNC had to come back from an 8 point deficit at halftime to beat Winthrop. Washington struggled for a bit against Sacremento St. Only a fool writes those teams off at this point — at least based on those games. Teams will make mistakes. They will look ahead. They will start reading their own clippings. They will just have the proverbial “bad game.”
Pitt had a bit of a struggle, down four at halftime to Oakland. It looked like they might have been heading for a surprising loss. Down by 10 with 8 minutes left in the first half. They closed to within 4 at halftime. By about 5 minutes into the second half they took the lead for good. Pitt ended up winning 66-55. They may have had some struggles with fatigue for the 3d game in 3 nights, but the same applied to Oakland. This was, however, the point of the tournament. Get the team prepped and primed for a game a day.
Aaron Gray played 34 minutes and had another double-double with 23 points (10-14) and 13 rebounds.
The guard play struggled in this game. Ramon was only 1-4 (5 points) and had 2 assists and 3 TOs. Fields had his first struggle of the season with 2-7 (5 points) shooting and 6 assists to 4 turnovers. The most TOs he’s had all season. Graves was 1-5 (3 points) but had 4 assists and only 1 TO.
Pitt had more turnovers (17) to assists (15) in this game. It may have been the first game this season where Pitt shot under 50% (23-47).
Still, another win. The defense was solid. Toughening up to hold Oakland to 6-25 shooting in the second half. That’s what they needed to do when the offense gets off to a bad start.
I also found it amusing and wrote about it in another post. I did some digging around on the web and saw that NMS was one of his possibilities for a while, but no one really took it that seriously because of the other schools involved. It’s like one of those choices a kid has just in case his other options dissolve. Pitt and some others may have cooled on him a bit and maybe he wanted to go somewhere he was truly wanted.
But I think two main reasons were that he could basically become an immediate star on the team and also he could work with coach Reggie Theus, who made it to the NBA as a big man.
If he had come to Pitt, he wouldn’t have been able to average 20 & 10 a night (granted, he has a while to work to be able to do that anyway). Look at Aaron Gray – he is a preseason All-American, Preseason Big East Player of the Year, etc. and he averaged 13 & 10 last year. He should score more points this year, but there are other players on the Pitt team who need to be involved. I think Herb wanted to go somewhere where he could be the focus.
