Gabler: Dixon’s system allows Pitt to succeed against top teams

After watching Monday night’s NCAA men’s basketball national championship, I wondered how Pitt can ever reach that elite stage of the tournament. The Panthers don’t shoot as well, don’t run as well and aren’t quite as talented as Michigan and Louisville.

The only thing that Pitt had in common with both national-title-game participants was consistently bad free throw shooting — all three teams shot less than 70 percent from the charity stripe this season.

Despite a clear disparity in talent, the Panthers played both Michigan and Louisville close this season, losing by five to Michigan and by three to Louisville.

Doesn’t that say something about head coach Jamie Dixon’s system — which most Pitt fans despise?

Michigan shot 52 percent against Louisville on Monday night. Pitt held the Wolverines to 46 percent, including a miserable 3-for-17 from beyond the arc.

At the time, the media said that No. 4 Michigan was overrated, and that Pitt, unranked at the time, was underrated. That made sense. There was no other reason why that group of Panthers should be hanging with a legitimate top-five team.

A lowly Penn State team beat Michigan, so I’d be willing to consider Pitt hanging around with Michigan an anomaly if it didn’t happen again when the Panthers played Louisville.

This time, visiting the No. 12 Cardinals in the KFC Yum! Center, Pitt played a terrible game, shooting less than 44 percent and missing 9 of the 12 free throws they attempted.

Despite that, Pitt was in it until the end against the eventual Big East and national champion Cardinals.

Simply put, Dixon’s system keeps his team in games when its talent may be overmatched. So why doesn’t it work in the tournament? It’s the same size ball and court, and the rim is still 10 feet off the ground — just like Gene Hackman showed us in “Hoosiers.”

Some say that Pitt needs a go-to scorer for clutch moments, but look no further than those same Cardinals to find a team that could not hit a big shot late in games.

In close games, Peyton Siva and Russ Smith would battle for the last shot. Siva would often take ill-advised shots before the clock warranted, and Smith would go down the court at 100 miles per hour before losing the ball and often not even getting a worthwhile shot off.

Others argue that Pitt doesn’t recruit as much high-end talent as teams like Michigan do.

The Wolverines’ best player, unanimous NCAA player of the year and future NBA lottery pick Trey Burke, was ranked 83rd by ESPN coming out of high school and was once committed to the Big Ten cellar-dwelling Nittany Lions.

Somehow he turned into a future NBA star, unlike Steven Adams — ranked sixth by the ESPN recruiting database — who didn’t exactly dominate at Pitt in his one year of collegiate competition.

The last critique, and the one most commonly used in the earlier months, is that Pitt doesn’t play a tough enough out-of-conference schedule.

Perhaps Pitt’s years with a go-to scorer, top talent and decent out-of-conference opponents have created a perfect storm of scrutiny against the team and the system.

Fans and pundits who call for Dixon to fully revamp his system 180 degrees need to rethink that approach. It is a system that has gotten Pitt to the NCAA tournament nine out of his 10 seasons at the helm.

To win the NCAA tournament, you have to make the NCAA tournament. If Dixon ever sells out on his defensive and rebounding approach in favor of relying on a go-to scorer and wide-open style of play, then Pitt will have to beat teams like Michigan and Louisville at their own game instead of forcing them to play “Pitt basketball.”

Critics might be right — Pitt’s style might be the team’s problem. Unfortunately for Pitt’s opponents, it has been a problem for them, too.

Write Dustin at dlg54@pitt.edu.