March Madness: What went wrong for Pitt this season

Expectations ran high for the Pitt men’s basketball team entering this season. The Panthers… Expectations ran high for the Pitt men’s basketball team entering this season. The Panthers were ranked No. 4 in the preseason and were expected to finish near the top of the Big East Conference. But Pitt played nowhere near those lofty expectations and finished 17-16 with an abysmal 5-13 record in conference play.

This year’s Panthers won’t be dancing.

There are multiple reasons for Pitt’s first poor season in a decade. The Panthers failed to replace the production of graduates Gilbert Brown, Brad Wanamaker and Gary McGhee. Ashton Gibbs, the Big East Preseason Player of the Year, was generally ineffective, point guard Travon Woodall sat out several games with an injury, and the Panthers struggled to take care of the basketball.

Pitt fans realized early on that Pitt’s current players couldn’t offset the losses of Wanamaker, McGhee and Brown. All three players spent at least four years in the system and embodied typical Jamie Dixon players with their unselfishness and toughness. Although none of the three were drafted, each played a key role in Pitt’s success over the previous three seasons.

Due to the number of talented frontcourt players in the Big East, Pitt dearly missed McGhee’s physical play and rebounding in the paint. The Panthers were left with Dante Taylor, Nasir Robinson, Talib Zanna, Malcolm Gilbert and Khem Birch, before the freshman Birch left Pitt for UNLV.

Despite Robinson’s hard-nosed style of play and great hustle, he still proved to be undersized and ill-equipped to guard Big East forwards.

Taylor still has not matured into the player fans thought he could be when he arrived at Pitt as a McDonald’s All-American. He struggles on defense, as evidenced most recently by Henry Sims’ 20-point, 13-rebound performance during Georgetown’s win over the Panthers in the Big East tournament.

Zanna played well in spurts this season, but he never did enough to take over the starting role from Taylor conclusively. Gilbert proved to be a quality shot-blocker, but opposing centers exposed a need for him to get stronger during the off-season.

The same issue plagued Birch when he was at Pitt. Birch excited fans with his blocking prowess but struggled to guard stronger players and fight for rebounds.

On the perimeter, no player stepped up to provide the defensive intensity Wanamaker and Brown brought to the court last year. Multiple guards posted high-scoring totals against Pitt, and their successes contributed to many Panther defeats, including the upset losses against Long Beach State and Wagner in nonconference play.

The inability to guard talented perimeter players played a direct role in the Panthers’ rise in scoring defense. Pitt allowed 66.2 points per game this season — making the team No. 126 in the nation and ninth in the Big East. Last year, Pitt owned the best defense in the Big East, giving up 60.1 points per game.

The absence of Wanamaker impacted the Panthers offensively as much as defensively. That, combined with the time missed by Woodall due to injury, contributed to the drop in productivity from Gibbs. For the first time in league history, the Big East Preseason Player of the Year didn’t make any All-Big East team.

Without Woodall, Gibbs was forced to initiate the offense, and fans learned that the guard becomes much less effective when forced to run the offense. Especially with Woodall out, Pitt had no other threats on the perimeter to prevent opposing defenses from keying in on Gibbs.

Last season, Gibbs played primarily off the ball with Wanamaker running the offense. He averaged 16.8 points per game and shot 46.8 percent from the field, including 49 percent from beyond the arc.

This year, forced to run the offense, Gibbs saw his numbers fall heavily. He averaged 15.5 points per game while suffering large drops in his percentages. He shot just 38.7 percent overall and 33.2 percent from 3-point range.

In Woodall’s absence, Dixon had no player available to assume the role of floor general. With no one to take the lead, every Panther suffered on the offensive end. Ball and player movement often stalled, forcing Gibbs to create and force up shots to beat the shot clock.

Finally, the Panthers failed to take care of the ball — and that’s putting it lightly. Pitt gave the ball away 13.5 times per game this season, which ranks the team 175th in the nation.

In college basketball, teams have to place a premium on taking care of the basketball. Considering Pitt’s ability to shoot 3-pointers, it gave away possessions that could have resulted in more than 20 additional points per game.

But fans can look on the bright side. Experience from this season will spur the growth of many young players, and the combination of talented recruits center Steven Adams, point guard James Robinson and shooting guard Chris Jones add promise to next season’s Panthers.

And hey, Pitt broke 70 percent free-throw shooting this season, a 3 percent improvement from last year. At least something went right.