Men’s basketball: Pitt struggles late as Georgetown upsets

The Big East finally caught up with the No. 9 Pittsburgh Panthers.

A 27-point effort by… The Big East finally caught up with the No. 9 Pittsburgh Panthers.

A 27-point effort by Georgetown guard Chris Wright helped the No. 11 Hoyas snap Pitt’s 31-game home winning streak and handed the Panthers’ their first conference loss, 74-66.

In a game with 11 lead changes, Wright’s layup with 1:14 left in the second half and one second left on the shot clock stretched the Hoya lead to eight and squashed a possible Panther comeback.

“Chris made plays. We have different guys on different nights,” Georgetown coach John Thompson III said. “Tonight just happened to be Chris’ night.”

While Wright excelled, Pitt guard Ashton Gibbs struggled. As Pitt’s leading scorer this season, Gibbs entered last night’s game averaging 17.5 points but shot just 3 of 16 from the field, managing eight points against the Hoya defense.

“We just needed somebody else to step up,” Pitt forward Gilbert Brown said. “Today we didn’t have somebody else pick it up and we kind of fell short as a team.”

Still, the Panthers (15-3, 5-1 Big East) had a two-point lead with less than ten minutes remaining in the second half, thanks in large part to the career-high 20 points that Brown scored off of the bench. However, a nine-point run with seven minutes remaining, gave Georgetown (14-3, 5-2) a lead that it would not relinquish.

A win last night would have given the Panthers their first 6-0 start to league play in school history — an achievement that could have been startling considering Pitt was picked to finish ninth in Big East by the conference’s coaches.

Pitt’s failure to set a new conference mark was attributed to defensive lapses in crucial situations. Wright’s shot clock-beating layup and another 3-pointer by the junior coming out of a timeout with 6:24 left in the game, highlighted defects in the Panther defensive effort.

“We had a lot of letdowns the last couple games in our defense. We really have to get back to what we do [best],” Brown said.

The numbers illustrate Brown’s sentiment. Georgetown shot 70 percent from 3-point range and 46 percent from the field, while Pitt missed 14 3-pointers on its way to a 22.2 percent success rate from beyond the arc.

“I thought we could have played better. [I] hadn’t felt we defended as well as we need to the last couple games and it caught up to us tonight as we didn’t shoot it well,” Pitt coach Jamie Dixon said.

The Hoyas finished with four players in double figures, including sophomore center Greg Monroe, who also pulled in 11 rebounds. And Georgetown managed 74 points, while only getting three points from its bench players.

The loss moves the Panthers into a tie with Syracuse for second place in the Big East trailing Villanova. The conference schedule will continue this Sunday when Pitt travels to play Seton Hall.

Senior Jermaine Dixon understands the necessity to put last night’s contest in the rear-view mirror and move on to the next game.

When asked what the first conference loss meant, the guard’s answer was simple: “Nothing. We have a long way to go. We’ve got a lot of games left. This is a tough conference. One loss doesn’t mean anything.”

Notes: Brad Wanamaker finished one point shy of a double-double, scoring nine points while amassing 13 rebounds and seven assists. With last night’s loss, the Panther’s record in the Petersen Events Center is now 125-11. The 31-game home winning streak that ended last night was the second largest active streak in the country, trailing only Kansas’ current stretch of 52 consecutive home wins. Georgetown snapped a three game losing streak to Pitt with last night’s victory. The Hoyas now lead the all-time series 40-33.