WVU misses too many threes

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The 3-point shot. It’s the characteristic that separates West Virginia’s… MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – The 3-point shot. It’s the characteristic that separates West Virginia’s offense from everyone else. The Mountaineers, who make 10.5 3-pointers per game, live by the shot and die by it.

For the first 33 minutes of Pitt and West Virginia’s game last night inside the WVU Coliseum, the Mountaineers shot four of 22 from beyond the arc and were losing by as many as 17.

Two quick 3s late in the second half ignited a 12-0 run for West Virginia. But when the shots again started to clank off the rim, Pitt sank its own 3s and headed toward a 60-47 victory – its first win in Morgantown, W.Va., in three years.

“We knew our sets and knew what they wanted to do,” Pitt head coach Jamie Dixon said. “You have to make the 3s as tough as possible. You have to be prepared for them making 3s, but we contested as many as we could, and we did a good job preparing for the game.”

Frank Young and Joe Alexander, two of West Virginia’s biggest threats from 3-point range, finished the game a combined one-for-10 from beyond the arc and totaled 13 points. The duo averaged 27.2 points per game entering the game.

“We didn’t shoot the ball well,” West Virginia head coach John Beilein said afterwards. “You don’t get many open shots against Pitt, so when you get them, you’ve got to make them. We just got buried much too early.”

The Mountaineers finished the game shooting six-of-24 (25 percent) from 3 as a team. The Panthers didn’t fair much better, hitting on only three of 10 attempts, but it was the timing of the Panthers’ shots that made the difference.

With 9:27 left in the second half, Pitt guard Ronald Ramon rolled off a screen at the top of the key.

After a pass reached his hands, he quickly set his feet and followed through on a jump shot that hit nothing but net. The shot was Ramon’s first of the game, the first 3-pointer made by the Panthers and put them on top by 17 at the time.

And 17 points to West Virginia on this night was more than enough to hold off any late rally.

As the Mountaineers started to cut into the Panthers’ lead, point guard Levance Fields dribbled past his first defender and into the West Virginia zone defense. When the defenders collapsed, he saw Ramon waiting, wide open for his pass.

At the top of the key again, Ramon launched up another quick 3, knocking it down with two hands in his face to put Pitt back up by 16 at 49-33.

“Ramon, it seems like he’s been there forever,” Beilein said after the game. “He hit a couple of daggers on us in that second half, and we still had our chances, but we missed layups.

“They were tough layups, Pitt contested them, but we still missed them.”

Later in the quarter, with the Mountaineers on a 12-point run that cut the Panthers’ lead to four, Sam Young found his own stroke.

The sophomore, who scored a game-high 21 points off the bench for the Panthers, set up shop in the corner along the baseline. With ball in hand, he delivered a 3-pointer on his only attempt that silenced the West Virginia faithful and stopped the threat.

“Sam played very well against West Virginia last year,” Dixon said. “The matchups are good and the way they play is good for a player of his style of play. He’s been practicing very well. He deserves success today, and he continues to improve.”

The Mountaineers went on to score just two points over the remaining four minutes as the Panthers sealed the victory.

Still, as the Mountaineers connected on 33.3 percent of their field goals and were held to their lowest scoring output of the season, Beilein took something away from the game.

His young team, he said, now knows what it’s like to have its shooting contested against a very good defensive team. And it’s definitely something the Mountaineers will take with them to their next game – at home on Saturday against the No. 2-ranked UCLA Bruins, who are coached by former Pitt coach Ben Howland.

“They’re just better than us right now,” Beilein said of Pitt. “It’s that simple. They are a terrific team, and they should be better than us. They have a great coach that knows what he’s doing and they beat us good.

“But we’ll see this style of defense again and soon. So this was great for us. We’ll learn a lot from it.”