Panthers handle Hoyas, Cook leads way with 18

The image of Pitt men’s basketball changed Saturday with its win over Georgetown.

Jamie… The image of Pitt men’s basketball changed Saturday with its win over Georgetown.

Jamie Dixon’s squad put on an offensive display that proved the days of Pitt being exclusively known for tough defense and a grind-it-out style of play may very well be a thing of the past.

“Everyone talks about our defense and their defense, but we’re pretty good offensively as well,” Dixon said after the Panthers finished off the Hoyas, 74-69, in front of a raucous sell-out crowd at the Petersen Events Center. “It was unbelievable. Who could have predicted that?”

What was surreal to Dixon was the impressive shooting by both teams. Dixon’s Panthers (16-2, 4-0 Big East) shot a stellar 59.6 percent from the field, but Georgetown (11-5, 1-2) did even better, posting a 60.9-percent line – the best shooting percentage of a Pitt opponent since Bucknell upset the Panthers in 2005.

“It was two great teams that played very well, didn’t miss many shots and played well all the way through,” Dixon said.

What may have given Pitt the advantage and the eventual win that put the Panthers alone atop the Big East was rebounding. Pitt out-rebounded the Hoyas 23-18, which may not sound like a sizeable margin until you consider that Georgetown is 0-5 when being out-rebounded.

After the game, Dixon and several Pitt players continued to mention the team’s depth, a quality the whole squad believes is invaluable in games like these, especially come March and April.

“It’s definitely our depth,” guard Mike Cook said of the team’s greatest strength. “Aaron Gray is great, but we also have so many players on this team capable of getting a double-double or scoring twenty points every time they step on the floor.”

Cook is a perfect example of that. The junior transfer and team’s second-leading scorer netted a game-high 18 points and distributed five assists as well. Overall, the Panthers had 22 assists on 28 baskets, a signature of what Dixon values most in his team.

“It’s also helpful that we have nine guys who can create spacing, then make a pass to exploit it,” Dixon said. “Not many programs have that many players [that] can play like that.”

Both teams ended up with four different players scoring in double figures, and Pitt nearly had five. Both Gray and Antonio Graves had 11 points and Ronald Ramon added 10 off the bench, while Levon Kendall fell just short with nine. Jeff Green and Jessie Sapp tied for the Hoya lead with 15 points each.

Coming into the game, many thought the key matchup would be between the two 7-footers, Aaron Gray and Georgetown’s 7-foot-2 center Roy Hibbert. Both big men battled all night and, in terms of points, split the bout with 11 points each.

However, Georgetown head coach John Thompson III mentioned after the game that Gray has an effect on his team’s play that goes well beyond the stat sheet.

“If you focus [only] on Aaron Gray, that’s a mistake because he’s surrounded by some great shooters and passers,” he said. “But he’s also a great passer. If you guard him heavily, he can kick it to guys outside, and he knows they can shoot and they do.”

And they did. Cook was 7-for-11 from the field. Ramon: 3-for-4. Graves, with the leading Big East 3-point shooting percentage: 5-for-8. Both Kendall and Keith Benjamin were 3-for-5. The stats speak for themselves, but Dixon has been stressing Pitt’s ball distribution all season.

“Our execution, our passing and really our unselfishness held throughout the entire game,” Dixon said. “I’ve been saying all year that unselfishness is the kind of thing that spreads with a team, and it’s spreading with us right now.”

The positive energy spread to every aspect of Pitt’s offensive game on Saturday. The Panthers were able to score enough to weather a career-high 12 points by Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing Jr. They were able to out-score Georgetown on fast breaks, 8-2. They had nearly double the second-chance points that Georgetown did. And they converted 15 of 19 free throws, a department in which Pitt is known for its incompetence.

“We knocked them down, and it was actually a lot of different guys that went to the line at the end, which is good,” Dixon said. “There’s not a lot you can complain about on offense from this game.”

Georgetown still leads the all-time series with the Panthers, 37-30. But Pitt (No. 7/7) broke its recent two-game losing streak against the Hoyas with the win.