Country Roads — Pitt returns home, upsets No. 9 West Virginia 57-53

Carl Krauser hadn’t done much for most of Thursday night’s win over West Virginia. But that… Carl Krauser hadn’t done much for most of Thursday night’s win over West Virginia. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t seal the game for Pitt.

The senior scored five of his eight points in the final minute of play, including a critical finger roll that put Pitt in control, as his team held on for an ugly 57-53 win over No. 10 West Virginia.

“I thought he was very good again. Teams are concentrating on him and he recognizes that,” Pitt head coach Jamie Dixon said of Krauser. “Carl made the big shots in the second half.”

“He’s a heck of a player, and he ended up seeing a little bit of an alley, but he’s a heck of player,” West Virginia coach John Beilein said.

Krauser, who had scored only three points heading into the final minute – well below his season average of 16.2 per game – shook off a sluggish offensive performance to hit the finger roll from the right side of the basket with 29 seconds left. That shot gave Pitt a 53-48 lead only seconds after the Mountaineers had cut a 10-point deficit down to three.

“We needed the guards to have a good game this game,” Pitt shooting guard Ronald Ramon said. “It was up to the guards.”

The Mountaineers turned the ball over with an offensive foul on the other end. Krauser went to the other end and calmly sank two free throws to put the game out of reach and send West Virginia to its first conference loss this season.

Ramon and Aaron Gray led the Panthers in scoring with 16 points apiece, with Ramon doing his damage from the outside. The sophomore hit four of his six 3-point attempts, all staving off Mountaineer rallies that Beilein’s team had problems finishing, given the extreme shooting woes of leading scorer Kevin Pittsnogle.

The Big East’s third leading scorer at 19.5 points per game, Pittsnogle suffered what was easily his worst game of the season. He missed all 12 of his field-goal attempts, half of them coming from behind the arc, turning the ball over four times and fouling out in only 27 minutes of play.

The poor performance comes a year after he torched the Panthers with two 20-plus point games that fueled two West Virginia upset wins.

“We pretty much have been watching film on him since last game. We knew he was one of the biggest keys to their team,” said Gray, who guarded Pittsnogle for most of the game. “[The] coaches just told me that you can’t leave him.”

“Maybe it was just a combination of him missing some shots and some good defense, but it turned out good for us,” he added.

No matter how many shots the 6-foot-11 matchup nightmare missed, however, his team stayed within striking distance. Twice the Mountaineers (17-5 overall, 8-1 Big East) cut Pitt’s lead down to six with well-executed sets that resulted in easy baskets, both following missed Panther free throws and neither even hinting at the prospect of putting up a 3-pointer.

In fact, Dixon’s squad saw its lead cut to five with 4:05 remaining when WVU forward Johannas Herber faked a handoff, split two defenders and drove in for an easy layup.

Pitt (18-3, 7-3) responded, though, getting a hook shoot from Gray at the other end to open up what appeared to be an insurmountable 49-42 lead. West Virginia, however, refused to go away. Herber hit two jump shots, and Frank Young hit a driving layup around Levon Kendall to cut the deficit to 51-48 with one minute remaining.

Once again, though, Pitt had the answer. And for the first time on the night, it was the Panthers’ leading scorer, whose late-game heroics put an end to a game that played out in a way foreign to both teams, which came in averaging a lofty 74 points per contest.

Like the first halves of Pitt’s two losses to the Mountaineers last year, this one had all the makings of a Pitt blowout early on. West Virginia missed its first eight shots, starting the contest 3-for-21 from the field and an abysmal 2-of-14 from the team’s trademark spot – the 3-point line.

“We have big men like Levon and Sam [Young] who also did a great job, they deserve just as much credit as I do,” Gray said of the team’s perimeter defense. “We have a lot of guys this year, and coach is doing a nice job in the rotation, a lot of plays tonight, we were just out on their shooters, making them make tough shots. They didn’t get many open looks. Maybe we’re a little sounder defensively this year.”

“Pitt played tremendous defense on us,” Beilein said. “It was a low-scoring game, certainly, one in which we did our best to get open looks and it is tough to get them. We’ll learn a lot from this game.”

Pitt, however, never fully took advantage, turning the ball over 13 times in the opening half, many times on possessions that would have opened up comfortable leads. West Virginia’s intricate 1-3-1 zone defense gave the Pitt offense fits, leading to three early Mountaineer steals, a category in which Belein’s team is second in the Big East.

“I think we got away from offense a bit, that’s how the turnovers came about,” Ramon said, indicating that a Pitt timeout with a minute left in the half calmed the team down.

The turnovers, however, left West Virginia’s window of opportunity cracked just enough to make it a close game at the half. A quick 8-0 sport, capped off by Patrick Beilein 3-pointers, put the visitors ahead 21-20 with 1:23 left in the half.

That was West Virginia’s only lead of the game, however, as the Mountaineers saw their two-game winning streak over Pitt end.

Pitt will return to action Sunday at 2 p.m. when the Panthers play host to Cincinnati.