The men’s basketball team’s last regular season game might as well be a playoff game.

When… The men’s basketball team’s last regular season game might as well be a playoff game.

When the Panthers travel to South Bend, Ind., tomorrow to take on the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame, the game will have postseason implications for both teams.

The Irish and the Panthers enter their conference finale with matching 9-6 Big East records. Whichever team ends up victorious tomorrow will clinch the fifth seed in the conference tournament next week and receive a first-round bye.

“They’re in the same situation we are,” Pitt sophomore forward Chris Taft said yesterday. “It’s going to be a battle. Every team wants to get the first-round bye because it’s going to be real hard to go to the Garden and win four games in four days.”

Despite the similar records, however, the past couple of weeks have been very different for these two clubs.

Since the two teams met on February 12, a 68-66 home Panther victory on a last-second Carl Krauser layup, the Panthers, then ranked fifteenth, have fallen to number 24 in the polls and have only won two of their last five games, including a three-game losing streak. The Irish have won three of four in conference play with their only loss coming at the hands of Connecticut.

Krauser and the Panther backcourt will have their hands full with one of the best guard tandems in the nation in Chris Thomas and Chris Quinn. Thomas, a senior point guard, leads the Irish with 13.9 points per game and is second in the Big East in assists at 6.69 per game.

Panthers head coach Jamie Dixon knows that shutting down Thomas and Quinn will be the key to a victory.

“They’ve been playing really well, and they are just as good as anybody we’ve seen in the Big East,” Dixon said yesterday at a press conference.

Quinn had a career day in the loss to Pitt last month. He tied his career high with 25 points while catching fire from the field. On the day, he shot 66 percent while hitting five of his six 3-point attempts.

The Irish had five players attempt shots from behind the arc, as they fired up 29 3-point field goals. Notre Dame, who shoots a conference-best 39.2 percent from long distance, converted on 14 of those 29 attempts for an impressive 48.3 percent.

Along with the heavy chore of defending the Irish’s sharpshooters on the perimeter, the Panther guards had to provide much of the scoring load against the Irish when these two teams last met.

Krauser led the Panthers with 16 points, while fellow guards Ronald Roman (13 points) and Anotnio Graves (10 points) both reached double figures.

The Irish’s tall front line, which features 6-foot-11-inch junior Torin Francis and 6-foot-9-inch senior Dennis Latimore, gave the Panthers all they could handle the last time these two teams met. Chris Taft and Chevon Troutman combined for only 14 points on the afternoon.

Dixon will be looking for more production from his frontcourt against the Irish tomorrow.

“We’ve been working hard to continue to get better inside,” Dixon said. “Chris really played well in the second half of the Boston College game and we’re looking for him to build off of that.”

The Panthers will be looking to establish an inside game and to quiet the expected hostile Irish crowd, which has one member that sticks out in Krauser’s mind every time he visits the Joyce Center.

“It’s going to be tough,” he said. “Just playing with that scary leprechaun.”

But why does it scare the Panthers point guard so much?

“It’s little, green and short!” he said with a laugh.

Tomorrow’s tip-off is set for 2 p.m. and will be televised nationally on CBS. Dick Enberg and Clark Kellogg will call the game. The Panthers are hoping it will be the first of many games they play in March that CBS, the official network of the NCAA tournament, will cover.

Editor’s note: Over Spring Break, log onto www.pittnews.com for complete coverage of Pitt’s Big East season finale and all the conference tournament action.