Team effort defeats Syracuse

No Brandin Knight? No problem.

With their point guard going scoreless for the first time… No Brandin Knight? No problem.

With their point guard going scoreless for the first time since February 2001, and with Jaron Brown and Ontario Lett combining for just 10 points on four-of-21 shooting, the Panthers needed someone else to step up.

Enter Julius Page and Chevon Troutman.

Page scored a career best 25 points, playing the entire game, and Chevon Troutman came off the bench to add 23 points and provide Pitt with an inside presence as the Panthers defeated Syracuse, 73-60, on Saturday.

“Everybody’s got to step to the occasion if somebody goes down,” Page said about Knight going down in the second half with a concussion. “We don’t have a big scorer, so [Knight] not scoring really doesn’t mean anything because nobody’s averaging 20 points. We’re not a big scoring team. We shut teams down.”

“Who would have thought, if I had told you before the game, that if Lett, Brown and Knight would combine for 10 points and we’d win by 13?” head coach Ben Howland said. “We have six guys that average in double figures.”

With Knight struggling early and getting into foul trouble in the first half, Page stepped up his game, helping Pitt pull even with the Orangemen and dissecting Syracuse’s 2-3 zone.

“I think we were settling for threes in the first half early on,” Page said about Pitt’s early struggle with the zone. “Then [Troutman] subbed into the game and we started getting some layups.”

“We were getting the ball on the high post and I was sealing on the backside and making the lane to make the pass through,” Troutman said. “They trap a lot and we tried to be patient with the ball.”

The Panthers’ patience paid off as they turned the ball over just 13 times, while forcing Syracuse into 20 turnovers. Pitt was able to convert those mistakes into 33 points compared to the Orangemen’s 11 points off turnovers.

“Our main problem was our offense,” Syracuse head coach Jim Boeheim said. “If they’re not the best defensive team in the country, they’re pretty close to it.”

While Pitt was able to hold Syracuse to less than 50 percent shooting from the field and just 25 percent from behind the line, it was the Panthers ability to break the Orangemen’s defense that helped them win the game.

“We attacked that press,” Howland said about his team’s success at breaking Syracuse’s press. “That press actually helped us, it helped us increase the lead rather than be a detriment to our team.”

“The press has worked for us in the last two games,” Boeheim said. “We were planning on using it, especially if Knight went out of the game. When you’re 10 down away from home, you’re not going to get back in it unless you try something.”

And once Pitt found a way through the press, Troutman was ready at the other end to finish the play.

“We did a pretty good job on Lett, but we didn’t find Troutman,” Boeheim said. “I don’t worry about one guy when we play Pittsburgh. You’ve got to worry about all of them and tonight was a good example of that.”