Pitt shooting, defense go cold in loss to Florida State
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The voices coming from the seats at Petersen Events Center were loud and expressive.
Not quite like the old days at the Pete, but encouraging for a program trying to return to relevance.
A crowd of 10,390 — more than 3,000 above the average attendance this season for Pitt basketball — was doing its best to energize its team.
In the end, however, Pitt couldn’t match the intensity of its guests from Florida State, and the Seminoles (7-13, 5-4) left town with a 71-64 victory. The loss ended Pitt’s two-game winning streak and dropped the Panthers (13-7, 6-3) out of a tie for second place in the ACC.
For six minutes, however, it looked like Pitt was in control. The Panthers opened a 15-5 lead after the first 5 minutes, 14 seconds. Shots were falling. Pitt’s defense was playing up to coach Jeff Capel’s expectations.
“They were executing their gameplan much better than we were executing ours,” Florida State coach Leonard Hamilton said. “When people move the ball like that, the defense is always going to make a mistake. They took advantage of our lack of ability to sustain defensive positioning for the whole length of the shot clock.”
A timeout helped, Hamilton said.
“We expressed to our guys in a very nice, calm way that they need to be a little bit more efficient on the offensive end,” he said. “Defensively, I thought we tightened up a little bit, weren’t doing as much reaching.”
The result was Pitt’s momentum disappeared. Florida State grabbed it, and the Panthers floundered through the rest of the first half — outscored 34-14 at one point — and a good bit of the second.
“I didn’t like the energy we played with for the last 14 minutes of the first half,” Capel said. “I thought we allowed our inability to make shots affect our defense. That hasn’t happened to us in a little bit.
“I thought we didn’t move the ball as well as we needed to in the first half. We were just trying to play one-on-one.”
Pitt misfired on 21 of 28 3-point attempts, shot only 32.1% while falling behind by 10 at halftime and put only two players in double-digit scoring for the game. Jamarius Burton recorded 20 points and Blake Hinson 16.
Meanwhile, Nelly Cummings and Nike Sibande, who had been instrumental in helping Pitt win six of its first eight ACC games, combined to hit only 3 of 18 shots.
On the other end, Florida State made more than half of its shots (25 of 49), led by Darin Green Jr.’s 24 points.
Florida State enjoyed another significant edge over the Panthers: Four bench players hit six of seven shots and totaled 17 points. Capel used only three reserves, and Sibande was the only one to score (four points). None of Pitt’s five starters played fewer than 34 minutes.
“We didn’t do our thing defensively,” Hinson said. “We did a lot of things wrong, and that’s why we lost.”
But the Panthers came out of the locker room in the second half with the same energy they displayed at the start of the game. After having trouble guarding the Seminoles in the first 20 minutes, Pitt opened the second half on a 21-6 run to seize a 50-45 lead with 12:34 left in the game. Pitt’s surge brought the crowd back into the game.
Hinson led the charge with three 3-pointers, and Burton and Federiko Federiko scored four points each during the run.
“They went through a period where I didn’t think they were going to miss some of those 3s,” Hamilton said.
The Seminoles fought back to claim a 65-59 edge with four minutes to play. Pitt trimmed it to 65-64 on a 3-pointer by Cummings — he missed seven overall, however — and a basket by Burton with 2:19 left.
But the Seminoles never lost the lead. Cummings’ charging foul with 27 seconds to play ended Pitt’s last, best chance.
“We did not defend up to our standards … like we need to win basketball games in this league,” Capel said.
Speaking of the ACC, Pitt will play two of the better teams in the conference this week: Wake Forest on Wednesday and Miami on Saturday, both at the Pete.
Capel said he doesn’t expect the loss to be a wakeup call. He said it will be business as usual.
“I don’t expect it to give us anything,” he said. “We’ll move on from it once we get back together on Monday. We’ll learn from it and start getting prepared for the next one.”