Pitt vs Notre Dame – Basketball Summary by Dan72
Anal Swabs!
I hear China is developing a new way of testing for Covid. Anal Swabs! Perhaps that may be the only thing that could get this Pitt Basketball’s “anything but a” team to stop the freefall that has developed in this 2021 basketball season! Something has to get their attention. I know for a fact Coach Jeff Capel and staff did not teach their roster to play this low level ball.
The 5-9 Notre Dame team blew 8-4 Pitt off our home court by 26 points and it was not even that close in the difference in play between the two teams. I could write 10 pages of the defensive mistakes Pitt made but I won’t bore you.
This team has lost any confidence it had and I think Jeff Capel has in turn lost this team. Not since Bobby Knight at Indiana have I seen a coach chase a player off the bench into the locker room like what happened in the 2nd half when Xman was expelled on a technical foul. You can get over a bad game but players cannot get over when the coaches lose the team!
This season, which showed such promise, may be for all intents and purposes, over! After six minutes into the game I saw such a lack of effort I bet the coaches were thinking of benching the entire first team… and almost did!
First of all, Notre Dame shot lights out all night. I’ve seen ND do this to Pitt over and over the last 15 years. Pitt helped mightily with a lack of player’s confidence so obvious that the Refs should have called the game over at the half. I can’t blame Xman for everything, but he is by far the biggest part of the problem. That and the overall lack of D1 talent on our roster. Pitt looked like a D-2 team vs the Lakers last night.
However, something other than a lack of talent is wrong with this team. I know when I played with “gunners and ball hogs” like Xman, I would get frustrated to the point of quitting. When the other four players are killing themselves running down the court and setting picks and by the time they get set up Xman has already turned the ball over or taken a jump shot from his waist that gets slammed back down the court to start a ND fast break. As a coach I never allowed a single selfish player to run my team.
What bothers me most is that I watched film of Sibende playing point guard at Miami (yes he was the 2 guard but ended up playing point a lot) and was hopeful that he could lead Pitt this year and solve our Xman problem. He’s not even gotten a sniff from Capel. Instead Capel played a new guy off the bench named Amadasun (I think) and he stunk worse than X. N. Allegheny you say?
We can look back to the 76-75 Wake Forest loss as the beginning of opponent coaches seeing how to beat Pitt and thus it was the beginning of the end I believe. We have not a single game ahead that I have any confidence that we can win like seems to be the case with Pitt football lately and that’s a real shame. Last night’s game, like the one point NC State loss in football that started our slide of four straight losses, was the lowest point of this season so far.
H2P,
Dan72
P/S – I really miss my Scotch!!
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