A good 10 minutes, a bad 30 minutes and a solid performance from Blake Hinson are among the notable items from Pitt’s 72-68 loss at Miami on Saturday.
A good 10 minutes
You already know the score of the game, so let’s go to the positive part of Pitt’s trip to Miami on Saturday.
The end.
More specifically, the final nine minutes and 32 seconds. The Panthers were trailing 60-41 at that point, and all hope seemed fully lost. But then Blake Hinson grabbed the rebound off a missed Guillermo Diaz Graham three-pointer and put it back up for a rare second-chance layup. And then Jaland Lowe drove for a a couple points from a goal-tending, which he followed with another drive for a basket.
All of a sudden, the score margin was down from 19 to 13, and you know where it went from there. Pitt chipped away at Miami until the lead was two with 45 seconds left, and while the Panthers couldn’t finish the deal, they were clearly the better team in those nine minutes and 32 seconds. During that stretch, they shot 9-of-15 (60%) from the field and 5-of-10 (50%) from three while allowing Miami to make just four baskets.
Lowe led the way with 13 points in those nine-plus minutes, while Ishmael Leggett scored six, Hinson had five and Bub Carrington scored two. It was an impressive stretch from a team that didn’t look great in the first 30 minutes, and if there was any encouragement to take from Saturday’s game – and there wasn’t much – it was the resilience and skill on display in the final 10 minutes.
A bad 30 minutes
Of course, those final 10 minutes couldn’t overcome what was a pretty bad first 30 minutes. Whereas Pitt shot 60% from the floor and 50% from three in the final 9:32, the Panthers also shot 30.6% on field goals and 23.1% from beyond the arc in the first 30 minutes and 28 seconds.
That futility dug a hole that an impressive final 10 minutes couldn’t dig out of. So while Lowe shot 4-of-5 in the final 10 minutes, he also went 2-of-8 before that. Leggett shot 2-of-3 in the final 10 and 3-of-9 in the first 30. And Carrington was 1-of-2 in the final 10 but made just one basket on nine attempts up until that point.
It was a terrible display, and Pitt scored just 29 points in the first half on 10-of-31 shooting. Facing a team that can shoot and score like Miami, the Panthers simply couldn’t afford to go that cold.
But they did, and that cost them the game. Miami got the lead to double digits less than 12 minutes into the game, pushed it to 16 before the first half ended, and then got up by as many as 19 before Pitt’s run.
Part of the problem was that the Panthers fell into the Hurricanes’ game. Pitt and Miami shoot more three’s than any team in the ACC, but that’s not always a path the Panthers should follow – especially when the shots aren’t falling. And on Saturday afternoon, Pitt shot 23.5% from three in the first half with more than half of the team’s field goal attempts coming from outside the arc.
That’s a losing equation, and that’s what ended up happening.
For a team battling to build a postseason resume – a quest that seems more and more hopeless with every game like the one on Saturday – it’s a equation that has to be avoided at all costs.
Hinson was on again
Blake Hinson didn’t have a great start to the Miami game. Pitt’s leading scorer didn’t attempt a shot for nearly four minutes to open the game, and when he finally did shoot, he missed his first four attempts.
But when he finally hit a jump shot just under the 6:00 mark in the first half, Hinson went on a run, following that basket with a three, a layup and another three before halftime to go to the locker room with 11 points.
In the second half, Hinson had Pitt’s first two baskets with an and-1 and a three-pointer, and then he keyed the Panthers’ comeback bid with a put-back on Diaz Graham’s missed three.
Ultimately, Hinson had a game-high 21 points for his ninth 20-point game of the season and the 18th time he has reached that number in his Pitt career.
This comes two games after Hinson was perfect in the Panthers’ win at Duke and one game after he was quiet in the win at Georgia Tech. Pitt can’t really afford for Hinson to run hot and cold Gilbert Brown-style, so any game where he shades toward the hot side of things is a positive, because the Panthers need him to do that every night.
