Pitt Basketball Notebook: For Panthers, only Wright State matters
Share with others:
Just for the fun of it, let's change the name for the next three weeks of hoops heaven from March Madness to Cliche Craziness.
You know the oldies but always good ones: "There's no tomorrow" and "One and Done" and "We'll do what got us here."
Pitt coach Jamie Dixon and his players repeated the time-honored refrain -- "We're going to play 'em one at a time" -- as they boarded the bus outside Petersen Events Center yesterday for the trip to Buffalo, N.Y., where the third-seeded Panthers (27-7) will meet No. 14 seed Wright State (23-9) at 9:40 p.m. tomorrow in the first round of the NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament at HSBC Arena.
Three months ago, this game would have been met by yawns and criticism from Pitt fans, complaining Wright State would hurt the strength of schedule and the RPI when selection time rolled around in March. But timing is everything and stuff like RPI and schedule strength no longer matter.
Now all the matters is the game.
The winner advances. The loser packs up and goes home.
Because of the magnitude of any game in the NCAA tournament, the matchups of the teams are put under a microscope. Forget that Pitt is ranked 12th in the Associated Press poll and runner-up in the heavyweight Big East Conference and Wright State is the unranked champion of the lightweight Horizon League. At this time of year, everybody looks unbeatable.
"There are no bad teams in this field,' said Dixon, whose Panthers are making a school-record sixth consecutive appearance in the tournament. "They're all good teams."
Wright State, which has won 11 of its final 12 and 18 of its past 21 games after a rocky start, features 5-foot-10 senior guard DaShaun Wood, the Horizon League player of the year.
When asked who might get the assignment of guarding Wood (19.8 ppg, 5.0 rpg, 3.9 apg.), Dixon said, "He plays off the ball, he plays on the ball, he's all over the place. There are going to be a lot of different people guarding him at different times."
Pitt will have a significant height and weight advantage over the smallish Raiders, whose only player of size is 6-8, 240-pound Jordan Pleiman (7.4 ppg, 5.5 rpg). The Panthers start 7-0, 270-pound Aaron Gray and 6-10, 230-pound Levon Kendall and bring 6-8, 245-pound Tyrell Biggs and 6-6, 215-pound Sam Young off the bench.
"We'll try to exploit our size," Kendall said with a smile. "We want to beat them on the boards as much as possible."
Dixon bristled at the suggestion that Gray's 1-of-13 performance from the field in a 65-42 loss to Georgetown in the championship game of the Big East Conference tournament might be attributed to fatigue.
"I don't think conditioning was an issue," Dixon said. "He missed some shots early in the game and he wasn't tired. Maybe [conditioning] meant something the month he didn't practice because of injuries. Nobody brought it up then. You can't use a theory one time and not another time."
This week's practices have been business as usual for the veteran Panthers, who start three seniors, a junior and sophomore compared to Wright State's lineup that has two seniors, a junior and two freshmen.
"We're not thinking about the tournament. We've always been about our next opponent," Dixon said. "Is there a sense of urgency? Not at all. We're preparing for this game the same way we've prepared for all our games."
His players picked up the company line.
"We want to make sure we go into it [Wright State] like it's our last game," Ronald Ramon said. "Our focus is on Wright State. That's the most important game of the season. We haven't changed anything in practice. We're keeping everything the same."
Kendall admitted he has taken a peek at the bracket sheet and is aware that a game against Duke could be down the road followed by a game even further down the road against UCLA and coach Ben Howland, who is Dixon's mentor and the architect of Pitt's revival before he handed the program over to Dixon four years ago.
"That's in the back of everybody's minds," Kendall said, of possible future matchups. "But, we don't think about it. We're only thinking about Wright State."
First Published March 14, 2007 12:00 am
