Throughout Jamie Dixon’s era as the Pitt head coach, we have heard the fact that Pitt is an unselfish and defensive minded team about a thousand times.
That mantra has carried the Panthers to outstanding success over the past decade plus, but during Pitt’s first season in the ACC, they are taking playing unselfish, great team basketball to another level.
One of the reasons that Dixon’s teams have always relied on unselfish play is they never really had a go-to guy at the offensive end that can take over games and drop 20-plus points on the opposition any night of the week in the fashion that Lamar Patterson has been doing as of late.
Throw in the fact that Pitt has always been an outstanding defensive team and the game plan was always simple on offense- work the shot clock until you find the best possible shot.
That’s not the case any longer as this Pitt team has a ton of offensive talent and plays much better when they speed up the game and look for shots early in the shot clock.
However while the style may have changed, the basic principles are still the same.
“It’s just something we practice,” said Patterson. “We are so unselfish it’s like second nature. We like to share the basketball and keep everyone involved. It’s fun.”
Perhaps no team in the country is as unselfish as the Panthers are and no team in the country excels at making the extra pass the way Pitt does.
That ability alone allows Pitt to frequently turn good shot attempts into great ones.
The result is a team that is third in the ACC in scoring at 77.3 points per game and leads the conference in field-goal percentage by shooting 48.8 percent from the floor.
No longer does Pitt have to avoid playing games that score in the 80’s.
They actually prefer it.
“I think it’s a mindset,” said Pitt point guard James Robinson. “We have a team made up of all unselfish players. We are all capable passers and we want to go out there and make the extra pass and get the best possible shots. A lot of that comes from Lamar and Talib (Zanna). They are our senior leaders and they are both willing passers to get the best shot for us.”
The Patterson factor is big for the Panthers as very rarely is a team’s best player as unselfish as Patterson is.
While he has carried the team in terms of scoring on most nights, he also leads the Panthers in assists (4.6 per game), showing that he can have a big impact on games even when he’s not scoring in volumes. That was evident in Tuesday night’s win against Georgia Tech. despite going scoreless early and having a rough first half, Patterson still dished out seven assists and grabbed seven rebounds.
The other factor is Robinson, who may be the best point guard in the ACC as a sophomore.
He leads the nation in assist-to-turnover ratio at a whopping 5.33 and really makes the Pitt offense run like a well-oiled machine. Robinson can score the ball, evident by his 16 point outing against the Yellow Jackets, but is often willing to sacrifice scoring in order to get his teammates better shots.
The result of that is that the Panthers are the eighth most efficient offense in all of college basketball.
“We recruit guys who already have that instinct to make the extra pass and be unselfish,” said Dixon. “That’s an ability and is important. It may not show up high in rankings but we look for guys who have that skill. The encouraging thing is our big guys have that skill to pass the ball as well. I like to think that unselfishness breeds unselfishness. It’s contagious. It’s the way I like to watch basketball.”
Another difference is the overall talent level at the offensive end of the floor.
A different guy can hurt the opposition on any given night. One night it can be Patterson, the next night Zanna and the next night Cameron Wright.
That gives the Panthers plenty of options to pass the ball to, something they didn’t necessarily have in the past.
One thing is for sure though and that is the fact that if Pitt keeps on sharing the ball at the rate they are now, they will be a very difficult team to matchup against the rest of the way.
Photo Credit: Brett Davis/ USA Today
