This one will sting on Selection Sunday.
In a world where every win and loss is measured, the separator between an NCAA Tournament team, a "bubble" team, and one which misses the cut for the field of 68 is the ability to upend inferior teams.
The Panthers' bubble is not burst with 11 games to play, but the 71-64 loss to a once 1-9 Florida State on Saturday at the Petersen Events Center certainly put a tarnish on it.
"They were terrific this afternoon," Jeff Capel said about the Seminoles. "I thought coming in they had been playing so much better than their record. They had some injuries, some things to get adjusted to earlier that really set them back. They're starting to get a little bit healthier. Guys understand their roles. They still have a lot of talent on that basketball team, and they showed it tonight."
Pitt entered Saturday at No. 50 in the NCAA NET rankings, and Florida State 207. That qualified this matchup against the Seminoles (7-13, 5-4 ACC) as a Quadrant 4 game with respect to those.
Pitt is now 7-1 in Quadrant 4 games, while Florida State picks up a Quadrant 1 victory on the road.
For a team which is not firmly in the field of 68, a loss like this will be within the wrong column on the Selection Sunday shows on March 12.
The positives to draw from this, is that Pitt (13-7, 6-3) has three prime opportunities in its immediate future to remedy this, beginning Wednesday with back-to-back homes game against Quadrant 2 foes Wake Forest and Miami, then continuing at Quad 1 team North Carolina as the calendar flips to February.
And the negatives. ... Well, that leads into just about everything else from a detail and an in-moment perspective.
"We didn't do our thing defensively. We did a lot of things wrong, and that’s why we lost," Blake Hinson said.
MORE FROM THE GAME
• Now, to those details.
Jamarius Burton summed it up in this 25-second clip:
"I would just say at times we had some pretty costly turnovers," he said. "I think they might have scored six points off of us either trying to throw the ball in-bounds and losing it or getting a rebound about to fall out of bounds and then trying to save it and then they get their hands on the basketball. You got to tip your hat off to them. They played with tremendous energy in here, and they made us pay for our mistakes."
• Pitt went ice-cold in the back-half of the first half in making just 9 of 28 from the field to Florida State's 15 of 28, while the Seminoles poured in 7 of 12 3-pointers to Pitt's 2 of 12. The Panthers were out of sorts in multiple ways offensively, in a contrast to the blazing hot five minutes it started the game with. Pitt took a 15-5 lead on a putback from Hinson with 14:46 left in the first half, but that turned into a into a 22-15 deficit over the next 5:11 as the Seminoles rocketed out with 11 straight points and 17 of the game's last 19.
Over a stretch of 4:05 inside the first half, Pitt made 0 of 8 from the field, including 0-for-3 marks from each of Nike Sibande and Nelly Cummings. One game after he posted a season-high 23 points at Louisville, Greg Elliott was rendered out of the offense despite starting 2-for-3 from 3 (while the rest of the Panthers were 0-for-9). Elliott made 0 of 3 3s in the second half and finished with nine points.
"I thought we got off to a really good start," Capel said. "I thought we had really good energy to start the game the first five and a half minutes, and then we were not able to sustain it. From the 14-and-a-half-minute mark of the first half for the rest of that half, we didn't play well. I thought we allowed our inability to make shots, I thought it affected our defense."
• Cummings and Sibande combined to make 3 of 18 from the field and 1 of 12 from 3, with a totaled three assists and three turnovers. Over his last two games, Cummings is shooting 15% (3-for-20) from the field. His woes from 3-point range have carried over his last seven games. Over that stretch, he has made 6 of 33 (18.2%) from distance.
Apparently, Cummings is aware of this:
Nelly Cummings getting some extra work. The game ended nearly two hours ago. #Pitt pic.twitter.com/AZDs4agtDa
— Corey Crisan (@cdcrisan) January 21, 2023
Pitt was just out of sorts offensively, allowing a shot clock violation to roll over in the first half with plenty more close calls alike. The Pitt bench, altogether, was not a forwarding factor at all on Saturday. Florida State's reserves outscored the Panthers' 17-4, and neither of Nate Santos nor Guillermo Diaz Graham attempted a field goal in a combined 11 minutes.
• I found Capel's words about Florida State to be intriguing:
"They're a lot better than their record," he said. "They had a lot of injuries to start the season, and they had a kid that was very talented that was suspended. When you get prepared for a season and as you get close to playing you have injuries to key guys, that can really mess you up. Now it puts guys that -- the guys that got hurt for them probably would have been starters or guys that played a lot of minutes. There's an adjustment. Guys' roles are different. Maybe they were working up to that point to be in a secondary role. Now all of the sudden you're in a primary role, and that can take sometime to get adjusted. I think they've played very well in this league. Obviously they came in 4-4, they just won on the road at Notre Dame, they've been competitive in just about every game, even the ones they lost. I do think they're a very, very talented team. ... They have talent, even though they have some injuries. They're a talented team and they played very well this afternoon."
General praise from a coach? Some please-dont-kick-us-off-the-bubble lamenting? Maybe a bit of both?
THE HIGHLIGHTS
THE 5s
• Florida State: G Jalen Warley, G Caleb Mills, G Darin Green Jr., G Matthew Cleveland, F Cameron Corhen.
• Pitt: G Nelly Cummings, G Greg Elliott, F Jamarius Burton, F Blake Hinson, C Federiko Federiko.
THE ESSENTIALS
• Boxscore
• Live file
• Scores
• Schedule
• Standings
• Statistics
THE INJURIES
• Out for the season: F Will Jeffress (foot), F John Hugley IV (personal).
THE SCHEDULE
• The Panthers continue their homestand with a 7 p.m. tip-off against Wake Forest on Wednesday. It concludes with a 4 p.m. game against Miami on Saturday at The Pete.
THE CONTENT
• Visit the Pitt team page for more coverage from the Petersen Events Center. You can listen to the latest episode of the H2P Podcast below.
