There aren’t too many thrills these days at the so-called Thrillerdome.
Georgia Tech was pulverized by visiting Pittsburgh on Wednesday at McCamish Pavilion, losing 89-66 in front of an announced crowd of 5,269. It was Tech’s third straight loss and fourth defeat in its last five games.
“There’s not a whole lot we can take from this game in terms of what we did well,” said Tech coach Damon Stoudamire, who is now 18-27 against the ACC and 5-15 in January games. “But we just gotta do better and we gotta respond. The one thing we can take from this game is what Pitt was, and we gotta be a desperate team. I didn’t think we played hard enough to beat them. That wasn’t a team that I’d seen all year out there this evening.”
Tech (10-8, 1-4 ACC) trailed by as many 26 in the second half and led for only 38 seconds after scoring the first bucket of the game. Stoudamire’s squad turned it over 15 times and allowed the Panthers to make 53.1% of their shots.
The lackluster showing came on a night when Tech tried to entice the student body to show up by giving away free submarine sandwiches and free hats. At least they left well-fed and well-capped.
Wednesday’s loss was Tech’s worst ever in its 23-game history with Pittsburgh. The Panthers got 39 points off their bench. Tech got 36 points from its starters.
“Nah, I can’t pinpoint it, but I do know it is a lot of season (left),” Stoudamire said of his team’s current malaise. “There’s optimism my way. It doesn’t feel like that right now, but you gotta keep pushing. The one thing that we’ll do is we gotta keep fighting. The first things at times you gotta do, and it’s so cliché that I don’t really wanna say it like that, but I’ll say it, you gotta find guys that just wanna play hard. Because tonight I just didn’t think we played hard enough.
“Standing on the sideline and watching the game, (Pitt) just played harder than us. They played really desperate. We gotta become that team. We can’t be a group that makes excuses. We gotta be coachable when we don’t wanna be coached. Tough times are times when you see what people are made of. I think we do have a lot left in the tank and it’s too early to look at it any other way. But we got work to do.”
Kam Craft scored 14 points to lead Tech in scoring. Baye Ndongo had 12 points and 8 rebounds but only played nine scoreless minutes in the first half. Kowacie Reeves and Chas Kelley each added 11.
The Jackets, who fell to 1-8 against opponents inside the top three quadrants of the NCAA’s net rankings, next travel to North Carolina State (12-5, 3-1 ACC) to play the Wolfpack at noon Saturday.
“I would just say collectively as a group the effort and toughness is there, we just need to play smarter and execute better,” Craft added. “I think our execution is what’s really killing us. We always play hard. We’re always gonna play hard for coach. We just need to execute at a higher level.”
Tech began Wednesday evening with a two-handed dunk from Akai Fleming who had driven the right baseline and soared through a couple defenders before finishing. The Jackets then gave up 12 straight points and missed six straight shots.
Pitt made 10 of its first 19 shots to keep its lead hovering around 10 points. Tech did little to help its cause, like when Chas Kelly fouled Barry Dunning Jr. on a 3-point shot and Dunning subsequently sank all three free throws, making it 27-15.
The Panthers kept the onslaught coming with eight more in a row, a run emphatically polished off with Dunning’s two-handed slam after a Tech turnover.
Pitt (8-9, 1-3 ACC) led by as many as 19 in the first half and was up by that margin, 45-26, at the break. The Panthers shot 54.8% from the floor, made six 3s, had 11 assists and poured in 18 points from the paint.
The listless Jackets, meanwhile, missed 22 shots, turned the ball over nine times and ended the half by bricking three straight foul shots.
“I think it’s an emphasis that we’ve been struggling with every game we’re putting ourselves in a hole,” Craft said. “To be positive, we have been building ourselves out of it, playing back into the game. So I think we just have to have a new mentality coming into the game and just make that, like, our main emphasis. We can’t start off like that and expect to win in this league.”
Brandin Cummings’ fast break 3 from the right corner upped Pitt’s lead to 60-37 a little more than seven minutes into the second half. That wasn’t necessarily the knockout blow, but the Jackets were already wobbling at that point and never found that second wind they so desperately were searching for over the final 12 minutes.
Cummings, off the bench, led four Panthers in double figures with 23 points. Pitt, which made 11 3-pointers and totaled up 19 assists, had lost three in a row coming in and hadn’t won since Dec. 21.
“One of the things that we noticed is they have really, really heavy gap help,” Pitt coach Jeff Capel said about the game plan to beat Tech. “Something that we talked about was getting off the basketball, like driving, but the kicks will be open. We knew that they would have heavy gap help when the ball was on one side with the way they play ball-screen defense. We felt like we could get into the paint. You probably weren’t gonna get there to finish, it was gonna have to be kicks and we were fortunate we made shots tonight.”
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