THE ESSENTIALS

THE OVERVIEW

Pitt is probably in first place in the College Basketball Ozymandias standings. They used to be somebody, you see. Under Jamie Dixon they went to the tournament 11 times in 13 years, locking down one seeds in 2009 and 2011. Dixon did fall off a bit late in his tenure, with two bidless years and no seed better than an eight in his last five, but when Pitt decided to move on they chose… poorly.

Vandy coach Kevin Stallings—once, terrifyingly, a prominent name in Michigan's post-Amaker job search—was the pick and lasted all of two years, getting deep-sixed after an 0-18 conference season in 2018. Then Pitt decided to sprinkle some Duke on it, hiring K assistant Jeff Capel. Capel's been remarkably consistent, but not in a good way: three of his four season his teams have won 6 ACC games, and in three of his four seasons they finished within about ten spots of 100th nationally.

Here they are again, about 100th nationally. They have a blowout of UT-Martin in the win column and a 81-56 home loss to WVU this season. It would calm some nerves around here after the "EMU is good" narrative took a blow last night if Michigan could handle some business today.

THE US

Seth's graphic [click to embiggen]:

faq for these graphics

Some updates: usage is now the black circles you see, with a big circle meaning… yep, a lot of usage. For the early part of the season we're going to denote transfers in other colors, indicating where the player came from. More relevant for opponents.

THE LINEUP CARD

Seth's graphic [click for big]:

Note that touted freshman Dior Johnson, a former five star who fell to 41st in the composite, is indefinitely suspended from the team after being arrested for assault in October.

THE THEM

This is a weird team full of transfers, as is now traditional in the lower reaches of the high major conferences. Only three guys on the team were even at Pitt a year ago, and two of those three guys transferred in last year. The third is a sophomore, so nobody outside of the gray area on Kenpom has been at Pitt for more than two years.

They've got a guy named Federiko Federiko, which is amazing in and of itself, but when you add in the fact that he's Finnish? Perfection. One more F and you've got a good name for a series previewing Michigan's upcoming football opponent.

FFF transferred in from JUCO Northern Oklahoma after averaging 12 and 9 last year and has operated exclusively as a dunks-and-putbacks guy. He's got 10% usage, all of his FGAs are at the rim, all of his makes are assisted except for one putback. He's got a respectable block and OREB rate so far but WVU bigs went 8/10 from the floor; at 6'11", 220 if Dickinson gets FFF on his back he is ending up under the basket. Also he is pretty inexperienced at this level so sometimes you get things like a blitz to the wrong side of the screen:

Dickinson will be slavering at the prospect of showing this guy some things in the post.

But also there are people who will attempt to keep the ball in their hands and maybe we should address those guys. Burly guard Jamarius Burton is the lone returner who had a major role. After transferring in from Texas Tech (and Wichita State before that) Burton was a high-usage gunner with questionable efficiency, shooting 43/32 from the floor with a heavy emphasis on twos over threes. Make that a heavy emphasis on other twos: over half of his shots are twos from outside the paint. Burton does not have the quickness to get all the way to the rim and even when he got there last year we was converting on barely half of his opportunities.

He does offset that with decent midrange shooting (39%) on a variety of floaters, jumpers, etc. He's a late clock option because he's good at tough shots.

He is not good at getting good shots.

Burton shared the playmaking burden with Femi Odukale last year, but Odukale decamped for Seton Hall so Burton's come to the forefront more. Early season stats can be weird, especially when you're coming off a 2 A, 8 TO game against WVU, but if Burton isn't trying to generate something the burden falls to a Colgate transfer, so… yeah.

That Colgate transfer is Nelly Cummings, the point guard. Cummings was real bad inside the line last year in the Patriot League (41%) largely because his FG percentage at the rim was 42%, which is a number I don't think I've ever seen before. He was barely worse in the midrange. One encouraging performance against WVU (4/6) doesn't offset what has to be a severe lack of athleticism.

Cummings is a quality shooter with a career 35% clip from deep, some ability to shoot off the bounce, and an 82% conversion rate at the line last year. His efficiency dropped off a cliff overall, though, when he had to absorb a bunch of usage at Colgate and so far at Pitt that usage rate is close to his elevated level. Once he hits lots of P5 competition the results are likely to be grim.

6'7" wing Blake Hinson started for a bad Ole Miss team three years ago, then disappeared into the Iowa State bench. He missed his first season in Ames with a mysterious ailment, then left the Iowa State team just before the 2021 season. He appears to have transferred to Pitt so that he can launch everything that comes his way. He's averaging 9 3PA per game(!) so far and has hit… uh… five. He's a career 33% shooter, though, so that's nominally okay. Like everyone else on the team his usage at his previous school was heavily tilted towards longer twos.

Shooting guard Blake Elliott is the final starter. He was a four-year bench player at Marquette who would have been pretty good as Just A Shooter (41% career clip from deep, 82% from the line) but wanted to attack closeouts so much that he ended up with a TO rate near 20 despite his role. He was still pretty efficient because he is a true sniper.

So far it's been that, but moreso: he's 6/14 from three on the young season but has 5 turnovers against no assists and is just 1/3 from two. When you have more turnovers than 2PAs something's off. In any case, Elliott is the #1 guy you have to stick to on the perimeter.

The bench:

• Lumber twins Guillermo Diaz Graham and Jorge Diaz Graham are the backup posts. Both came from IMG's JV team, where megafauna still roams the ancient savannas of North America. Neither was even given a composite ranking; neither has made a shot this year. They're averaging 6.7 and 8 fouls per 40 in their brief appearances so far and check in at around 200 pounds at 6'11".
• Wing Nate Santos is the only guy on the team who 1) Pitt recruited out of high school and 2) is not a true freshman. Last year he shot more threes than twos and hit 22% of the threes. Yikes. This year he's… still doing that. He gets half of Pitt minutes and is just a guy who takes some shots sometimes; he doesn't really do anything else statistically other than grab defensive rebounds.
• Guard Nike Sibande is more or less the same guy as Burton, except with fewer assists and more turnovers. His 45% three point shooting a year ago was almost certainly an aberration; he's a career 34% shooter on almost 600 attempts.

THE TEMPO FREE

I mean… no? This team has one guy back from last year and has two deeply unrepresentative games against a KP300+ team and West Virginia's turnover machine. Last year's numbers aren't worth anything and neither are this year's.

FWIW, 55% of Pitt's shots this year have been threes. That's sixth nationally and while that is probably something heavily affected by WVU's defense it is worth noting that everyone Pitt brought in this year is a shooter. That is a large departure from last year's bunch, which was outside of the top 250 both in threes launched and made. I would expect to see a bunch of threes.

THE KEYS

[Campredon]

Feed the Sandwich Man. You've got three opposition bigs, all of whom are stick persons in their first years of D-1 basketball. Hunter Dickinson should go off for 30. Michigan's high post flashes defeated EMU fronting last time out and we're likely to see another dose of those since Pitt is long in the post, if not large.

Breaking the Eli Brooks curse. You could not have drawn up a team that's a better test for the idea that Michigan's bigger, more athletic backcourt will be better able to contest off-the-dribble midrange twos. Nobody on this team can get to the rim and all of them resort to a lot of pull-up game that they're pretty dang good at, considering the circumstances. We're probably going to see a lot of chasing over screens and drop coverage—blitzing is not going well and it's hard to see how it's ever going to go well—so Kobe Bufkin and Jalin Llewellyn bothering pull-ups will be a large feature of the game.

Find a plausible wing stopper. Not so much for this game but for down the road. Jett Howard's only playing one side of the ball right now, Bufkin is a work in progress, and Isaiah Barnes flashed a little against Emoni Bates. More generally, this team needs to show some progress game-in, game-out on the defensive end if they have any designs on big things.

Can Terrance Williams keep it going? He was a game saver last time out. He's never sustained production over long stretches, but he's also never been given the keys to a starting job.

THE SECTION WHERE I PREDICT THE SAME THING KENPOM DOES

Michigan by 8.