Pitt survives scare from Murray State, pulls away to 83-68 victory

Pitt coach Jeff Capel believes his team has the ability to score at a high level, and not just in nonconference games against mid-majors.

The Panthers have totaled 179 points in their first two games — both victories — including 83-68 Friday night against Murray State and 96-56 in the opener Monday against Radford. But he expects to eventually be coaching a team that will be able to score in bunches against other power conference teams and the ACC.

The game Friday in front of a crowd of 7,537 at Petersen Events Center was encouraging to Capel because his team faced adversity and made several important plays that didn’t entirely involve making baskets. Perhaps in a bit of a surprise, Pitt and Murray State were tied, 57-57, with 11 minutes, 51 seconds left in the game. At that point, freshman guard Brandin Cummings made two of the biggest plays that led Pitt to its victory.

First, Cummings drove the middle and hit Guillermo Diaz Graham for a 3-pointer. Next play, Cummings made a slick pass while falling down and found Diaz Graham for a fast-break dunk.

“That got the crowd back in it and gave us a cushion,” Capel said.

From there, Pitt dominated the Racers, who were picked to finish third in the Missouri Valley Conference preseason poll. Murray State scored its last field goal with 7:46 to play.

Part of that strong defensive effort can be traced to Zack Austin, who only scored two points. But he collected seven of his eight rebounds after halftime and recorded five blocks.

“He was big-time,” forward Cam Corhen said. “We told him everything at the rim had to be his.”

“Zack has the ability to impact the game in different ways besides scoring,” Capel said. “Everyone will look and say he didn’t score. He had as big of an impact on this game (as anyone).

“Same with (Cummings). He had a huge impact on the game, and not one thing came from him taking a shot. It was him driving and kicking to the open guy, making the right play.”

Most of the scoring — 71 of 83 points — came from four starters. Jaland Lowe led the Panthers with 20 points and three assists. Damian Dunn and Ishmael Leggett added 19 points each, and Cam Corhen scored 13, with 10 rebounds.

Pitt led by 12 early but lost the advantage before the end of the half. Lowe, who played only 11 minutes in the first half because of foul trouble, hit a 3-pointer at the intermission buzzer to give Pitt a 41-39 lead going into its locker room.

“It hurt us,” Capel said of Lowe’s absence. “But I thought more than anything we hurt us. Defensively, we didn’t play as hard and smart as we normally do. I don’t know if we were up 12 (and) we thought it was going to be easy.

“Our defense hurt our offense because we didn’t have much movement on offense. That’s an area where we missed Jaland. What hurt us the most was our defense.”

In the second half, Pitt increased its intensity on defense and held Murray State to 29 points and a 30.8 shooting percentage (8 of 26).

“Really, just us taking our matchups personal and doing our best to get stops,” Dunn said of Pitt’s defensive effort. “Putting your hard hat on.”

“We just had to talk more,” Corhen said. “They weren’t running anything that was necessarily crazy. We just had to talk through it.”

Dunn scored 11 of Pitt’s first 22 points in the first half by “being assertive, being aggressive, trusting my teammates to let me be free,” he said. “You get comfortable a little bit, and the rim gets a little bigger. We all have our turns. We all have our days. Everybody’s going to eat. When it’s your time, it’s your time.”

Capel said his team still has plenty to work on over the weekend in advance of its next game Monday at the Pete against Gardner-Webb. One positive: Freshman Amsal Delalic is expected to play after missing the first two games with a hand injury.

Capel hopes a tight score for most of the night taught his team a lesson.

“It lets us know we’re not as good maybe as we think we are,” he said. “When you win by 40 in the first game, there’s a lot of great stuff being said about us, and that’s good. I think we have a chance to be a good team, but we’re not there yet.

“We have to earn it and we have to earn it every day. We have to do it for 40 minutes. We can’t do it for nine minutes, we build a lead and we think, ‘OK we can take a rest.’ “It’s better to learn this (while) winning the basketball game. We dealt with some stuff and our guys made some plays and figured it out.

“We have to work on defense. Seeing the ball, off the ball. Rebounding the basketball, five guys going to do it. All of those things we have to work on at a high level. Offensively, moving the basketball a little bit more.”

He sees potential in his offense, noting Pitt was not at its best but still scored 83 points and shot 50.9% from the field.

“Really, the defense is the part (that’s most concerning). We’re going to play against really good guards going forward and we have to accept the challenge of sitting down and guarding.”