Capel would be getting eviscerated if Jeffres and Fede were in the starting five.
"We're playing 3 on 5 every night!"
Starting 5 should have been Lowe, Ish, Zack, Jeffress, Fede/GDG
- Thread starter Sean Miller Fan
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Capel would be getting eviscerated if Jeffres and Fede were in the starting five.
"We're playing 3 on 5 every night!"
Sure, by the same people who spent last offseason howling about how the missing piece was getting a center who could score inside, and/or that Guillermo was actually a natural 4.
Well, we went out and got a center who can score. He scores a bunch of points in games that Pitt loses. We moved Guillermo off of the 5 and made him play a position that he’s never played in his life. Both of those decisions made the team worse. If they decide this offseason that they just need to go out and get a better version of Corhen, then they’ll lose games again next year. At least if that happens maybe it’ll be the end of the Capel era here.
if Greene has the value, worth and impact we all should hope for in Pitt's future he'd have an intervention with JC forcing a fix to the glaring shortcomings if financially not able to replace him
if he is worth anything he's already looked over these last 3-4 years and has enough data to work with to NOT need to wait for another year to play out with Jeff at Pitt
if he is worth anything he's already looked over these last 3-4 years and has enough data to work with to NOT need to wait for another year to play out with Jeff at Pitt
Well, they did need to get a center who can score (and heaven forbid catch the basketball - another thing Fede often did not do) if they wanted to be as good or better than they were last season... which should have been the goal. They obviously didn't make the right choice, but having offensive and defensive/rebounding ability doesn't have to be mutually exclusive. Let's also not make Fede into this great defense and rebounding stalwart, as he often struggled in both areas last season. It's not like they let Dikembe Mutombo walk out of the program.
As for GDG at the 4, well, I was always 1,000% opposed to that. He's either a mid-major starter or he's a power conference backup 5 whose minutes should be in the teens at best.
I think the only thing he can really do is "encourage" him to direct some of his salary to pay players. Mike Gundy at OK St had to do this. I'm not exactly sure the procedural steps that would need to be taken since you can't actually do that by NCAA rules but there are workarounds....and the NCAA isn't monitoring any of this anyway. Hypothetically, if Capel literally brought a bag of cash and emptied it at mid court at halftime of a game and his players picked up the stacks, what would be our probation? 1 year NCAAT ban? Who cares?
Greene has very little leverage here. If Capel says no, Greene basically can't fire him. The buyout is too much. I guess the only thing he can possibly do is tell him that he has to make the NCAAT next year or else but if he agrees to direct $2 million/year to the players, he will guarantee him 2 more seasons but that would just be a handshake deal.
I think it’s deeper than that. First, I honestly think that scoring from the center position is really not important at all, unless it’s stretching the floor with outside shooting. The center is the fifth most important scorer on the floor at any given time. Scoring, and especially interior scoring, is the least important responsibility for any center behind rebounding, defense, screen setting, protecting the rim, and running the floor to put pressure on a defense in transition. It’s like talking about how good a tight end is at pass blocking when you keep him in line on passing downs. I just fundamentally disagree that having a more proficient scorer at center was necessary to be better than last year, because the center position was simply not the problem with last year’s team.
And second, if the plan was basically, “we need to go and get a better version of Fede’s game,” then that’s fine! No issues, and I agree it would have been an improvement. But they didn’t do that. They instead went out and sought out a totally different kind of player with a totally different skillset. They got an old school interior scoring big to feed, and they’ve certainly fed him. My issue since the signing over the summer hasn’t been with the player, it’s been with seeking out the skillset that they did because I don’t think that Corhen’s skillset aligns with winning games in modern basketball. There are certainly players who are as good or better defensively than Fede (though I think Fede’s defense was wildly underappreciated by this fanbase) and also as good as Corhen is offensively, but there are not many of those players that exist in the basketball world, and the ones that do exist certainly aren’t cheap.
And my concern moving forward is that we’re in a situation where that style of big might just be Capel’s preference, just like it was with Hugley, and I am concerned that Capel is too stubborn to change and keep up with the times. We saw him accidentally stumble into a perfectly fine center rotation for the past two seasons after Hugley got hurt, and he scrapped it at the first opportunity to go out and get another 32+ minute a night player who plays like Hugley.
Here's how the ball goes in the basket:
Lowe and Leggett at guards
Austin and Jeffress at forwards
GDG/Fede at Center
It's a varied offense. Lowe and Leggett do the same thing but Austin and Jeffress can both be cutters. Nobody cuts to the basket on this team. Look at SMU's offense. Constant movement, passing, cutting. The ball won't stick as much. Jeffress will pass and get the defense to move. Also, GDG is better at the 5 with his ability to step out.
This isn't a perfect solution but the goal would be to be better on defense and essentially hope that Lowe and Leggett can score us enough points. As it is, they can't score us enough points because we can't stop a decent WPIAL AAA team on defense.
I don't necessarily disagree with any of that. An upgrade from Fede would have been fine with me. I'm not saying we needed to harken back to the 90s and get some cheap version of Ewing/Olajuwon/Shaq/Robinson/Duncan. I just wanted someone who could catch the ball (Fede fumbled so many passes that were laid out on a platter for him) and put the routine stuff through the hoop. Fede wasn't very good at that. A half-respectable midrange jumper, while not a prerequisite, shouldn't be out of the question, either.
And his great defensive efforts were primarily the season before last, as I recall. He was starting to get taken behind the woodshed at times. Was it Efton Reid who was having a field day on him before we swapped him out for Jeffres? I seem to recall most thinking he has regressed a bit.
Well, all I know is that we lost 11 games against a pretty weak schedule with those guys + an NBA lottery pick + one of the most prolific scorers in Pitt history.
This is all some pretty hardcore revisionist history. Wil Jeffres? I mean, come on. He was way out of his league in the ACC.
Early, we did. But we were a Top 10-15 team by the end. It was a very very good team.
This is exactly right. I do cut Capel some slack because I think he did think Corhen was going to be able to score and defend as well as Fede plus give you offense. We got the offense but the defense/rim protection and rebounding have been significant downgrades, which several losses can be attributed to. I do believe that if we just kept Fede and did the Fede/GDG combo at the 5 and played Austin or some other transfer at the 4, we would have been 2-3 games better.
We honestly exaggerate how good that team was at the end of the season to highlight how much getting left out of the tournament sucked. I've done it also. But top 10? No chance in hell. Not even close.
Maybe not Top 10. I do think Top 15. My guess is if they did a NET Rankings from the Duke game on, we'd be Top 10-15. I mean the last time we saw them, they played a #1 seed even on a huge stage in an extremely well played game. It wasn't like UNC didn't show up and let us hang around. We were very good. Probably our best team since the Steven Adams/Patterson team that got terribly mis-seeded as an 8 seed and lost to Wichita. Their NET equivalent was like #9 overall but they didn't use that back then.
It depends on the numbers you look at. I think his play was probably a little less consistent, but still very good on the defensive side. His big step back from 2022-23 to 2023-24 was on the offensive side of the ball, where he just could not buy a basket for long stretches - something that has returned to his 2022-23 form this year at Texas Tech.
In 2023-24, he finished #3 in the ACC in offensive rebounding, #2 in shot blocking, #11 in defensive rating, #10 in defensive box plus/minus, and #13 in rebounding percentage. All are very good defensive numbers, and that general level of production has carried over to the Big 12 this year. He would immediately be the best defender on this team, both from the perspective of his individual defense and also in terms of how his defensive ability helps the other four players on the floor.
A flawed player, for certain. Most players are. But he was an absolutely massive loss that we really never came close to being able to replace.
Torvik had Pitt as the #17 team in college basketball in the last ten games of that season. Not top 10, but they were absolutely playing well enough to challenge for the second weekend of the tournament if they had gotten in. Depends on the draw and a bunch of other factors, but they were playing at a very high level.
I don't disagree with that. I've said top 20 in the past, and I 100% believe they could have made a Sweet 16 with a favorable (matchup-wise) draw. But "top 10" is, like, national championship contender territory. This team wasn't that.
We should have done a better job emphasizing interior defense and rebounding. No doubt about that. But I cannot go so far as to call Fede Federicko a massive loss. I just can't.
Fede last year: 4.9 ppg, 5.3 rpg. Corhen this year: 10.9 ppg, 5.4 rpg. How is Fede better than Corhen, and who would take him instead of Cam?
Since we’re still pining for players no longer here, how about Nate Santos? Now there’s a guy who truly “got away.” Would’ve helped to replace Hinson’s 3pt shooting, too.
Fede gets a lot of PT for #10 team in the country. Corhen is better offensively, but Fede is a better rebounder and defender. Why didn’t we keep Fede and bring in Corhen? Kante would be shown the door in this case.
Because at its simplest, players who play 30 minutes a game are probably going to accumulate more statistics than players who play 20 minutes a game. The issue is that when you adjust for minutes played, and especially when you adjust based on tempo, here’s what you find on a per 100 possession basis:
2023-24 Fede: 13.2 points, 14.4 rebounds, 3.6 blocks, 1.4 steals, 63.7 eFG%, 120.7 ORTG, 100.5 DRTG, +20.2 net rating
2024-25 Corhen: 22.6 points, 11.2 rebounds, 1.6 blocks, 1.6 steals, 62.1 eFG%, 122.7 ORTG, 107.7 DRTG, +15 net rating
The takeaways here are that when you adjust for minutes played and tempo, on every single offensive possession Corhen is more likely to score because he attempts about 50% more shots than Fede does. Despite that, both players score at about the same efficiency, and Fede is significantly more likely to get an offensive rebound on any given possession than Corhen. On every defensive possession, Fede is more likely to get a defensive rebound, more likely to block a shot, and the opponent is less likely to score than when Corhen is defending. Over the course of 100 possessions, a game between Pitt and their opponent is about 5 points closer with Corhen on the court than with Fede on the court, despite Corhen scoring more points. You score more with Corhen than you do with Fede, but you allow even more points.
And Texas Tech obviously would have taken him over Cam, and did, and they’re currently on the way to a protected seed with Fede playing basically the same role there as he played here for two years. I think the market for Federiko was likely much more robust - and was populated by more successful teams and programs - than the market for Corhen.
Had a nice game against #4 UH last night, too. Nine rebounds.
NC State made the Final Four. Pitt could have gotten there with the right matchups. Once you are there, you are 2 games away.
NC State made the final four last year. We beat them twice. I don't think it's far fetched to say we were top 10.
I knew that would be the example used, and yes - they did make the Final Four and I believe they were tied for the lowest seed ever to do so. But was George Mason a top ten team when they made it?
NC State also lost to Syracuse twice; were they a top 10 team? And would a top 10 team have gone 9-11 in a league with like 4 (or whatever the number was) at-large bids?
Wichita State was probably a Top 10ish team when they beat us as a 9 seed with Fred Vanvleet and Ron Baker, 2 NBA guys and made the Final Four. Their BPI (which is somewhat equivalent to NET) was like 15 and we were like 10. If NET was around back then, we would have been a 4 or 5 seed and they would have been a 5 or 6.
Sometimes there's luck like GMU. As for NC St, it was just getting hot and changing their style to go through Burns every possession
I don't think it's that crazy to say we were top 10. Certainly not crazy to say were were top 15. There were 4 ACC schools in the sweet sixteen.
Syracuse was a 20 win team that went 11-9 in the ACC. They weren't terrible, although not a top 10 team. They did not demonstrate the same end of season improvement as we did.
You guys are nuts, man. The NCAA Tournament might be about 50% talent, 30% matchups, and 20% luck. You can get just about any result when you put that in a shaker. You're cherry-picking examples that fit one direction when I could name you 8,000 in the other direction.
Virginia had 6 NBA players and was 17-1 in the ACC before losing to a 16-seed by 20 points. Then, comprised mostly of that same team, they won it all the next season. It's as if anything can, and does, happen in a single-elimination basketball tournament.
Regardless, we agree that the mid-January - March Pitt team last season was very good.
Ignoring the injuries, Dunn has actually been much, much better this season than he was last season.
Last year: 70.6% ones, 38.6% twos, 31.7% threes, 4.0 assist rate, 16.1 turnover rate, 4.6 off rebounding pct, 10.5 def rebounding pct
This year: 80.0% ones, 43.5% twos, 41.2% threes, 14.1 assist rate, 9.9 turnover rate, 3.3 off rebounding pct, 9.5 def rebounding pct
Better shooting ones, twos and threes, better with assists, better with turnovers, and slightly worse rebounding. I'm not sure what people were expecting when he came here, and yeah, he's obviously missed a lot of games, but when he has played he has been better than we had any right to expect.
I think he was better than I thought he’d be offensively, but I was hoping to have an assist rate closer to the high teens considering the staff billed him as sort of a secondary playmaker that could either play alongside Lowe or be the primary ballhandler when Lowe is on the bench. I don’t think we got that, but I think we did get an effective scorer. I think the pull up jumpers in transition got on peoples’ nerves and the individual iso drives to the lane, which is probably tied to the lower assist rate than expected.
I also think it’s hard to separate pre-injury Dunn with post-injury Dunn, where he pretty clearly wasn’t at full strength. Obviously that’s not his fault. And it’s also when a little bit more of the individual offensive game started to creep in, which may have been related or maybe not.
The disappointment was more on the defensive end. Statistically, he was one of our worst defenders, which was a very unpleasant surprise considering he just came from Houston who beats opponents’ offenses with hammers, and Capel pointed to him as one of our best defenders early in the season. Again, maybe that was injury-driven so it makes it hard to separate.
