Depleted Pitt men's basketball team can't keep up with The Citadel in opener

After Pitt’s season opener had ended, Femi Odukale tapped the stat sheet in front of him, eager to make a point.

“We have enough on this paper to still win,” he said. “We just want to prove everybody wrong.”

The stat sheet, however, said otherwise in the form of the final score.

Pitt’s sophomore point guard combined with power forward John Hugley to score 47 points – 27 for Hugley, 20 for Odukale — in Pitt’s 78-63 loss Tuesday night at Petersen Events Center.

Both players were impressive, the 6-foot-9 Hugley recording a double-double with 10 rebounds and Odukale committing only three turnovers in 36 minutes.

But the most distressing stat in a night full of them was this: Those two players accounted for 75% of Pitt’s points. Second on that list is Pitt’s free throw-shooting percentage (48.4%, 15 of 31).

With only nine scholarship players available and three guards unavailable, Pitt allowed The Citadel to dominate for 40 minutes in one of those so-called buy games in which the host (in this case, the losing team) writes a check for the visitor (the winner).

“To come in and beat an ACC team is really special to them,” The Citadel coach Duggar Baucom said of his players. “It was special to me as a coach.”

The Citadel, which was picked in a preseason poll to finish ninth in a 10-team Southern Conference, jumped to a 14-2 lead 3 ½ minutes into the game and kept the depleted Panthers in check for the rest of the game. After The Citadel scored 27 points in eight minutes, Pitt had little chance to recover.

“They played harder than us. You play harder than a team, you’re going to win. No. 33, honestly, he wanted it more than us,” Hugley said of Southern Conference preseason Player of the Year Hayden Brown.

Brown finished with 19 points and freshman Jason Roche, playing in his first collegiate game, hit 8 of 14 3-point attempts and matched Hugley’s 27.

Pitt coach Jeff Capel, starting over in his fourth season at Pitt, acknowledged the adjustments that must be made after losing two starting guards one week before the start of the season.

After months of preparing one version of his team, all of sudden he lost guard Nike Sibande to a season-ending knee injury and Ithiel Horton to an arrest and subsequent suspension. Plus, Jamarius Burton, a transfer from Texas Tech, has missed the past month with a knee injury and hasn’t been cleared to return.

“It’s an adjustment, but we have to be better,” Capel said. “We had some guys playing a lot of minutes in different roles we really haven’t practiced.

“We should be better defensively. That kid (Roche) is a specialist (as a shooter). There should be a sense of urgency to know that.”

Capel said he was not displeased with his players’ efforts.

“I don’t think we had lack of effort. I don’t think they played harder than us,” he said. “They were smarter than us. They executed.”

He pointed to two examples.

• “Their first basket came on an offensive rebound where we should have gotten the defensive rebound,” he said. “We can’t sit and wait for someone. We have to gang rebound.

• “We rotated to a guy who’s a non-shooter and left the best shooter (Roche). That’s what I mean. We have to be smarter. Some of that is rooted in inexperience. But we have to be better. We will be better.”

Players understand the situation, but refuse to make excuses.

“I don’t think it changed expectations,” Hugley said. “Coach still expects the same thing.”