Pitt holds off UNC Wilmington rally for 1st victory of the season

Jeff Capel didn’t say he has a bad team.

He didn’t say he has a good one, either.

“Our team is interesting,” Pitt’s coach said.

Pitt also is no longer winless after the Panthers (1-2) blew most of a 17-point lead in the second half before surviving a UNC Wilmington rally and walking out of Petersen Events Center on Tuesday night with a 59-51 victory.

“Right now, we’re going to have to win ugly. That’s what we did today,” Capel said.

The Panthers valued the basketball better than they did Friday night when they committed 32 turnovers against West Virginia at the WVU Coliseum.

The sloppy play didn’t completely disappear – Pitt turned the ball over 17 times to UNC Wilmington’s 10 — but inaccurate shooting was the problem in the second half.

Pitt made only one basket from the field in the final 14 minutes, 31 seconds, but never lost the lead.

“We weren’t scoring and they weren’t scoring,” center John Hugley said. “Playing great defense on both ends.”

Capel, of course, will look much deeper than that. Especially when he sees the numbers: Pitt missed 15 of 22 shots after halftime.

“We probably missed in the second half about six to eight shots right there at the basket that rolled around the rim,” he said. “It was like it had a lid on it. I thought that deflated us a little bit.

“(The Seahawks) pressured the basketball, made catches a little more difficult. But we missed some good looks.”

Femi Odukale and Hugley scored 15 and 13 points to lead the Panthers. Each player had three assists.

“If they’re going to double-team me, I’m going to make them pay every time they double-team me,” said Hugley, who added 11 rebounds for his second double-double in three games.

Dan Oladapo made his first start of the season, replacing Mouhamadou Gueye who was excused from practice Sunday and Monday to tend to a family situation back home in Staten Island, N.Y. Oladapo responded with nine points. Williams Jeffress scored seven with nine rebounds.

That was the good news, but not the best news.

Jamarius Burton, a senior transfer guard from Texas Tech, played his first game for Pitt after a knee injury kept him off the floor for the previous month.

Burton entered four minutes into the game and hit a 3-pointer. Incredibly, it was Pitt’s only long-range basket in four attempts. Later in the first half, he hit a 2-pointer at the end of the shot clock and finished with seven points in 25 minutes.

“It was great to have JB out there,” Capel said. “He gave us a calming influence. He provides leadership. He’s a good player. I knew he would be a little bit rusty, which he was. But he made some big plays for us.”

Odukale is pleased to have another scholarship guard on the team, especially one with a team-first attitude.

“Since day one since he’s been on campus, he’s all about Pitt,” Odukale said. “He hasn’t been talking about himself and saying he wants to be a pro. He’s always talking about Pitt and winning.”

Capel said he expected Burton to play only about 20 minutes in his debut, but circumstances – the Seahawks’ whittled Pitt’s lead to 49-47, with 9:14 left – dictated that the veteran guard stay in the game.

“The way the game was going, I didn’t want to take him out,” Capel said.

Capel liked the fact that Pitt survived UNC Wilmington’s defensive pressure, even though it clearly wasn’t as intense as what West Virginia presented last week.

“We were able to (win) with some game pressure after we built up a big lead,” he said. “We still have to really work on valuing the basketball when things get a little bit chaotic. We have to be able to have poise and be strong and make plays.”

The return of Burton might be the first step.

“Hopefully, we can start getting back whole,” Capel said.