Pitt basketball had nothing to lose. Now it has everything to gain (2024)

PITTSBURGH – Two minutes before “The Jeff Capel Radio Show” begins, its eponymous star walks through a glass door while everyone inside the Campus View Club expectantly awaits what’s next. Pittsburgh’s men’s basketball coach makes a quick pass by the tables closest to the set, shaking hands and accepting bouquets. Coach, love watching your team play, a gentleman holding a beverage in a Panther Club koozie says, and Capel duly thanks him before moving along to another smiling face.

By design, it’s a friendly crowd. Invitation-only for annual fund donors who listen in person while indulging in crudites, nachos and maybe a Levity Brewing Co. Tenured Double IPA, cooled in ice on a bartop. It’s just not always been a big crowd. Invitations have not always been eagerly accepted. There’s not always been two- or three-dozen seats filled, like now, even as the sun shines and the temperature spikes at 70 degrees, tying a century-old record. Given the rare opportunity to be anywhere in late February, these folks choose to be here.

“It’s been beautiful today,” Capel says on-air, but that applies to most of the days before, too. After six consecutive losing seasons, the Panthers have won 21 games and are ranked for the first time since 2016. Picked to finish last in the ACC, they are in position to win a regular-season championship. A little more than a year after the stress overwhelmed him and sent him in search of someone to unload on, Capel is in the running for national coach of the year honors. A roster, a scheme and an overall vibe and outlook flipped in months. Across men’s college hoops, arguably no program shoved aside bigger boulders in order to rise again.

Capel mingles with the crowd during commercial breaks, posing for a picture at almost every stop. He noshes on carrots while grad transfer guard Greg Elliott sits in for a segment, laughing when Elliott notes that no one told him the Petersen Events Center was on top of a huge hill he’d have to scale daily. ESPN play-by-play man Dan Shulman calls in and jokes about Jay Bilas and Pitt crowds hassling referees while extolling results he’s seen from afar. “I’m thrilled for Jeff, personally,” one of the game’s preeminent voices says, and Capel nods appreciatively.

Capel’s co-host, Jeff Hathhorn, wraps things up at 6:58 p.m. and the people in the room put their hands together. Pittsburgh men’s basketball and its coach, worthy of another round of applause, and who’d have thought it. This is real life, and real enough.

No one’s thinking about how long it’ll last.

Nelly Cummings grew up in Midland, Pa., fewer than 40 miles from one of the biggest shows in town. He was in the mix, too, as he puts it. His third-grade AAU team practiced in the auxiliary gym at Petersen Events Center while the Pittsburgh men’s team used the main floor, putting him in close proximity to everything and everyone he wanted to be. Even gave former Panthers star Sam Young a bucket once, he proudly reports. No, he didn’t initially earn a Pitt scholarship after scoring more than 2,400 points in high school. But he understood what the program was about and, more importantly, what it should be.

On Dec. 9, 2021, in a road game at Pittsburgh, Cummings took the main floor as a starting guard for Colgate and saw emptiness all around him. Maybe 7,000 people in a building that seats nearly double that. The Oakland Zoo student section, nowhere near packed. A ghost, instead of the program he thought he knew. “I think I had just as many fans as Pitt did, almost,” Cummings says now, sitting outside an arena media room, a 6-foot grad transfer playing for his dream school at last. “It didn’t sit right with me, for sure. This place, this town, this city, it has so much pride. It wants basketball to be good. This place wants to jump. It wants to rock.”

It does. At last. This is broadly because everyone seized on various last chances to make it so.

None of Pittsburgh’s top five scorers started their college basketball careers at Pittsburgh, and three of them hadn’t played for the Panthers before November. (Leading scorer Blake Hinson hadn’t played in two years, period.) All but one exhaust their eligibility this spring. The head coach, meanwhile, started his fifth season 18 games under .500 overall. While Capel’s bosses were looking for reasons to continue to employ him, and not the other way around, he knew he had to provide some reasons.

Fourteen ACC wins and a chance to clinch a share of the league title on Wednesday at Notre Dame is reason enough, even if an NCAA Tournament bid is not a sure thing, to the Panthers’ exasperation. Everyone brought their own version of desperation into the room. It worked. Pittsburgh resembles what successful modern teams often look like: a bunch of interchangeable, broken-in players who aren’t overly careless with the ball and shoot a high rate of 3s with a good amount of success. The offense is top 30 in adjusted efficiency and the defense has enough connectivity to produce usually adequate results. And it got here without a moment to spare.

“The biggest problem that people don’t understand is that when you (rebuild), most of the guys that you’re able to get, they feel like they’re doing you a favor,” Capel says. “That’s one of the things that we’ve dealt with because we haven’t won. I’m not sure how much everyone really appreciated the opportunity to be at the University of Pittsburgh, being in the ACC, to have a chance to compete at this level. I certainly think that’s a big part of where we are – our whole team appreciates it.”

There’s too much to unpack in this years-long footslog out of the barrens – the two-year Kevin Stallings dystopia, catastrophic teammate infighting, injuries, a pandemic that prevented the staff from truly getting to know players they signed – so let’s start on March 9, 2022. A day after a desultory 11-win season ended, and hours after confirming with athletic director Heather Lyke that he still in fact had a job, Capel gathered his staff and issued a mission statement: They needed a lot of recruiting wins between then and June.

On that timeline, it meant being nearly perfect in transfer portal evaluations. Pittsburgh needed shooting, both because Capel envisioned surrounding holdover big man John Hugley with perimeter threats and because the Panthers were pretty bad at that, ranking 291st in 3-point accuracy in 2021-22. Hugley wound up playing in only eight games before leaving the team in mid-January, but better shot-makers were bound to help with or without him. “That’s the best way to win,” Capel says. “If you can shoot the basketball, then you can be hard to guard.” Capel likewise emphasized finding players from winning programs, because, well, Pittsburgh was pretty bad at that, too.

A strategic and cultural cleanse. No Plan B.

A year earlier, Capel begged to add a staff position solely dedicated to monitoring and researching transfers, to eliminate as much dart-throwing as possible. Lyke obliged him. It proved essential to putting this roster together. “We were so much more prepared,” Capel says. Cummings had been a core player for a Colgate team that lost seven conference games in three seasons. In three of the four seasons Elliott was active, Marquette posted winning records. Though Hinson missed two years with an unspecified medical condition, he was a part of a 20-win Ole Miss team as a freshman. Some other connections helped – this was Cummings’ hometown team, while Pitt staffer Jake Presutti coached Elliott at Marquette – and Pittsburgh landed them all.

Through 29 games, the three new transfers have combined for 38 points a night and 201 made 3-pointers overall; Pittsburgh, as a team, hit 172 shots from long range a year ago. In sum, the Panthers’ five core veterans have played at nine schools. They have, collectively, one season of eligibility left between them. (Hinson can return and says he will.) They account for 79.4 percent of the team’s points, 57.8 percent of its rebounds and 87.7 percent of its assists. It is a group that appreciates the opportunity, understands the immediacy and behaves as such. “We’re all looking at the same finish line, I feel like,” Hinson says. “I don’t think anybody’s end goal is different than the next man’s.”

The harmony tracks back to conversations between camp sessions last summer, when the group retreated to an apartment for lunch and talked like unsparing old-heads do. “One of the biggest things I said – because I felt like this at times on other teams – is that I don’t want to be competing against my teammate while I’m competing against the other team,” says fifth-year senior Jamarius Burton, who can make a case for ACC player of the year honors. “And we don’t do that.”

“We’re receptive to being coached, and we’re receptive to being wrong,” Hinson says. “If you’re not willing to do that at the simplest level – even if it’s I left a candy wrapper on the locker room floor and my teammate says, ‘That’s wrong, you need to pick that up’ – if I’m not receptive to that, that’s going to be a problem.”

A joyride, not always. There was Pittsburgh, 1-3 leaving the Legends Classic in November, the temperature spiking. During that trip, the team watched Louisville get trounced and someone wondered aloud if Cardinals coach Kenny Payne might not make it out of Year 1. “If Cape ain’t getting fired,” one Panther replied, “isn’t nobody getting fired.” That rather insidious comment made it back to the head coach. Capel also steamed as he rewatched a loss to VCU and spied two of his players being, as he puts it now, “absolutely horrendous teammates.” The tension was real. “I knew when we got back, our next day of practice, that was the most important day of our season,” Elliott says. Capel resolved to show his group strength. Elliott resolved to be loud. The rest of the group had the required intensity. Pittsburgh subsequently won three straight games against low-major opponents – despite trailing at the half of two of them – and then obliterated Northwestern by 29 on the road. Twenty-two assists on 26 field goals. Music and dancing in the locker room. An identity.

“That was the first time,” Cummings says, “we really bonded around fighting for each other.”

It’s loud near the end of what was supposed to be a light late-February practice. Pittsburgh’s starters position themselves for reps against a press, and assistant coach Tim O’Toole tells sophom*ore Nate Santos to “put the fear of God” in the inbounder. Minutes later, Capel is in a defensive stance, demonstrating how to deny a drive to the middle. He’s engaged. He’s wired. His team has 21 wins in the books, but ask how he is after the workout ends, and Pittsburgh’s coach replies thusly: “Good. Anxious.”

A regular state of being in this job. Doomed to never be sure of anything.

He thought he had perspective. He got fired at Oklahoma and realized the world turns even if Jeff Capel isn’t a head coach. He nearly died after his first year back at Duke as an assistant due to a flare-up of Crohn’s disease that required emergency surgery. “It was touch-and-go,” Capel says now. “They had to bring me back.” These are moments of big reassessments, and he figured he’d made them. He believed he was equipped to try everything he could to make it work at Pittsburgh.

He wasn’t. “As a person,” he says, “last year was really, really hard for me.” He dry-heaved before some games as his fourth season muddled along. He wanted to unload and felt he couldn’t. In January, his doctor suggested seeing a therapist. Grudgingly, Capel relented. He didn’t think that stuff worked. And then it did.

“I was a person that was against it,” he says. “I went into it with a closed mind: ‘I’m just going to do this once just to appease them.’ The first one was for two hours. I left there feeling such a sense of relief. Of calm. That was really huge for me.”

He began summer workouts with his new team and no material change in the desperation of his own situation. And as Capel ran the practices and watched the group coalesce, there was one thing notably missing: Fear. A coach who might still rightly be coiled up, operating with a lightness of being. “I knew we had to win,” Capel says. “I knew that. But also there was maybe a little bit of freedom. Because it was just like, ‘OK, I’m going to do it my way. I’m going to go for it. If it works, it works. I think it’ll work.’”

He says he, too, operates with a renewed gratitude, particularly after Lyke stuck by him last offseason. “It could have been easy for Heather to want to make a change,” he says. “And I’m sure she had a lot of heat and a lot of pressure from people to do that.” On her end, Lyke has been even more visible at practices and around the basketball offices. It’s a way to enrich a relationship, yes, but also to provide constant reassurance. “He’s got great confidence,” Lyke says of Capel. “But you get swayed a little bit when things don’t go perfectly.”

In addition to any worries about his job status, Capel has dropped 40 to 45 pounds since August. Good eating, fewer adult beverages, more walking and intermittent fasting got him there.

Behind his desk, with the day’s practice plan in front of him, Capel looks healthy. He looks secure.

“I’m hopeful,” he says.

Pittsburgh’s coach sounds like a man who’s lost a lot, who isn’t sorry to see any of it go.

The ACC, depending on your metric of choice, is something like the sixth- or seventh-best conference in the country as March begins. Pittsburgh, depending on your metric of choice, is anywhere between the 53rd- and 65th-best team in the nation. Its four Quad 1 wins aren’t decisive, but 19 teams with a higher NET ranking have fewer than that as of Tuesday morning. The Panthers might win the ACC regular-season championship for the first time. They are fighting to make the NCAA Tournament. Try to solve the equation for the value of revelation and you can’t. The math and the achievement exist on parallel planes.

Pittsburgh men’s basketball, in 2023, is the search for what’s real.

In other words: What’s the meaning of all this?

The infrastructure is in place, finally. The head coach himself says so. The personnel philosophy of striking a balance between developing high school prospects and adding winners through the transfer portal fits the place. The basketball approach of surrounding a mobile big with high-end shooting is sound. “It really is about the totality of the things Jeff has put in place,” Lyke says. “I think it’s the culmination of his work. There are new players and new kids on the team, but it’s more about his overall culture, his overall focus, being undeterred in his vision for what he wants this to be.”

Short-term, leading scorer Hinson has another year to play. Former five-star recruit Dior Johnson is practicing with the team while serving one year’s probation after pleading guilty to two misdemeanor charges for simple assault and strangulation. The three-man 2023 recruiting class is ranked in the top 25.

But a singular group responsible for almost everything this year, on the floor and off it, leaves. The all-important selflessness can’t change when the players do. And the question of how good Pittsburgh is relative to any ACC – not just this one – remains. Fairly or not.

“It can carry over based on the younger guys we have,” Burton says. “They’re getting to experience this – experience winning, what it takes to win, the selflessness that’s required to win. Even last year, (Capel) was saying we wouldn’t do well if it wasn’t right within. But it still comes down to the players ultimately buying in. And I believe we have a good group of younger guys who believe that, who’ve experienced that, and will continue to push that forward.”

On a more seasonably brisk Saturday, most of the seats at the Petersen Events Center are occupied by the time the first notes of the national anthem hit in the regular-season home finale. Syracuse, led by a head coach who a couple weeks earlier said Pittsburgh “bought a team” before apologizing, is in town. Few, if any, consider what the next two-plus hours is worth to a committee. Few, if any, care to wonder about the sustainability of joy while they’re feeling it.

Within 62 seconds of tipoff, the 12,508 in attendance are reminded not to throw objects on the court. The air is noticeably clammy by halftime. The place goes up for grabs a few times as Pittsburgh surges ahead in the second half, then more or less loses consciousness when former manager and current senior walk-on Aidan Fisch scores the Panthers’ 98th and 99th points of the night in the final minute. When the horn sounds, the Panthers sprint toward Fisch and disappear him into a pile of sweat and unintelligible glee. “That was the most fun thing I’ve ever done,” Cummings says. “Pure adrenaline.”

It’s something to see, in any context, just like the ACC standings graphic that appears on the scoreboard screen at 7:12 p.m. Pittsburgh, alone in first place. More than enough people left in the building to applaud that, too.

A few minutes later, the bespectacled warhorse whose team lost by 17 points says Jeff Capel has done a great job. He’s found good players who fit together. Which means Pittsburgh has a really good team, he says.

As he grabs his water bottle and stands up, the man temporarily denied a 1,116th career victory smiles.

“Last year,” Jim Boeheim says, “they were trying to get a new coach, weren’t they?”

(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: David Jensen, Lance King, Jonnie Izquierdo / Getty Images)