A Winning Solution : The Pittsburgh Basketball Team Is Doing It With Mirrors--and a Whole Lot of Talent

ore continuing, keep in mind that the University of Pittsburgh’s basketball team could very well be No. 1 in the country. This group, which starts one player out of position, two others who insist that they are, and two freshman, is one lousy game at the free-throw line away from being undefeated.

Proof that oil and water can mix, that’s the Panthers.

They are a team coming from many directions and heading for, well, who knows? A championship in the Big East, one of the toughest conferences in the country, perhaps? Maybe, on the other hand, a season of disappointment.

Or how about Hollywood? Point guard Sean Miller from Beaver Falls, Pa., used to show off his ballhandling skills on the “Tonight Show” and “That’s Incredible” and at halftime of Pitt games as a youngster.

His partner in the backcourt is Jason Matthews, a hard-to-rattle shooter from Los Angeles who attended St. Monica High School in Santa Monica. Both are freshmen.

Reno? Power forward Jerome Lane is, after all, the littlest big man in the country, having led the nation in rebounding last season despite being 6 feet 6 inches and a sophomore.

The great outdoors? Charles Smith, a senior, would love to ask people to step outside, but for now he is a 6-10 center. It’s not by choice. He prefers a finesse game to the body slamming under the basket, often playing so far out as a wing in the 2-3 zone defense that he tries to block three-point shots. A true forward in waiting.

The Big City? Senior forward Demetreus Gore wrote a rap song last season, “Pitt on the Rise.” Another for this team is in the works, by popular demand.

Kansas City, Mo.? That’s where the Final Four will be played in April.

Appropriately, they have met somewhere in the middle, and we’re not talking geographics. A five-point loss to Georgetown while missing 16 of 32 free throws, an impressive win over St. John’s, a narrow victory over Connecticut, a solid victory against Villanova. How can the rest of the basketball world be expected to know where the Panthers are going when it’s obvious they don’t know themselves?

About the only thing for sure today is that Pitt is 13-1 and No. 6 in the country with a big nonconference game at No. 11 Oklahoma (Channel 2, 11 a.m., PST).

“I don’t know,” said Paul Evans, who coached David Robinson and Navy to a regional final of the National Collegiate Athletic Assn. tournament in 1986 and is 38-9 in his second season at Pitt. “With (Rod) Brookin, it was possible we could have done almost anything.

“But then we came out of the Georgetown game knowing Bobby Martin could play with anyone. Maybe that was a plus we wouldn’t have known if we still had Brookin. Now, Sean and Jason have more pressure to be scoring, which they haven’t needed to do to this point.”

A year ago at this time, the projected team for 1987-88 was Smith at center, Lane and Brookin at forward, Gore and Mike Goodson at guard, with Brian Shorter the best of the incoming freshmen. That was the plan.

But by summer, it was apparent that Goodson, who led the team in assists last year, would not make it academically. Before the season, Shorter, the headliner of one of the best recruiting classes in the nation, fell to Proposition 48. Brookin was averaging 12.6 points after eight games before he, too, became an academic casualty.

That meant that Gore would be switched from guard to forward and the freshman class guards wouldn’t have time to develop slowly.

It also meant that the first four players off the bench were Martin, a freshman front-liner; Darelle Porter, a freshman guard; forward Nate Bailey, a transfer in his first season with the team, and guard Pat Cavanaugh, a former walk-on.

Still, seven of the nine coaches in the Big East picked Pitt to win the conference title, even after it was announced that Brookin would be out.

Lane was tabbed as preseason player of the year--which raised some eyebrows around Pitt, what with Rony Seikaly at Syracuse--and not too long after told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: “If we don’t get to the final eight or the Final Four, there definitely is something wrong.”

Now, it looks as if something may definitely be wrong. But Lane, never one to hide his feelings, may also turn out to be right. The logic: If the Panthers are winning with a still-adjusting blend, they could be just right at tournament time.

Despite what Lane said--”Rod’s a great shooter, but I don’t think he’s a major factor in us going down”--the real loss is Brookin. A 6-5, 220-pounder who averaged 10.2 points a game last season, he was the team’s clutch player.

The Panthers made it through nine games before needing their money man, all the way to the conference opener Jan. 6 against Georgetown at Landover, Md. It was clear from that game that the Big East would not be the Big Easy for Pitt, as Georgetown fought its way to a 62-57 victory.

Trouble in Three River City? Or maybe they just didn’t deserve the high ranking? Depends on whether you listen to Evans or Lane.

“That’s you idiots,” Evans told writers afterward. “We’re not the No. 2 team in the country. We’re more like 22. We play four freshmen. I don’t think many teams that play four freshmen are No. 2 in the country.”

But that’s just where the Panthers were, heading into the game, No. 2 in the nation according to the news service polls, the highest ranking ever at Pitt, and 9-0, their best start since 1929.

Then all Hoya broke loose.

In the first half: Georgetown’s Mark Tillmon started a fight and was kicked out. Coach John Thompson blurted out a certain barnyardcuss word with such force that half the kids between the Capital Center and Virginia must have been shivering. On several occasions, the game and 45-second clocks failed, the first time with 10:11 left in the first half. Or thereabouts.

In the second half: When Evans complained to the timekeeper after yet another malfunction, the timekeeper gestured right back. Later, when Thompson complained to the timekeeper, the timekeeper didn’t gesture. With 29 seconds to play and his team down by two, 58-56, Evans, so incensed by what he judged to be a missed traveling call, followed one official past midcourt, about five feet onto the court and almost in front of the Georgetown bench. The Hoyas took advantage of the double technical and made it a four-point game.

If only the mix of oil and water could shoot free throws. The Panthers would be No. 1 in the country.

Pitt had its chances last season.

In Evans’ first year, the Panthers went 25-8, had the second-best rebounding margin in the country--9.7--were co-champions of the Big East with Georgetown and Syracuse, and beat Final Four participants Providence and Syracuse during the regular season.

But they closed the season by splitting their last eight games, including a 96-93 loss to Oklahoma in the second round of the NCAA tournament, and finished No. 12 in the country.

Between April and November, the most important thing that happened was something that didn’t happen. Smith didn’t turn pro. He decided to remain at Pitt, and Evans convinced him that playing center would be to his benefit. The coach used a simple example: David Robinson’s $26-million contract with the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Assn.

“Charles, why would you want to play outside?” Evans told him. “Look at David.”

Smith looked and agreed.

Smith has averaged 17.1 points and 7.2 rebounds--and raised his stock for the NBA draft.

Lane, at 6-6 and 232 pounds, is a lighter version of Charles Barkley who would have preferred being a shorter version of Magic Johnson.

Lane says that former coach Roy Chipman gave him an election-style promise during recruiting that he would be the starting point guard by this, his junior season. Instead, last year he became the smallest player to lead the nation in rebounding since 6-5 Alex Ellis of Niagara in 1958.

Now averaging 11 points and 12.6 rebounds and looking to become the first player since Kermit Washington of American University in 1972 and ’73 to win consecutive titles, he is the once, present and future starting power forward for the Panthers. Evans has said so.

It was a good decision. Take it from opposing coaches.

“No one in the country, I don’t care how big he is, can outrebound Jerome Lane, one-on-one,” Syracuse Coach Jim Boeheim once said.

Lane has not exactly gone quietly from would-be point guard to the record books. But that never has been his style. His complaints about lack of playing time last summer at the Pan American Games in Indianapolis--he was the lone U.S. player not to appear in the semifinal win over Puerto Rico and logged only a few minutes in the title-game loss to Brazil--were much like his rebounds.

Well documented.

“I’m hurt, man,” he said at the time. “I feel very bad about it.”

Others preferred to point out that he reported to camp 18 pounds overweight and was ripped for practicing at less than full speed on a team that already had Robinson and Kansas’ Danny Manning playing inside.

Anyway, after breaking the Big East rebounding record by 50 last season and averaging 13.5 overall, the 1987-88 season has included few reminders of his summer of discontent. He has used position to dominate games inside and strength to make up for the times he hasn’t.

The leader of this group is Evans, 42, a curly haired perfectionist with a no-nonsense approach who has been known to dip his toe into the deep end occasionally.

There was the time before the Big East opener last season, against Providence in on-campus Fitzgerald Field House. He talked to the team about getting off to a fast start. He used Lee McRae, the world-class sprinter at Pitt, as the analogy, of how important it is for McRae to burst out of the blocks in the 100.

He dimmed the lights. Suddenly, . . .

Bang! It was Evans. He had fired a starter’s pistol in the room.

None of the players was quite sure immediately what had happened. When the lights went back on, Gore looked at Lane and said: “Geez, I thought for a second you were shot.”

Evans’ method also includes throwing players out of practice. Or making it very tough on those who stay.

The other day, Bailey, a 6-5 sophomore, was looking sloppy. Evans stopped practice, walked a few steps toward Bailey.

“Are you on drugs?” Evans screamed.

Such a comment couldn’t have surprised Bailey, however. He had played for Evans at Navy--and transferred to Pitt so he could play for him some more.

That’s the type of respect Evans gets from his players: He’s tough, but we need it.

Do they ever. The joke on campus when Chipman was coach was that discipline was an elective. That he announced his resignation in December and completed the season as a lame duck only made matters worse. The Panthers were like sixth-graders with a substitute teacher.

Evans came in and changed that. Discipline now is something in which the players could write a thesis.

To Evans’ credit, he allows assistant coach John Calipari to recruit players only if they can fit into the system. That is, only if they are thick-skinned as well as talented. He knows what he is as much as he knows how to win.

“Paul is a very competent person,” said Calipari, a holdover from the Chipman years. “He’s also a fighter, and I think that’s kind of the personality the team has taken on.

“They’re good kids here. They want to win and they have a coach who wants to show them how to win.”

With that mix, it just may work.