Bub Carrington Makes History as Pitt Demolishes North Carolina A&T
PITTSBURGH -- If a team that won 24 games and made the NCAA Tournament lost four of its top five scorers from a year ago, a regression would be expected. At the very least, some growing pains would surely show. But not for the Pitt Panthers and not in their season opener.
Pitt rocked North Carolina A&T from the opening tip, racing out to a 9-0 advantage before anyone in the Petersen Events Center could blink. They built advantages of 18-6, then 33-11, then 50-15 by halftime on the way to a wholly dominating and winning effort over the Aggies, marked by a final score of 100-52.
The Panthers opened with a familiar starting five of Carlton Carrington, Ishmael Leggett, Zack Austin, Blake Hinson and Federiko Federiko and that group came out red hot. Hinson hit a pull-up triple to open the game and proceeded to score seven of the game's first nine points while Carrington assisted on all four made field goals as Pitt took a 9-0 lead and North Carolina A&T called a timeout before the first media break.
Pitt cooled off shooting the ball, going just 3-8 from the field after a 5-7 start. But a unit made up mostly of bench players - led by Guillermo Diaz Graham - played furious defense on the interior, blocking a pair of shots and stealing another while holding the Aggies without a field goal for more than four minutes.
The Panthers kept their foot on the gas defensively, amassing six blocks in the first 15 minutes of action and extending the lead to 35-15 with 4:04 to go until halftime. They turned blocked shots into easy offense on the other end as they ripped off 12 points on fast breaks in the first half to the Aggies' zero.
Pitt rattled off 15 points in a row - nine in a row from Jorge Diaz Graham, then four in a row from Leggett and punctuated by a two-handed, alley-oop slam from Hinson to Austin that sent the Petersen Events Center into a frenzy as the Panthers entered halftime with a 50-15 lead.
The big lead mounted at halftime appeared to have lulled Pitt to sleep a bit. Four of the first five shots off Panther hands fell off the rim, but they nonetheless extended their lead by four points to 57-18 by the first media timeout of the second half.
The Aggies and Panthers traded buckets up until the 11:45 mark of the second half but Pitt maintained a 39-point lead as Carrington continued to stuff the stat sheet. He reached a double-double, just the third Pitt player to do so in their freshman debut ever, with 16:10 to play in regulation. He then recorded his seventh assist with 14:27 left in the second half, and all of a sudden he was knocking on the door of a triple-double, which has happened just four times in Pitt history.
At the 9:03 mark, now leading by 45, Pitt brought their full starting lineup back out to finish the job and he did by the 4:10 mark of the second half.
The lead continued to balloon to as large as 44 and head coach Jeff Capel pulled Carrington briefly when he thought the game had finally gotten out of hand. Pitt was holding an 82-38 lead with 4:40 to play, but at the behest of his players and the fans around him, Capel subbed Carrington back in and he hit Guillermo Diaz Graham for a top-of-the-jey triple that secured just the fifth triple-double in Pitt history and first since 1998.
From there, the Panthers scored 12 of the next 17 points, opening up a 51-point advantage through the final buzzer. Pitt sent their fans home with a 100-52 victory in the opener behind Carrington's historic triple-double, a 13-point, 10-rebound double-double from Federiko and 14 more points on a perfect shooting night from the field for Jorge Diaz Graham.
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