Jeff Capel's Recruiting Reflects Urgency In Pitt Basketball
PITTSBURGH -- The head coach of Pitt Panthers men's basketball left the floor of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn hanging his head. As his team limped to the finish against Boston College, capping a long and lackluster 2021-22 season with a blowout loss to a team that wasn't all that good, Capel's distress was apparent.
Maybe losing to the Eagles wasn't rock bottom, but it sure felt like it. Without Pitt athletic director on hand to address questions about the fourth-year head coach's future with the Panthers, Capel had to defend his body of work at Pitt to assembled media and and the public, and make a case that the state of the program was not as dire as it seemed.
“We have to win,” Capel said. “We’re going to keep trying to build this. I said when I got here — ‘brick by brick.’ You got to throw some bad bricks away. I got to keep adding good bricks. Hopefully we can get to building a good foundation and we can get this thing going in the right direction.”
As the offseason began, multiple reports valued the buyout on Capel's contract at $15 million on the low end and maybe even as high as $17 million. Those steep figures all but guaranteed that Capel would get at least one more season to right the ship.
With that limited leeway, Capel has done well to rebuild his roster. Though it is far from complete, this has been Capel's best offseason of recruiting since the spring and summer after he took the job in 2018. But in contrast to the 2018 cycle, this offseason's recruiting reflects the heightened urgency of this moment. The old, experienced, transfer-laden roster that Capel put together needs to win not next year, not in two years, but now.
The 2018 class featured a pair of four-stars - Au'Diese Toney and Trey McGowens - and a three-star Nebraska flip, Xavier Johnson. At 32nd in 247Sports' national team rankings, it was the best class to sign with Pitt in half a decade.
But those wins on the recruiting trail represented most of what Capel was able to accomplish that season. After winning his first six games as head coach of the Panthers, they went 8-19 the rest of the way. The team was incongruent and it showed on the court. The next season, they returned most of the same core and yielded the same results - a fast start marred by the harsh realities of conference play.
The explosive athletes and blue-chip talent that Capel recruited did not pan out. High rankings from the national recruiting sites didn't translate into wins and eventually, the trio of Toney, McGowens and Johnson meant to build Pitt's foundation was gone, in the transfer portal searching for greener pastures.
Over the next couple of years the focus was the same - recruit high school players and build the program "brick by brick" as the team motto instructed. This season, however, Capel is opting to fill the holes created by outgoing transfers and graduation primarily through the transfer portal.
The most consequential addition of the offseason was the first. Former Colgate point guard Nelly Cummings committed in March. He immediately addressed a couple of dire need for Pitt. Cummings is a capable passer and shooter with experience running the show for an NCAA Tournament team.
80% of the presumed starting lineup was now in place. All-ACC honoree John Hugley announced that he would return to Pitt. Second-leading scorer Jamarius Burton was never going to leave after transferring twice already during his career. And the return from injury of a 1500-point scorer, Nike Sibande, gives the Panthers a proven Division I scorer who can take pressure off Hugley to force shots in the paint.
Then Capel went about building depth. He lured 6-foot-11 junior college forward Fede Federiko to Pitt. Then Ole Miss and Iowa State transfer wing Blake Hinson, who averaged double-digit scoring figures during his last full season, committed too. The latest piece of the puzzle is Greg Elliot, a career 41% three-point shooter that signed with Pitt just this week.
There are no guarantees, but at least on paper, this team fits together better than Capel teams of the past. Their roles are clear and there are few redundancies in the individual skill sets. It's much easier to imagine Cummings bringing the ball up to initiate offense for the much more diverse set of perimeter threats now on the Panthers roster.
There are inherent challenges to relying so heavily on transfers. The new-look Panthers have just a few months to introduce and integrate the additions. The truncated timeline is exasperated by the fact that the roster is not even full yet and that there will be little live game action in between now and the start of the 2022-23 season.
Winning with a retooled roster such as this is a tall order, but it is Capel's only option and the offseason additions made to date suggest a roster that is up to the task.
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