Race to Rock Bottom: 2018 Pitt vs 2022 Louisville
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PITTSBURGH -- By just about every measure, the 2018 Pitt Panthers were the worst basketball teams the school has ever sponsored. In Pitt's 116 seasons of bouncing a ball on hardwood, just six teams posted winning percentages lower than its .250 mark, seven averaged fewer points and 25 squads allowed more points than the incredibly young and frequently overmatched 2017-18 Panthers.
That Pitt team's 0-18 record in conference play is an infamous stain on the program's history. A year prior, Kevin Stallings felt dead on arrival when he was hired and somehow sunk lower than that. That season marks what is generally considered the lowest of lows for a program not far removed from the glory days of the 2000s and early 2010s. Few teams have ever come close to replicating the kind of wholesale misery and apathy that team did until the 2023 Louisville Cardinals took the floor.
With a first-year head coach in Kenny Payne at the helm, the Cardinals sit at 2-16, last in the ACC, with no wins against Power 5 opponents and 11 losses coming by double digits. Their season has miraculously deteriorated from their 61-60 loss to cross-town rival Bellmarine, who made the jump to Division I just last year. They are two games away from midway through their conference slate and haven't beaten an ACC team, which naturally invokes comparisons to that 2018 Pitt squad. The Cardinals are currently chasing history and not in a good way.
Compare those two teams statistically.
The 2018 Panthers ranked 227th in overall efficiency - 278th in offense, 166th in defense and 156th in luck while playing against the 39th-best schedule in the country. With an efficiency margin of -5.76, they occupied a space in KenPom ratings shared with sub-.500 low majors - schools like 8-19 Columbia, 11-21 Colorado State and 10-22 James Madison.
For as barren as the results were, that Pitt team ended in by far a better spot than where this Louisville team is now. The Cardinals are a shocking 282nd in KenPom - 42 spots removed from the nearest high major team. They are 305th in offense, 233rd in defense and 288th in luck against the 37th most-difficult schedule in America. Their contemporaries currently are 7-12 Bucknell, 5-14 Northern Arizona and 6-11 Western Michigan.
18 games into the season, Louisville has won just twice, while the Panthers stumbled upon eight wins at this same point in their campaign. And that handful of extra wins happened for a reason. The Panthers moved the ball better (with an assist rate of 41.1 vs. UL's 57.8), shot marginally better from everywhere on the floor and while opponents could block their shots at a higher rate, the Panthers were stingy defensively at times and could lean on that to grind out some teams down. they also played at a mind-numbingly slow pace - 351st in Division I - to shorten the game and keep scores as low as possible.
It wasn't very successful but it was better than what Louisville is trying to do now. All the Cardinals have to lean on is their outstanding free throw rate - 44th nationally - and 71% mark from the charity stripe. But the fact that they commit turnovers more frequently than anyone in America and can't score from anywhere else on the floor largely neutralizes that advantage.
There is also some added context that is needed to evaluate these teams. The ACC is a much more forgiving league now than it was in 2018. The season Stallings and company failed to break through for a league victory, Virginia won the national title, nine teams made the Big Dance, eight were ranked at some point over the course of the year and 12 of 15 squads ended the year with winning records. It was stocked with legendary coaches, NBA prospects and national title contenders.
While many of the ACC's coaches will try to tell you this league is better than the reputation that follows it, the conference is far from the juggernaut it was last decade. The Cavaliers are once again a national title contender, but one of the only in the conference. Just six teams have been ranked at any point this season, only three are in the current iteration of the AP top-25 and five sit at or below .500.
Winless is winless and comparing two records devoid of victory is somewhat silly but Pitt suffered a harder path to get there. The Panthers played 12 ACC games against teams in the top 50 of overall efficiency while the Cardinals have played just two such games so far with only two more left on the schedule.
It's safe to say that Pitt team enjoyed slightly more success against a more difficult path but there is a long way to go and this is all a moot point if the Cardinals can continue a streak of 11 straight wins over the Panthers on their home floor tonight. All Louisville needs to escape the infamy Pitt currently holds is win one single game out of the 13 left.
Pitt is next up on the schedule and hopes to avoid becoming a piece of Cardinal trivia by losing.
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