Stats were gathered using teamrankings.com, foxsports.com, evanmiya.com. Stats with parenthesis is the teams national rank in this statistic. Evan Miya OBPR is a offensvive efficiency statistic that predicts future outcomes. Evan Miya DBPR is a defensive efficiency statistic that predicts future outcomes. Evan Miya combines OBPR and DBPR together.

Stat	Pitt	UL
2pt%	45.8% (286)	50.3% (152)
3pt%	29.8% (300)	31.3% (262)
Pts/poss	.97	1.00
Pace (Amount of possessions per game)	63.1	69.8
3 point attempts a game	15.2(352)	25.8 (58)
Assist/Turnover ratio	.855 (239)	.939 (192)
Free Throw %	66 (297)	70.5% (187)
Evan Miya OBPR	-4.6	5.7
Rebound differential	5.1	4.5
Opposing Team 2 point%	46.3 (66)	44.4% (33)
Opposing Team 3 point%	34.1 (226)	30.4 % (71)
Evan Miya DPR	2.8	18.4
Evan Miya BPR	-1.8	24.1

Louisville plays tonight at 7:00 PM EST at the YUM center. I’m switching today’s article up to summarize it a bit better and add the statistics I use to look at most games. I’ll summarize my thoughts with these stats, breakdown some of Pittsburgh players, and dive into what I want to see.

Offensively, Pittsburgh is a team that struggles worse than we do. These statistics are affected a bit due to how bad Pittsburgh struggled at the beginning of the season. Pittsburgh couldn’t reach 60 points in West Virginia, UNC Willmington, Vanderbilt, Minnesota, Virginia, Monmouth, and St. Johns. Before we say anything nice about this, no they do not play good defensively like Virginia. Pittsburgh has struggled immensely offensively so I tend to see this continuing tonight.  Pittsburgh should only play into our strength by attempting to score in the paint due to them having one of the lowest 3 point attempts in the nation per game. A strength of theirs looks to be rebounding and them having a higher rebound differential than us, but they shouldn’t control the pace unless we struggle offensively. I’ll talk below why I don’t think we will.

Defensively, Pittsburgh is a team that looks to mainly play man to man defense. Watching them play against Notre Dame, it looked like they switched to a 2-3 zone where they looked stronger in. This team really struggled to get around simple picks defensively, which is something we try to do a lot. I tend to think we will be successful however they play defensively. Louisville has looked better against zone defenses this year, so this doesn’t worry me since they didn’t constantly switch like Georgia Tech does. Mouhamadou Gueye is someone that I predict we score a lot on. Against Notre Dame, he allowed so many points off of basic pick and rolls and forcing people to switch. He could only play in the 2-3 zone comfortably. I’ll be looking for Mack to expose this.

John Hughley will be the main player to watch tonight against Pittsburgh. He is averaging 14 points per game and 7 rebounds per game. This may be our main challenge against Pittsburgh whenever Malik comes out of the game. We will see how Curry or Roosevelt do against him tonight. Femi Odukale is a 6’5 guard who average 12 points per game with 3 assists per game. Odukale looks to be one of their better 3 point shooters, but primarily tries to score in the lane. Jamarcus Burton is another guard whose listed at 6’4 and is averaging 11 points per game. Overall, I’m mostly worried about Hughley matching up with everyone outside of Malik.

This will be a must win for Louisville. The ACC is not great this year and Pittsburgh will probably be the worst in the ACC. The first thing I will be curious about is how many minutes Mason Faulkner will get. Faulkner will be returning from quarantine and I doubt they will return him to full speed tonight, so I won’t get worked up if he doesn’t get many minutes. Another point of focus will be if West continues to be aggressive defensively trying to take away the ball like he did against Georgia Tech. I continue to believe West defensively was what won us the game late in the stretch against Georgia Tech. My last point that I will die on is that Withers needs to get even less minutes tonight. He had 11 minutes against Georgia Tech and only helped us rebounding the ball. Curry and Wheeler have proven they can impact the game more positively than Withers has and the time has come for us not to keep wishing on stars for him.

Overall, this game is suspected to be a blowout. Louisville has not proven anything for me to fully expect this, but this is how it should go. I predict the game to be 55- 70 Louisville. I’ll be disappointed if we allow them to get to 60. I’ve been on quarantine, so I get to watch from home tonight. We’ll see how quick itll be until I get yelled at for being too loud.

degenerateCARD

stats via teamrankings.com, foxsports.com, and espn.com