CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. _ The potential remedy to the chaos, the fix to the increasingly out-of-control problem that was unfolding on the court, was sitting a handful of feet to Kevin Stallings' right, tethered to the Pitt bench. But he wouldn't budge; to him, there was no other choice.
Senior stars Michael Young and Jamel Artis, two of the ACC's five leading scorers entering the day, had shown up 10 minutes late to the team's breakfast the morning of its game Saturday at No. 23 Virginia, the final regular-season game of their respective careers. Stallings, in turn, sat them for the opening 10 minutes of the matchup, one minute for each minute they were late. Without them, a Panthers team that faced a herculean task even with them appeared lost.
While trouble might have simmered beneath the surface for parts of the 2016-17 season, a team recently shrouded in turmoil looked the part in a 67-42 loss at John Paul Jones Arena, the most recent setback in a season in which little has gone as planned.
"We're trying to establish a culture here of doing the right thing and having accountability and being responsible and committed to doing the right things for your teammates," Stallings said. "Sometimes, even when it's not the opportune time, you have to try to uphold that and enforce that."
With the loss, the Panthers (15-16, 4-14) finish the regular season with a losing record for the first time since the 1999-2000 season, former coach Ben Howland's first with a fledgling program that, at that time, had posted a losing record in five of its previous six seasons. Their conference winning percentage of .222 is the lowest since 1976-77, their final one in the now-defunct Eastern Collegiate Basketball League.
The 42 points were their sixth-fewest in a game since the 1954-55 season, and the loss was their third this season in conference play by at least 25 points. Heading into this season, they hadn't endured such a defeat since 1999.
Complicated as such a lopsided loss might seem, the roots of it were relatively simple.
Young's and Artis' tardiness was, according to Stallings, not a first-time occurrence, something that came with a penalty. As they watched from the bench _ with Ryan Luther and Jonathan Milligan starting in their place _ Pitt fell behind to the Cavaliers (21-9, 11-7), 19-2, missing its first 11 shots and going the opening 10:58 without a made field goal.
"I think that obviously really affected them," Virginia coach Tony Bennett said. "They're a dynamic duo in terms of their ability to score and stretch you, scoring inside and scoring outside."
By halftime, the Panthers trailed, 32-15, and shot just 21.7 percent, the 14th-worst all-time mark in a half. Of the 14 worst shooting halves in Pitt history, six have come this season.
It was a doomsday scenario of sorts for the Panthers, thrusting an undermanned and outgunned group against Virginia's tenacious pack line defense, the top-rated unit in Division I. Given those conditions, Stallings saw a hard-working, competitive unit that got open shots but simply didn't make them. In the process, though, those five became sacrificial lambs to enforce a larger and, to Stallings, necessary point.
"My job is to uphold the integrity of the team and do things that are right by the team," he said. "That's what I do. We struggled to score at the beginning of the game. It wasn't like we closed it down once they came in. We didn't all of a sudden threaten them because we had other players in the game. It's just one of those unfortunate things that you deal with sometimes."
Although Pitt was only outscored by the Cavaliers by eight, 48-40, from the time Young and Artis got on the court until the final buzzer, it was never able to get closer than 17. Panthers players were not made available for interviews after the game.
The loss secured the No. 14 seed (of 15 teams) for Pitt in the ACC tournament, which will begin Tuesday at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. The Panthers will face Georgia Tech at 7 p.m. that day. In recent weeks, even as the team limped down the stretch by losing five of its final six games, the tournament represented a reset, one where an underachieving group could make one final run at the NCAA Tournament.
After Saturday, that sense of hope is about all it has.
"I don't know that I've got any magic that's going to shift their way of thinking," Stallings said. "I think when things go bad, there's a reason they're bad. The first thing you do is you try to fix what's making it bad. If guys are unable or unwilling to fix those things that are bad, all the motivational speeches in the world aren't going to do a lot of good. I'll think about that as we get together tomorrow. Right now, as I've been doing and will continue to do, I'm trying to help guys get better and try to help them understand the right way and wrong way to do things and hope the message hits."
