Takeaways from the PBC Pro-Am

The Pittsburgh Basketball Club Pro-Am wrapped up last Wednesday, with Shale Land Services (and Summer League GOAT Rene Castro) defeating the Duca Nepa Road Warriors in a highly-entertaining 133-24 game.

But let’s be honest – outside of an extremely select few (they’re out there somewhere), the results of these games between cobbled-together teams are immaterial. You, very understandably, care about how the players at your favorite college performed.

So what exactly did we learn from the two weeks of games? It varies. For players like Mike Young and Jamel Artis, it wasn’t a ton, mostly because these are established players with little to prove in that kind of a laid-back setting. For others, like Justice Kithcart and Damon Wilson, it was a valuable glimpse at, respectively, a newcomer and a player still early in the developmental process.

With the Pro-Am over and the start of the season still several months away, I figured now would be a good opportunity to evaluate what we saw from various Pitt players in that brief viewing window. As always, there’s something important to note with these games, namely that overarching conclusions and concrete expectations shouldn’t come from them. There’s little to no defense played and the free-flowing structure of the games is a stark contrast to the more regimented schemes that await them once the season begins. How someone performs in one has no bearing and limited insight on how that will translate to actual games.

With that in mind, let’s get started. I didn’t include Young, Artis or Sheldon Jeter in these write-ups because they’re largely the same players you have watched the past several seasons. Without anything revelatory emerging from the Pro-Am, I’ll trust that kind of body of work over what we saw this month.

And, for reference, here’s a composite box score from the event.

Stats from the PBC Pro-Am (Craig Meyer/Post-Gazette)

Justice Kithcart – Kithcart enters his freshman season with the kind of expectations usually reserved for top-50 prospects, but given Pitt’s roster situation, it’s not difficult to see why he’s such a person of interest. The Panthers are extremely thin or just flat-out inexperienced at point guard, something that has led to open discussion of Artis manning the position, at least to start the season. At 6-foot-1 and 175 pounds, Kitchart is an extremely fast player, both over a distance and, especially, with his first step, the latter of which he used to repeatedly blow by defenders. As you might expect from someone who grew up playing the position, he has an excellent handle and uses it advantageously, routinely turning on a dime and displaying a shiftiness that hasn’t been seen from a prominent Pitt point guard in a bit. There are, of course, drawbacks and I would advise Pitt fans to keep these in mind when mentally envisioning his freshman-year conquests. He was statistically proficient, averaging 27 points per game, but he too often used his impressive skill set to be a high-volume but extremely inefficient offensive player. Kithcart made just 40.8 percent of his shots and 20.8 percent of his 3s, a combination of taking bad shots and simply missing open looks. His two assists per game aren’t exactly encouraging, either, but that could be partially attributed to the nature of the games.

Cam Johnson – Perhaps the biggest revelation of the tournament, Johnson looks primed for a breakout role this season after averaging just 11.7 minutes per game last season. Johnson, at times, looked like an ideal iteration of himself, i.e. an effective two-way player that’s the size of some college power forwards but has the skills of a guard. Most likely, he’ll be a shooting guard in Kevin Stallings’ system, though a player with his kind of versatility won’t be pigeonholed that narrowly. He made exactly half of his 44 3-point attempts during the tournament and looked to be a capable driver as well, one who was quick enough to get by shorter, faster defenders and big enough to wade through the trees in the low post and get his own shot. Johnson cooled down a bit after some outrageously hot showings in the second and third games, but he was an appropriate choice for co-MVP of the Pro-Am. Though it’s obviously debatable, he was Pitt’s best player in the event.

Damon Wilson – Wilson has a year of games for us to look back on, but given those spot appearances (10.8 minutes per game in 2015-16), he’s still something of an unknown. I didn’t get the chance to watch Wilson a ton last year, but I’m familiar with the problems he experienced, from his carelessness with the ball at times to his woeful shooting. From what I saw in the Pro-Am, I was very impressed by him, whether he competes at point guard or ventures into more of a two-guard role. At the very worst, the foundation for a potentially great point guard is there. He’s quick and, in the games I saw, an able passer who regularly put his teammates in good scoring opportunities. The biggest question, of course, is whether he can improve as a shooter. Granted, it was just the Pro-Am, but his stroke looked much better and he has developed more of an arc on his jumper, something that helped him make seven of his 17 3s (41.2 percent). Assistant coach Tom Richardson is known, among other skills, as a shooting specialist and he said he has worked with Wilson more than any other player on the team. While we won’t know the true impact of that instruction for months, Wilson is at the very least off to a promising start.

Ryan Luther – It was interesting watching Luther in a summer league setting, especially since he’s so often deployed as a defensive and rebounding reinforcement off the bench in actual games. Those skills are still apparent in this kind of a format, but he becomes a more proficient and dazzling offensive player, one that averaged 21.5 points per game. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, he played in just a couple of games, taking fewer shots (32) in the Pro-Am than all but one Pitt player. What I saw was good, but there simply wasn’t enough to draw any major observations.

Jonathan Milligan – I wish I had gotten to see more of Milligan than I did, but from what I did catch, he and Kithcart seem like fairly similar versions of each other, though one (Milligan) is clearly more polished. He’s fast, smaller guard who isn’t much of an outside shooter – he missed 14 of his 18 3s (22.2 percent) – but who can cut through the lane and find open teammates, as evidenced by his excellent 3.5:1.3 assist-to-turnover ratio. Because of his age and his perceived developmental ceiling, Kithcart is certainly a more tantalizing prospect, but Milligan did nothing to show he can’t compete for minutes at point guard.

Rozelle Nix – I probably got more questions about Nix from people than any other Pitt player. Being a 6-foot-11, 300-pound center will generally do that, especially for someone who has yet to play a game for a team lacking a true rim protector. There’s a lot of promise in Nix. He’s got a decent, albeit awkward-looking, outside jumper for someone his height and he has a nice touch around the basket. For someone who has notably lost a lot of weight, it didn’t look like he had too much trouble getting up and down the court, at least in the spurts he was out there. He did, however, look clumsy at times with the ball and his footwork was a bit clunky, both of which were apparent when he wasn’t able to physically overpower his defender. I wouldn’t envision a huge role for Nix next season -- especially with firmly entrenched forwards like Young, Jeter, Artis and Luther on the roster – but if he could play a solid, productive six or seven minutes a game for Pitt in ACC play, that’d be a pretty nice boost.

Corey Manigault – Pitt’s other freshman who participated in the event took the fewest shots of any Panthers player (26) and, like Luther, didn’t play in every game he could have. He was a little slow on defense – again, not unusual for that event – but he seemed to have better vision of the court/open teammates than many young bigs typically do. Manigault also looked winded fairly quickly in his appearances, which isn’t totally damning since the games are played at a faster pace, but it’s worth noting nonetheless. As far as freshmen are concerned, he looks to be further behind on the developmental scale than Kithcart, albeit at different positions, but on a team with so many experienced frontcourt players, he will, at worst, get a valuable year to get acclimated to college basketball without being relied on too much to play a bigger role than he may be ready for.

Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG