Vukovcan: Criticism Towards Jaland Lowe is Not Fair

It sure looks like we’re witnessing the de-construction of the Pitt men’s basketball roster.

The question is whether or not that’s a bad thing.

Since the opening of the Transfer Portal, five players from last season’s roster have announced their intentions to leave the program, the latest being point guard Jaland Lowe. Prior to Lowe, Guillermo Diaz-Graham, Jorge Diaz-Graham, Amsal Delalic and Marlon Barnes also made the decision to leave the Panthers team.

Prior to this morning’s news, the other four defections weren’t really a surprise and, in my opinion, not huge losses. I could be totally wrong about Delalic but let’s wait and see what happens in his career.

It’s a shame how the fan perception of Lowe has totally changed over the last year.

Coming into the 2024-25 season, Lowe was a fan favorite and being talked about proudly as joining Bub Carrington as the next Pitt Panther to be playing in the NBA.

However, following a terribly disappointing season by the Panthers basketball team, all the positive talk has turned into negativity.

And that’s extremely unfortunate.

If you follow what’s being said on social media, the two biggest problems for the 2024-25 Pitt Panthers were head coach Jeff Capel and Lowe.

Choose any one of these and it’s being said: “Lowe’s a ball hog,” “Lowe’s out of control and is a turnover machine”, “Lowe regressed from his freshman season,” “Pitt is better off without him,” “the Pitt staff doesn’t want him back.”

The reality is that none of those statements are true and are nonsense that just developed a life of its own as a result of the teams’ failures.

Here’s a look at Lowe’s stats from the last two seasons:

2023-24:  9.6 PPG, 2.8 REB, 3.3 A, 38.8 FG % and 35.2 3-Point %.

2024-25: 16.8 PPG, 4.2 REB, 5.5 A, 37.6 FG% and 26.6 3-Point %.

What went on or what went ‘wrong’ with Lowe is pretty simple, his problems were mostly a result of the teams’ failures. I know many will disagree with this but hear me out first.

First off, Lowe was asked to play almost 40 minutes a game, which was probably too much. His minutes increased from 26.5 minutes to 35.5 minutes per game. With the makeup of the roster, no one was truly capable of replacing him at point guard.

The increase in minutes also came with the increase of responsibility. As a freshman, Lowe was able to blend in as much of the focus and responsibility was on Carrington and former star Blake Hinson. That was no longer the case this season, as he became the face of the team and talked about as the next Panther to be selected in the first round of the NBA Draft.

Something else that impacted Lowe was the loss of Damian Dunn to injury. Dunn was being looked at as someone that could take on a huge leadership and scoring role with Pitt but once he was lost for the season and others not living up to expectation, everything was thrown on Lowe’s shoulders to him needing to win games for Pitt.

As we saw, unfortunately, that was something that Lowe wasn’t able to do by himself.

Does that suddenly make him a bad player or the main culprit of Pitt’s problems? Of course not, but that quickly becomes the narrative when a team fails and people need to play the blame game.

Whatever program is fortunate enough to land Lowe will be getting an immensely talented player that will be a part of them winning a lot of games. I also believe that after next season, Lowe will be joining his former teammate, Bub Carrington, on an NBA roster.

As far as Pitt goes, with the 5 transfers along with graduations of Dunn, Ish Leggett and Zack Austin, this will be a brand-new team next season. And while fans are in disarray over this, I’m not so sure this is a bad thing.

Last year’s team was talented enough and should have been an NCAA Tournament team but wasn’t. All season, we kept waiting for this team to put it in another gear and go on a long run but all we got were slow starts and losing to teams they had no business losing to.

Clearly something wasn’t clicking with this particular group of players so why not just break it up and start over?

While I believe we’re still going to get some changes on the coaching staff, I think we’ve seen the last transfer of this offseason.

It appears as though one of the two lightning rods of criticism is gone from Pitt and now all eyes are on Capel.

He has the opportunity to go into free agency (A.K.A. the transfer portal) and reconstruct this roster. This could be his last opportunity because if this next group doesn’t work, Capel could be the next person from Pitt looking for a new basketball home.