captured the spirit of the afternoon<\/a>:<\/p>\n\u201cPITTSBURGH \u2014 Sam Young has become the University of Connecticut\u2019s unsolvable riddle.<\/p>\n
The 6-6 senior forward torched the Huskies for 31 points and 10 rebounds Saturday as No. 3 Pitt rocked top-ranked UConn, 70-60, before an ear-shattering, standing-room only crowd of 12,908 at the Petersen Events Center.<\/p>\n
\u2018I\u2019ll tell you one thing,\u2019 UConn coach Jim Calhoun said after this battle of Big East heavyweights. \u2018When he graduates, I won\u2019t be shedding any tears. We play pretty good defense, but he\u2019s scored 56 points on us in two games. \u2026 There hasn\u2019t ever been a player who gives us as many problems as he does.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Ear-shattering. Standing-room only. Those were the days, and in these parts, as March Madness unfolds, it has become a rite of spring to lament them. Pitt used to play bunches of big games. It almost never does anymore. The Pete is a library, and a near-empty one at that.<\/p>\n
I guess all of this, combined with stumbling into Weiss\u2019 piece, is what made me call Sam Young the other day. For my money, he was the most memorable player of that era.<\/p>\n
Maybe for you it was Brandin Knight, Julius Page or DeJuan Blair, but we should agree that Young was the most dynamic scorer, whether he was flying through the air for one of his monster dunks, hitting another silky smooth mid-range jumper or making fools of people with that iconic pump fake.<\/p>\n
What a player. Young logged the second-most games (143) in Pitt history \u2014 behind Lamar Patterson\u2019s 149 \u2014 and scored the fourth-most points (1,884). And you better believe he keeps that time close to his heart. He\u2019ll often sit down with his 9-year-old son, Sam Young IV, and turn on old Pitt tapes.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m still real active when it comes to watching our old games, a lot of games,\u201d Young, 40, said from his home in Tampa, Fla. \u201cI think my fondest memories were winning the Big East title my junior year and beating UConn in my last game at the Pete. We beat them pretty good.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I showed my son that game a few times. He says, \u2018I\u2019m gonna be better than you.\u2019 I say, \u2018We\u2019ll see.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n
Young, who coaches his son in AAU and trains young basketball players, has a group chat with a bunch of his former Pitt teammates. He\u2019d like to help the Panthers get back to their winning ways.<\/p>\n
\u201cI wish I could be there and impact the program a little bit more,\u201d he says. \u201cI feel sometimes we\u2019re losing our way a little bit. When I think back to before I got to Pitt and when I was there, we had a certain mindset on the court, a certain energy we brought.\u201d<\/p>\n
Turns out Young brought some serious Pitt energy to the NBA, too. He never forgot his roots. When he teamed up with ex-UConn star Hasheem Thabeet on the Memphis Grizzlies, for example, he would remind him of their battles in college, like the time Blair flipped Thabeet over his shoulder in a huge win at UConn.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, I told him DeJuan used to bust his (butt),\u201d Young says, laughing. \u201cI was real blunt with him: \u2018We used to kick your (butt).\u2019 But he got some payback. It\u2019s an automatic bet in the NBA that when your (college team) plays my team, it\u2019s $100. Well, we were watching at somebody\u2019s house when Kemba Walker (in the Big East Tournament) hit that step back on Gary McGhee \u2014 he fell \u2014 and I just threw $100 on the floor and walked out the room.\u201d<\/p>\n
Another NBA teammate was former Georgetown center Roy Hibbert. The two played for the Indiana Pacers. Young liked to remind Hibbert of the Big East championship game from 2008: Pitt 74, Georgetown 65. MVP \u2014 Sam Young. He didn\u2019t need words to do it, either.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t say anything. I just hung up a photo of me blocking his shot,\u201d Young says. \u201cYeah, I took that picture and hung it in the locker room so everybody could see it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Young didn\u2019t have the NBA career he wanted, but he made an impact, especially for a kid who didn\u2019t really play basketball until he was 14. He had six 20-point games in his four-year career and started on a Memphis team that eliminated the 61-win San Antonio Spurs in seven games in 2011.<\/p>\n
Young had two outstanding games in that series, playing against the likes of Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Manu Ginobili (Blair was a Spurs reserve). He scored 17 points in Game 2 and had 18 points, six rebounds and two steals in a 110-103 overtime loss at San Antonio in Game 6.<\/p>\n
A few years later, Young\u2019s career hit a crossroads: He had offers from New Orleans and other NBA teams, but he wasn\u2019t sure he wanted to be a role player anymore.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen I look back on my career, I have a lot of mixed emotions,\u201d Young says. \u201cI\u2019m not sure if a lot of people know that I started playing basketball in ninth grade. I was getting three-second calls every time down the court, people saying, \u2018Get your (butt) out of the paint.\u2019 I didn\u2019t know anything. I had to learn the game from scratch. I was a football guy.<\/p>\n
\u201cI feel like in high school, I was just learning how to play and then at Pitt, I was still learning everything on the fly. My basketball IQ wasn\u2019t as good as it could have been if I\u2019d played earlier. Not as good as it is now. In the NBA, I could score. I knew that. It wasn\u2019t that difficult. But I didn\u2019t really embrace the idea of being a role player. By my fourth year, it wasn\u2019t as fun.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I had to figure it out: Do I want to go overseas and play the way I want to play or stay in the NBA and play a role?\u201d<\/p>\n
Young chose the former and lit up leagues all over the world. It might be easier to list where he didn\u2019t play than where he did. He found leagues in Australia, Lebanon, China, Dubai, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Turkey and Mexico.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust going everywhere, country to country, and seeing the world was amazing,\u201d he said. \u201cSome of those places, it got crazy. Fires in the crowd.\u201d <\/p>\n
Which brings us full circle, to the fires that used to light the Pete when Pitt played a big game. And to think, Young almost transferred to Kansas State to play for Bob Huggins after his sophomore year, before Huggins left after one season there.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was about to get up out of there, much as I loved Pittsburgh,\u201d Young says. \u201cI played less as a sophomore than I did as a freshman. I was playing behind Levon Kendall. That kind of had me at odds with Jamie Dixon for a second. It was (ticking) me off. I almost left.\u201d<\/p>\n
Thank goodness he didn\u2019t. Young now finds himself appreciating Dixon\u2019s coaching and rooting for him in the NCAA Tournament. And even though Young still feels the pain of the Scottie Reynolds shot that beat Pitt in the Elite Eight, he chooses to remember the good times.<\/p>\n
Maybe we should, too, because when Pitt was humming from about 2002-13, it was really, really good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Man, do I miss Pitt basketball. Like a lot of you, I can close my eyes and put…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145688,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[73,75,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-145687","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pittsburgh","8":"tag-pittsburgh","9":"tag-pittsburgh-headlines","10":"tag-pittsburgh-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145687"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145687\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}