Scotch Plains' Gibbs in Hunt for NCAA Basketball Title

There are no walkovers after the first round of the NCAA Tournament, even for a No. 1 seed. If you are a three-seed, most people might have you penciled in to advance against a six in the second round, but by that point, assuming the chalk has held, the games are pretty much a coin flip.

For the University of Pittsburgh, which has had its share of earlier-than-expected exits from the Big Dance over the years, last year’s premature departure was another biting reminder that, come that first weekend, things can get dicey and a bad game can be your last game.

Last March, the third-seeded Panthers drew Xavier in a second-round game in Milwaukee. The previous season, top-seeded Pitt rallied from eight down in the second half to beat Xavier and advance to the Regional Final, where it fell to Villanova. In 2010, Xavier turned the tables on the Panthers, sending them packing before the first weekend was out with a 71-68 loss.

In that game, then-sophomore guard Ashton Gibbs, who spent his teenage years in Scotch Plains, got the final look at a game-tying three-pointer with three seconds remaining.

“It was rushed a little bit,” he recalled in a telephone interview Thursday night of the off-target launch that ended Pitt’s season last March. “I didn’t have a lot of time. But I got a good look.”

Pitt finished its season 25-9, while Xavier moved on to the Sweet 16.

What made that loss particularly hard to swallow for Gibbs was that after scoring 18 points in the first half, he managed only one in the second. His 4-of-13 performance from deep was a rare misfire for Gibbs, who made nearly 40 percent of his threes during the season to earn Big East Most Improved Player honors as well as a selection on the All-Big East Second Team. The Seton Hall Prep star, who left the school as its all-time leading scorer and with three state titles in tow, made even more strides from his sophomore to his junior season. (Brother Sterling surpassed Ashton as the school’s top scorer this past winter.)

Gibbs and the Panthers vowed not to let what happened to them last year against Xavier happen again this year. Pitt, which entered the tournament with the No. 1 seed for the second time in school history, got off to a shaky first half against play-in winner UNC-Asheville on Thursday afternoon and led by only five points at intermission. At that point Gibbs had made only 2 of 6 shots, but he caught fire in the second half, knocking down 7 of 10 to finish with 26 points on 6 of 9 shooting from beyond the arc, and Pitt cruised into the second round. The Panthers take on last year’s national runner-up Butler on Saturday.

“I struggled a little bit early,” Gibbs said of the UNC-Asheville game. “But I just kept shooting the ball. We were a little tight, but the second half we got going. It started on the defensive end where we were really locking them down.”

The Bulldogs shot only 30 percent and missed 16 of 19 from deep.

According to his father Temple Gibbs, a former Temple football player, the way Pitt went out against Xavier last year provided a spark for his son and for the Panthers.

“Last year was such a big disappointment,” he said as he drove to Washington, D.C. to see Ashton and Pitt take on UNC-Ashville on Thursday. “They really thought they should have gone a lot further. I think that was one of the logs on the fire for them this year. After that game, he said they weren’t going to lose this year. It really got them together as a team.”

A sign of things to come was a notable trip to Ireland over the summer when the Panthers went 6-0, dispatching a host of national teams by an average of nearly 35 points per game.

“He came back from Ireland and said he felt no one could beat them,” Temple Gibbs said. “Ashton felt as a sophomore last year, it wasn’t his team. This year, he wanted it to be his team.”

He appears to have assumed that role, not only leading the team in points per game (16.7), three-point field goals (95), three-point field goal percentage (48.0) and free-throw percentage (89.7) but also the conference in those final three categories. All of that was good enough to earn him First Team All-Big East while playing a conference that no one argues is the best in the country after 11 of its 16 teams drew bids to the NCAA Tournament.

With the 6-foot, 2-inch, 190-pound Gibbs scoring and running the floor, point guard Brad Wannamaker dishing out five assists a game, center Gary McGhee pulling down nearly eight rebounds a game in a little over 22 minutes of play, seven players averaging five or more points, a defense that limits opponents to under 40 percent from the field while grabbing 10 more rebounds a game, Pitt won the regular season conference title and seems poised for its first trip to the Final Four since 1941.

For Ashton personally, the last offseason was a time to work harder on his game. Hard work is nothing new to Ashton or his brother Sterling, a standout at Seton Hall Prep this season and a University of Maryland signee. Their father said the two doubled their workouts when they were home, working morning and afternoon. Anything from swim drills to tire lifting to weight lifting to running were incorporated into drills that might go from seven in the morning until six at night.

“They’ve always been hard workers,” Temple said.

Gibbs said he sometimes bristled at his father’s demands but now realizes how important those demands were in his development.

“My father always had a great work ethic,” he said. “That’s what got me to the point I’m at right now. I didn’t always agree with [the rigorous workout schedule], especially when I was young. But I kept listening to him.”

Growing up, Ashton said he and his brother Sterling had epic one-on-one battles, each trying to prove to the other he was the better player.

“We were really competitive,” he said. “We finally had to stop playing one on one because we would start fighting.”

The two eventually put aside that sibling rivalry and became each other’s biggest fans. They even got a chance to play together when Sterling was a freshman and Ashton as senior at Seton Hall Prep. Temple Gibbs said that while it would have been great had his little brother to have joined him next season at Pitt, Maryland was ultimately a better fit for him.

“Pitt offered Sterling his sophomore year but he didn’t want to commit that early,” Temple Gibbs said. “And Pitt plays more of a halfcourt offense and that didn’t really fit Sterling’s game. I personally could have gone either way, but Sterling’s more a finesse-type player. He can play tough, but he slides more.”

Ashton said it was maybe also a matter of Sterling wanting to break free of big brother’s shadow.

“He was really close to coming here,” Ashton said. “It would have been great to play with him again. But I think he wanted to have his own identity, to start his own name. He’s going to be a great player for them.”

Sterling’s choice is a blessing for Temple and his wife Jacqueline, whose trips to watch Ashton play are limited to weekends due to the long trek to Pittsburgh. A day trip to College Park is much more manageable, he said.

For Ashton and his teammates, nothing less than a trip to Houston for the Final Four in two weeks is acceptable.

“I knew we were good last year and the media kind of was downing us,” Ashton said. “They were saying we weren’t as good as we knew we were. And then when it ended short like that, it was definitely a big motivation for us.

“I like our chances. This is a good, experienced team. But Butler will definitely be tough.”