University of Pittsburgh Athletics
Pitt Men's Basketball Ready to Write Its Next Chapter
9/22/2026 6:00:00 PM | Men's Basketball
The calendar said Sept. 21, but for Pitt men's basketball, Monday's opening of fall practice marked something bigger than a date.
It was the first step of a journey that begins now. It truly kicks off six weeks from now with a season opener against Rider on Nov. 2, and continues on from there as the team searches for its identity.
There's a lot of ground between here and there.
This is a Pitt roster remade almost entirely in the transfer portal: just three returners, one of them on scholarship. It's a roster otherwise full of new faces. They spent eight weeks together over the summer getting acquainted.
Now, the real work starts. Day one showed exactly how much work that is.
Fifth-year guard A'lahn Sumler, who arrived at Pitt this offseason after stops at Northern Kentucky and Charleston Southern, said the opening session was rough simply because it was the first time this specific group had ever competed against each other. By day two, though, something had already shifted.
"We had our energy back," Sumler said. "We were a bit more connected. The good juices were flowing, so we were competing today for sure."
That word — connection — is the one that keeps surfacing around this team, and it's not just player talk.
Associate head coach Milan Brown said building that chemistry quickly is the program's first real test of the season, long before any of it shows up in a box score.
"That's going to be one of the big hurdles that we're trying to clear early," Brown said. "Just trying to get everybody connected on a level where it looks like they've known each other for 10 years, not 10 days."
It's a challenge Capel raised himself at the end of Tuesday's practice, gathering his team in a huddle to talk about buy-in and pointing to recent history to make his case.
Pitt's two most successful teams of the last several seasons, the 2023 and 2024 squads, didn't necessarily have a singular star. What they had were players who bought fully into their roles.
Nike Sibande won ACC Sixth Man of the Year in 2023. Ishmael Leggett won it in 2024.
Neither award happens without a team, and a program, built around buy-in rather than one player carrying the load.
Those Pitt teams didn't just have talent — they became greater than the sum of their parts because everyone accepted their job and did it well. It's the standard Capel is asking this group to chase, even as the roster looks almost nothing like it did a year or two ago.
For transfer guard Jalil Bethea, who arrived by way of Miami and Alabama, that standard starts with something simpler: shared background.
"That's kind of what brought us together," Bethea said. "That we all basically have the same background, same some kind of story and we all have a chip on our shoulder."
do you remember? dancin' in september ?? pic.twitter.com/JHaMqZTjTs
— Pitt Basketball (@Pitt_MBB) September 22, 2026
That sense of shared identity extends beyond the current roster, too. Sumler pointed to two specific voices helping bridge the gap between Pitt's past and its present: Ricardo Greer and Ronald Ramon, both former Pitt standouts now on staff, who played through some of the program's grittiest, most physical eras.
Their presence is a daily reminder of what this program has looked like when it's at its best, and what Sumler and his teammates are being asked to rebuild.
"They played in the days of Pitt being that gritty, down, dirty team," Sumler said. "We're trying to bring that back: that grittiness, that desire to really win, for sure."
Brown sees those staff ties the same way — not as nostalgia, but as proof of concept.
With Greer, Ramon and other former Panthers now coaching this group, the message isn't "trust the process" in the abstract. It's pointing at real, tangible success that happened in this same building, in these same jerseys.
"We're not trying to create history; we're trying to recreate history, which means something good has already been done here," Brown said. "Having guys on staff like Ricardo, Ronald, [Jamarius Burton]., KJ [Marshall] — where they've experienced positive results in a Pitt uniform — we have living testimony, which is always great."
Bethea said that experience is already paying off in the locker room, even six weeks before the games start to count. Having teammates and coaches who've been through high-stakes moments before gives a roster full of newcomers something to lean on.
None of it guarantees anything six weeks out from tip-off. Chemistry built in September doesn't always hold in March.
But Brown made clear this is a process with no finish line, even once the games start and that the work happening now is just the beginning of a much longer arc.
"It's an ongoing challenge," Brown said. "It won't stop. Hopefully we'll continue to grow in our togetherness as the year goes on, and hopefully deep into March and into April."
For now, the first step is enough. Practice one and two are in the books, with Rider about six weeks out. They spent the summer turning strangers into teammates. Now comes the harder part, showing that togetherness on the court, in the details, one practice at a time.
