At his introductory news conference on April 5, Gophers coach Richard Pitino barely let 30 seconds slip by before bringing up his style.
He spoke of a fun-to-watch, fast-paced system, waving off preconceptions that it's tough to play up-and-down in the grinding Big Ten.
Perhaps now he's getting a glimpse of just how hard it is.
One year after running his Florida International squad into one of the faster-playing teams in the nation, Pitino has struggled to find that same pace with his new team. The Gophers rank 223rd in nationwide pace of play heading into Saturday's game against Northwestern, the slowest team in the league, according to the website of college basketball analyst Ken Pomeroy.
In Big Ten play, the Gophers land at eighth in a conference that — with the exceptions of Iowa, Indiana and Purdue — isn't very fast at all. The conference ranks 23rd out of 32 Division I conferences in average pace.
"This is more of a slow-it-down league than the Sun Belt Conference," said senior Malik Smith, who also played for Pitino at Florida International, which ranked 48th in D-I at 68.9 possessions per game last season. "A lot of teams like to run in that conference, and teams are just slowing us down this season, and we just have to impose our will more than we've been doing."
The Gophers have failed to eclipse 65 points three times in the Big Ten schedule — and even when they manage to score a lot of points, it's mostly because they make the most of their possessions. Against Wisconsin, the Gophers scored 81 points on only 58 possessions, their slowest-paced game of the year.
Though the Gophers' pace is a far cry from what Pitino sold as the team's identity at the outset, the lack of speed can hardly be considered a weakness.