2008-09 Pitt Basketball – The Flip – Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Interactive

The Flip
In three seconds, DeJuan Blair embodied an era of Pitt basketball and used a 7-footer to do it.

Connecticut's Hasheem Thabeet lands hard after attempting a rebound against DeJuan Blair during the first half in Hartford, Conn., on Monday, Feb. 16, 2009. (Fred Beckham/Associated Press)

Connecticut's Hasheem Thabeet lands hard after attempting a rebound against Pittsburgh's DeJuan Blair during the first half of an NCAA college basketball game in Hartford, Conn., on Monday, Feb. 16, 2009. (AP Photo/Fred Beckham)

Connecticut's Hasheem Thabeet lands hard after attempting a rebound against DeJuan Blair during the first half in Hartford, Conn., on Monday, Feb. 16, 2009. (Fred Beckham/Associated Press)

The Flip

In three seconds, DeJuan Blair embodied an era of Pitt basketball and used a 7-footer to do it.

Craig Meyer
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
April 5, 2019

There’s admittedly little DeJuan Blair can remember about what may have been the defining performance of his basketball career, a night in which he was plastered across national highlight shows and introduced himself to large swaths of sports fans across the country through every ounce of force in his 265-pound frame.

Early in Pitt’s 76-68 victory at then-No. 1 Connecticut on Feb. 16, 2009, a game in which he had 22 points and a career-high 23 rebounds, Blair said he was poked in the eye. Between that, the enormity of the moment and the 10 years that have since passed, that game, in Blair’s mind, exists today as a blur.

But somewhere in his memory, there’s always that play, the one Blair is still most likely to get asked about all of these years later.

What about that time you threw down Hasheem Thabeet?

If Jerome Lane’s backboard-shattering dunk in 1988 is the most iconic play in Pitt history, Blair’s flip of Thabeet is maybe the most symbolic. A player generously listed at 6-foot-7 who was effectively without an anterior cruciate ligament in either knee grabbed, albeit inadvertently, a 7-foot-3 opponent and, through nothing but brute strength and a pinch of momentum, flung him over his right shoulder and sent him crashing to the court.

In a three-second burst inside Hartford’s XL Center on a frigid Monday night, a team and an era of Pitt basketball was embodied. A program that spent years punching above its weight and rising in college basketball’s hierarchy by being the toughest team in the toughest conference in the sport toppled a giant — quite literally — and beat a top-ranked team for the first time in program history.

“It was indicative of who we were as a team,” said Tray Woodall. “Was he trying to break his arm? No. He was making a tough play and he was sending a message. That was one thing about our team. We backed down from no one and we were aggressive. We always were aggressive. That play was an indication of who we were as a program.”

The play itself was a crescendo of events that preceded the matchup of two top-five teams vying for a conference championship.

While the Panthers entered the game with a 23-2 record and a No. 4 ranking, the Huskies were a cut above even that, at 24-1 and entering their third week as the No. 1 team in the nation. Both literally and figuratively, Thabeet loomed larger than any player on a loaded roster. The native Tanzanian, who would go on to become the No. 2 overall pick in the NBA draft that year, was a player unlike any in college basketball at the time, a dominant force with a 7-foot-7 wingspan who averaged a double-double that season, along with 4.6 blocks per game.

Two days before his team was slated to play Pitt, Thabeet turned in perhaps the finest showing of his college career, a 25-point, 20-rebound and nine-block outburst in a win at Seton Hall, Connecticut’s 13th-consecutive victory.

Even before that, Blair had spent all season reading and hearing about Thabeet, a big man who cast a shadow over seemingly all other frontcourt peers in the conference. It only prepared and motivated Blair that much more for their impending matchup.

“I remember DeJuan just kind of laughing about Thabeet,” said Greg Hotchkiss, the team’s sports information director at the time. “All the media were asking questions about Thabeet and DeJuan was kind of laughing about it before the game, almost a little cocky. I’m thinking ‘Jeez, DeJuan, that kid just went off for 20 and 20.’”

“I don’t think he was worried about Thabeet,” said Jamie Dixon. “Let’s put it that way.”

It didn’t take long for their paths to cross.

“It was just a normal play,” Blair said of pulling Thabeet to the ground on a rebound. “I had the ball in front of me and he tried to reach over and get it. I wasn’t letting it go and he wasn’t letting it go. May the force be with him.” (Fred Beckham/Associated Press)

Just three minutes into the game, Connecticut’s Jeff Adrien missed a baseline jumper. As the ball bounced off the rim and hung in the air, Blair established position on Thabeet, boxing his opponent out. Thabeet used his long arms to reach over Blair and tipped the ball, extending his left arm out one last time before the ball went into the Pitt forward’s grasp. Thabeet’s arm, however, got ensnared between the ball and Blair’s right forearm. With Thabeet at his back, Blair hunched over and tried to muscle himself away from his opponent, but as he did so, that momentum carried Thabeet forward, momentarily placing him on top of Blair’s back before the deadlock was broken and Thabeet was sent tumbling to the court.

As Thabeet laid in a fetal position, holding his left wrist in pain, one of the officials whistled the Huskies’ big man for a foul — Blair, by his judgement, had secured the defensive rebound and Thabeet had reached over his back — and Blair dropped the ball and walked back to the other end of the court as Tyrell Biggs, his Pitt teammate, briefly stood over the fallen foe. His work there was done.

“It was just a normal play,” Blair said. “I had the ball in front of me and he tried to reach over and get it. I wasn’t letting it go and he wasn’t letting it go. May the force be with him.”

In the moment, there was some level of disbelief, as if what had unfolded in front of them was a mirage. As the game settled down and the seconds elapsed, it was clear it wasn’t, and to teammates and opponents alike, it became understandable. Gravity had done some of the work, sure, but if there was one player capable of doing something so unusual, it was Blair.

“That was a crazy moment,” said Ashton Gibbs. “DeJuan, he was a man-child, man. I’m not surprised because it’s DeJuan. It’s just what he was at the time.”

“DeJuan Blair would flip anybody,” said former Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun. “He’s that tough a kid.”

The encounter did little in the way of generating any short-term momentum. Leading 8-3 at the time it happened, the teams matched another in scoring, 7-7, over the next five minutes.

What it did, however, was establish a tenor for the evening. Pitt trailed for only 40 seconds of the game’s opening 30 minutes and used a late push to earn an eight-point win that would eventually help it rip away the Huskies’ No. 1 ranking the following week. On a night in which Blair posted the outrageous numbers he did, Thabeet was held to five points and four rebounds in 23 minutes before fouling out.

“That moment right there was the moment we knew it was going to be a battle and they knew it was going to be a battle,” Gilbert Brown said. “It was a defining moment.”

It was the exclamation point of a season in which Blair, while not quite to that unsustainable extent, was among the best players in the country. As a sophomore that season, Blair averaged a double-double, with 15.7 points and 12.3 rebounds per game. What made him an unprecedented player in modern college basketball history was his offensive rebounding ability.
While Blair was on the court, 23.6 percent of Pitt’s missed shots ended up in his hands, comfortably the highest ever such mark for a player since KenPom.com began keeping track of it for the 2001-02 season.

With those eye-popping stats to his name, Blair was a consensus first-team all-American, the program’s first one since Don Hennon in 1959, and was named the Big East co-Player of the Year, sharing the award with, oddly enough, Thabeet.

It was a fitting and spectacular end to a college career that drew to a close that April when he declared for the NBA draft, capping off maybe the most decorated two-year run in program history, when the burly kid with the megawatt smile who grew up less than a mile from the school’s campus became the face of a bona fide national championship contender.

“You could sense the folklore of him being a local kid,” said former Pitt assistant coach Tom Herrion. “There hadn’t been many recently at that time coming to Pitt that were of his ranking, stature and abilities. There was pressure, but once you got around him on a daily basis, with his personality, he was more than equipped to handle that. He was full of life, knew what he was as a player and he embraced the fact that he wore the city of Pittsburgh on his shoulders. I’m not sure there’s a lot of guys who could handle that as well as he did.”

And with one bend at his waist on a fateful mid-February night, much of the country discovered what many in Western Pennsylvania, the Big East and college basketball already knew — this guy’s good.

“I think it put me on the map,” Blair said. “It said, ‘Okay, he’s somebody to be reckoned with.’ That was a big step for me in my career.”

Craig Meyer: cmeyer@post-gazette.com and Twitter @CraigMeyerPG