Cincinnati Tops ECU 82-69
Jeremiah Davenport and Mason Madsen led four Cincinnati players in double-figures with 19 points each and the Bearcats took down ECU 82-69 on the road on Senior Day in Minges Coliseum Sunday afternoon.
It was a career high for Madsen who also added six rebounds and three assists. Keith Williams added 16 points, seven rebounds and five assists for Cincinnati to go along with 12 points from Mika Adams-Woods.
Jayden Gardner led all scorers with 23 points for ECU to go along with 13 points each from Tristen Newton and Brandon Suggs who also pulled down eight rebounds in the Pirates’ tenth loss of the season.
“We fought back to 52-50 and I felt pretty good. We actually played a pretty good defensive possession and Williams threw it in and it seemed to go sideways from there,” said ECU head coach Joe Dooley, “They outscored us 30-19 in the last 12:19. We’re down 55-50, they lucked one in and we go down and turn it over and we gave up some transition baskets which we hadn’t done. They played zone and we don’t make shots they guarded the driving lanes and we struggled.”
The inability to make a decent percentage of shots from the arc and elsewhere continues to put an abundance of pressure on ECU at the defensive end of the court. The Pirates held the lead on a couple of occasions but fell behind early and had to fight back from a double-digit deficit.
“Tre (Tremont Robinson-White) had been on a roll and Tre has really struggled. He missed some open looks and he was 0-5 tonight. He is a better shooter. Coming out of the pause he was at 37 percent,” Dooley told PirateIllustrated.com.
“Moreso our offensive ineptness has put our defense in trouble. You can’t score and every time it puts so much pressure on your defense. We came out of the halftime and we knew they were going to throw the ball to the big fella and we give up a layup. We sort of eased back into it but we do need to make some shots. A lot of it is timing and a lot of that is repetition. We’ll try to do that the next couple of days.”
After falling behind 14-4 in the early going of the game, East Carolina(8-10/2-10 AAC) began to assert themselves and eventually tied the game at 15-15 with 12:59 to go in the half.
It wasn’t long before Mason Madson’s three-point jumper had Cincinnati up by five again, but eight early points from Jayden Gardner and six each from Brandon Suggs and Tristen Newton in the first thirteen minutes helped ECU remain deadlocked with the Bearcats at 25-25 with just over seven minutes before halftime.
J.J. Miles’ three-pointer from the right arc gave the Pirates their first lead of the game at 28-25 at the 6:31 mark. The ECU lead grew to as much as three at 33-30 after a technical foul was assessed to Keith Williams for arguing a foul call.
The Pirates got ten points each from Gardner and Newton in the first twenty minutes and despite 1-8 shooting from the arc, ECU was down by just two in a 37-35 ballgame at halftime.
“The zone has been hurting us a lot the last two games. We’ve been exploiting mismatches when teams guard us man to man and then they change to zone on us but in the first half we were able to do a little bit of both and score against man and zone,” Gardner told PirateIllustrated.com, Then in the second half we went cold when they went zone. The zone offense really killed us.”
A pair of ECU free throws from Ludgy Debaut allowed the Pirates to recapture a one-point 45-44 lead four minutes into the second period. The Pirate lead proved to be short lived as Chris Vogt, Tari Eason, Jeremiah Davenport and Keith Williams all scored over the course of the next four minutes to open up a five point Cincinnati lead with 11:18 remaining.
The Bearcat lead grew to 64-53 at the eight minute mark on a three-point Mason Madsen bomb before a seven point ECU run got the Pirates back to within seven at the 5:32 mark.
Cincinnati(10-10/8-6 AAC) then expanded the lead to eleven with four minutes to go before expanding to 18 in the final minutes and the Bearcats held on for the victory.
ECU went just 4-19 from the arc and made just 34.5 percent from the floor overall to 12 for 30 shooting from three-point land for Cincinnati that shot 47.5 percent overall and 40 percent from the arc.
With the loss the Pirates fall to the No. 11 seed and face No. 6 seeded UCF in the first round of the AAC Tournament in Dickies Arena in Fort Worth, Texas next Thursday in a 7 o’clock matchup. The winner will take on third seeded Memphis on Friday.
