Oklahoma held off feisty East Carolina 79-74 in what proved to be a very winnable contest for the Pirates in the first round of the Myrtle Beach Invitational Thursday night in Conway, S.C.
Tristen Newton with 18 points along with 14 from Brandon Suggs and 12 from Tremont Robinson-White led ECU(3-1) while Duke transfer Jordan Goldwire and Umoja Gibson with 13 points each led five players in double-figures in the Oklahoma(3-0) win.
The Pirates are improving and had a good opportunity against a solid Big 12 team, but did not have their best night at the stripe making just 13 of 20 despite making 53 percent from the floor overall to 52 percent for Oklahoma in the loss.
“We did do some good things. We did a lot of good things, but you’ve got to finish some things out,” said ECU head coach Joe Dooley afterward, “We gave up probably ten points in the first half on ball screen tags. They did a good job of throwing the ball to the big fella Groves in the paint, but we had a bunch of them where we should have been on the other side of him.”
ECU won the turnover battle 16-11 and that too put the Pirates in a better position to win, but some early misses shot wise helped the Sooners quickly open up a working margin in the second half and the Pirates were never able to fully recover.
“In the second half I thought the shot selection to start the half got us in a little bit of a bind then we battled back and had some opportunities,” Dooley said, “You’ve got to make some free throws, we had three or four basketballs that we got stops that we lost out of bounds and two of them resulted in points. Then we had two down here where we needed to make some free throws and had some untimely turnovers.”
East Carolina hung in there with the Sooners in the first twelve minutes of the first half. Down by as much as seven in the first four minutes, the Pirates recovered to take as much as a three-point lead at 22-19 on an Alanzo Frink bomb from the arc.
Solid play from post man Ludgy Debaut with six points on three straight shots, good ball movement and strong ECU defense that forced eight Oklahoma turnovers by the 7:48 mark of the first period kept the Pirates in the contest.
Vance Jackson’s second chance bomb from the corner gave ECU a four point 30-26 lead with just under six minutes before the break before trailing by a point in a 39-38 contest at halftime.
Tristen Newton led the Pirates with seven first half points along with six each from J.J. Miles, Alanzo Frink and Ludgy Debaut who went three for three in the first twenty minutes along with four rebounds in 13 minutes of play.
Tanner Groves with nine and Umoja Gibson with eight points led the Sooners who shot 65.2 percent from the floor in the first half to 57.1 percent for ECU at the intermission.
Oklahoma opened up an early six-point lead in the first minute and a half of the second period on a Tanner Groves three-point play and a basket from Elijah Harkless. The lead then grew to eleven at the eleven minute mark.
But a Brandon Suggs dunk in transition, a basket in the paint from Frink and a triple from Trevon Robinson-White trimmed the lead to five at 66-61. ECU eventually cut the lead to as little as three before Rick Issanza and Jordan Goldwire made shots to give the Sooners a seven point working margin with just under four minutes to play.
ECU trimmed the lead to four at 73-69 on a Tremont Robinson-White bomb with 2:19 remaining before a Tristen Newton trey with 11.3 to play cut the lead to just three.
The Pirates put on a full court press, but Oklahoma got the ball inbounds and ran the clock down to 5.7 seconds where two Goldwire free throws eventually put the game on ice.
ECU will regroup in the loser’s bracket Friday night at 7:30 p.m.to take on ODU that lost to Indiana State 77-36.
