East Carolina
 

Wednesday, January 12th, 2022
7:00 PM
Fifth Third Arena
ESPN+

The Pirates (10-4, 1-1 AAC, NET #154, KenPom #157) are looking to build on a strong start to the season and finish with a winning record for the first time in 9 years, or at worst, secure 15 wins for the first time in 5 years.

Also, for the first time since the introduction of NET in 2018, a win over ECU tonight at home would count as a Q3 victory for the Bearcats. 9 of East Carolina's 10 victories have counted as Q4 wins, with their only Q3 win (coincidentally) coming against Tulane at home in OT. For that reason, it should come as no surprise that ECU has the weakest SOS in the conference by a large margin.

The Pirates don't have a deep bench, but their primary line-ups feature some big guards, such as 6'5 Tristen Newton who leads the team in scoring (18.2 ppg) and assists (5.1 apg) and 6'7 JJ Miles who makes 40% of his 3-point attempts.

The Pirates as a team shoot the 3 ball well at just under 37%. Their best 3-point shooter is 6'9 Vance Jackson (40.2%), who debuted at UConn in the fall of 2016, then made pit stops at New Mexico and Arkansas before grad transferring to ECU this year.

Despite losing at Temple by a buzzer-beater 3 on Sunday, ECU is currently 10.5 point underdogs to the Bearcats.

I would like to see the confidence keep building in MAW and Newman to take a little bit of the load off DD and JD. Also would like to see Ody get a few more minutes at the 5 mainly (if he can stay on the court).

That's about it for me

If you had to draw up the most average college basketball team possible, it would look a lot like East Carolina. They rank between 99 and 191 in each of the Four Factors on offense and defense. They don't do anything really well, they don't do anything bad, they just play average basketball.

The one non-efficiency stat that stands out is assist rate, where ECU ranks in the top 10 nationally. Most of that comes from Tristan Newton and his incredible 34.9 assist rate. He also leads the team in shot attempts, usage rate, effective field goal percentage, and ORtg (among 10+ min players). His shooting split is 57-35-88. Statistically he is very similar to Kendric Davis.

Keys to the game will be containing Newton without helping off of 40% three point shooters Vance Jackson and JJ Miles, and getting the ball to the rim on offense. In most of ECU's poor defensive games, they gave up either a ton of looks or a very high percentage at the rim (16-18 vs Temple, 19-29 vs Liberty, 16-34 vs NC A&T, 15-29 vs Coppin St, 11-12 vs Oklahoma).

Newton meet Newman!!

That might be the greatest compliment anyone has given their program in a long time.

Too late to put that on their bulletin board but I love it!!

The Most Average Team award goes to...

Off to a great start, they've gone after Davenport in the interior and he has more than held his own. Defense is really tight and it seems to be bothering ECU.

Only concern thus far is foul trouble, Newman has two (though I'm not sure what that tech on him was) and Ody has two.

Nice to see Hensley play aggressively on offense

Refs a bit whistle happy, at this rate the game is going to last 3 hours.

Ado still hasn't come back out of the locker room. Might be out with that ankle injury.