Three Man Weave: Bearcats Topple East Carolina 74-63 to Open AAC Tournament

Cincinnati completed the season sweep of ECU.

CINCINNATI — Sweep complete.

The Cincinnati Bearcats defeated the East Carolina Pirates 74-63 on Thursday afternoon to tip-off the 2022 AAC Tournament. David Dejulius (22 points, four rebounds, three assists) showed why he's an All-AAC player, and he got plenty of backcourt help around him to move on in the tourney field.

"It's been a tough stretch here over the last month," Bearcats head coach Wes Miller said after the game. "And we've been in a number of really close games. And haven't been able to close them out down the stretch. We've also spent the year in practice working at it and talking about it, about having an identity being built around our defense, being able to get stops when it matters. And it was great to see that come together tonight down the stretch"

The Bearcats now play No. 1 seed Houston on Friday with another chance to shake off the Cougars' win streak. The Bearcats leaned on their strength to get there and will need it to keep coming through on Friday. Things were tight throughout until Dejulius & Co squeezed the life out of this one with a 15-3 closing run in the final minutes.

Here's the Three Man Weave on Cincinnati's opening-round win.

Backcourt Balls Out

It's been no secret what the winning formula for Cincinnati is this season: make jump shots and defend on the ball.

Both of those facets showed up at different points, largely from Cincinnati's backcourt stars. Dejulius, Jeremiah Davenport (11 points six rebounds), and Mike Saunders (10 points) were masterful at squeezing just enough offense from ECU's 12 turnovers. 

Although, Dejulius was the real star of the show.

In what could've been his final college game, the Bearcats' leading scorer wasn't going out without a fight. Literally. Dejulius took some hard contact on multiple drives to the hoop, and the two teams actually broke out into a scuffle walking to the halftime locker room.

Dejulius didn't cause the bad blood, but he did know it would shape the game.

"That's what it's about," Dejulius said after the win about reacting to the fight the right way. "That's what I said in the locker room. Whoever comes out with more class is going to come out with the win. and I believe that's what we did in the second half."

The leader had a team-high 12 points in a classy second-half showing. He had the entire bag of handles and stepbacks working in this game to the tune of a 56% effective field goal clip on 16 shots. That was the highest among all Bearcats that had more than three looks.

.@DavidDejulius has been clutch for the Bearcats all day.#AmericanHoops | @GoBearcatsMBB pic.twitter.com/NoDFDAoY9X

— American MBB (@American_MBB) March 10, 2022

John Newman III (7 points, team-high eight rebounds, team-high five assists) continued to struggle shooting the ball (42% eFG). The criticism ends there. The Connector is what I've dubbed Newman, and he did plenty of that in a return from the ankle injury that limited him to six minutes in Cincinnati's last game.

"I thought John Newman defensively, that's one for my memory bank there as a coach," Miller said. "In terms of his effort defensively that one will go down because he was phenomenal in the first half and then we put him on Newton in the second half. I know Newton still got 11 in the second half but they were a different kind of 11. He had to really earn them, and I thought that disrupted their offensive rhythm a little bit."

Newman was a clinical facilitator on offense, made multiple deflections that led to offensive rebounds, and led the team in possessions where ECU did not score (eight stops). He is only melding more things into his game as he and the Bearcats try to make sure this season stays alive.

Pirates Turnover The Loot

Speaking of stops, Cincinnati found plenty of those in the final 20 minutes after ECU was scorching from mid-range in the opening frame. The Pirates committed 12 turnovers on Friday and lost 21-4 in points off turnovers.

That included a 12-0 mark in the second half during a stretch where Cincinnati tightened the screws and turned their defense back to something reminiscent of their December/January feel. ECU shot 8-of-28 in the second half, and the biggest factor Cincinnati stopped was an obvious x-factor coming into the battle.

"We just emphasized getting stops you know?" Saunders said about the defense putting the clamps on ECU in the second half. "We were scoring on offense at will, so we just knew that once we start getting stops, that's the team that's going to win and that's what we did over the course of the game. We just really talked about it at halftime and came out and executed."

Vance Jackson (16 points, 10 rebounds) went 0-of-6 from deep in the second half and shot just 20% overall. He came into the game as the league's best outside shooter—making 44% of his threes. Cincinnati rarely let him work for an open shot in that range and was more than happy to funnel him towards the basket.

Tristen Newton (26 points, five TOs) went off in the first half, but Cincinnati made him pay for some sloppy decisions in the second half. The Bearcats themselves coughed the ball up just seven times. That marks the sixth time this season they've committed fewer than eight TOs, and they are 3-3 in those games. The losses came by a combined seven points total.

Newton Nearly Wills A Win

The Pirates' best player may have been a little sloppy with the basketball, but that can happen when you are on the floor for 91% of the minutes and post a 39.5% usage rate. 

Newton added nine rebounds and game-high six assists to his 26 points.

It marked the sixth time this season he's scored 25-plus points in a game and the second time in the past three outings. Newton did a lot of his damage in the midrange throughout the first half, but Cincinnati did a nice job forcing him away from that area.

They adjusted in the locker room, and it led to the Pirates' leader having as many made shots as turnovers in the final 20 minutes (three). He and Jackson were by far the best defenders—finishing with a 97 and 88.2 defensive rating respectively. No other Pirate had a rating below 117.3. The duo notched 18 of the team's 24 stops.

Cincinnati closed things up on Newton in time, but they can't mess around on Friday. Kyler Edwards, Fabian White, and the rest of Houston won't play a sloppy second half and allow Cincinnati to claw back as ECU did. For UC to break the Cougars' five-game win streak they'll have to play their best 40 minutes of the season.

"It took for us to stick to our principles," Saunders said about what it took to close out the game. "Our coach said do what we've been doing all summer leading up to this point. So that's what we fell back to and it ended up working out for us. That was a very good win but now it's onto the next game. You know we got a really good team coming up in Houston. So we are just going to lock in and prepare for the next one."

The quarterfinal matchup tips off at 1 p.m. ET on ESPN2.

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