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By Bill Koch
GoBearcats.com
GREENVILLE, N.C. - For a team without high post-season aspirations, a nine-point win on the road against a strong defensive team might be considered a decent day's work.
But for the 22nd-ranked University of Cincinnati Bearcats, it left a lot to be desired.
UC overcame a poor shooting game and turned back East Carolina, 55-46, before 4,597 fans Sunday afternoon at Minges Coliseum for its eighth straight victory, leaving the Bearcats with a sparkling 15-2 record overall, 5-0 in the American Athletic Conference.
But after the game no one outside the UC locker room was celebrating. Or even smiling.
"The only place we won today was on the scoreboard," said UC coach Mick Cronin. "We didn't get better today. We got worse. We've got a lot of slippage, but everybody goes through that. You have to give East Carolina credit. It's my job to make sure we execute better and I'm gonna make sure it happens."
Kyle Washington led UC with 16 points and 11 rebounds for his sixth double-double of the season. Jacob Evans added 10 points and Gary Clark, a North Carolina native, scored eight points and pulled down nine rebounds playing before a large contingent of family and friends. Troy Caupain also scored eight points.
ECU (9-10, 1-5) has lost five straight. The Pirates played without their leading scorer, guard B.J.Tyson, who suffered a knee injury in last Wednesday's loss to Houston. Tyson averages 11.9 points per game.
It was the sixth time this season that ECU has failed to crack the 50-point barrier. The Pirates rank last in the league in scoring with an average of 62.7 points per game.
This figured to be a tough outing for the Bearcats, who always seem to struggle here, playing in front of a small crowd against a team that's known for its stingy defense. An already precarious situation was compounded by the fact that UC was coming off a pulsating 2-point win over SMU on Thursday night before a loud, enthusiastic crowd at Fifth Third Arena.
Playing without much energy in a subdued atmosphere, UC had trouble executing on offense, shooting just 32.8 percent from the field and making only two of 12 from 3-point range. Against anyone else, those numbers might have spelled defeat, but ECU was even worse, shooting 25.4 percent and making four of 23 from long range.
"We really didn't get any stops," Caupain said. "ECU missed a couple of wide open shots that they could have made and made it an even closer game."
Caupain didn't attempt a shot until he made a jumper with 2:36 to play in the first half to break a 21-21 tie. He quickly followed that basket with a 3-pointer, and then a traditional 3-point play, giving him eight points in the final 2:36 to lead the Bearcats into halftime with a 31-23 lead. ECU never got closer than six points after that.
"At the 14-minute mark, he had no field goal attempts, no assists and no turnovers," Cronin said of Caupain. "I asked him, if he had told me, I would have left him at home and brought one of the managers. I'm sure they would have appreciated the opportunity to come down here today and put on the uniform."
Caupain, who said he had been feeling under the weather for the last few days, took Cronin's words to heart.
"It just kind of opened up toward the end of the first half after Coach got on me," he said. "In my mind, I just thought, you've got to do something and try to force the issue a little bit. Whatever he said about the manager thing, it made me force the issue."
Caupain didn't score again in the second half and took only two more shots the rest of the game. He finished with no assists and three turnovers, but his scoring outburst at the end of the half provided the breathing room UC needed.
ECU led for only 27 seconds, but the Bearcats never did shake out of their offensive doldrums.
"It was just poor execution," Cronin said, "very, very poor execution. We didn't do much to make it hard on them. Our rhythm in the first half was throw one pass and shoot it. Our rhythm in the second half was to never throw the ball inside and that's all we were supposed to do."
And even though the Bearcats held the Pirates to the lowest field goal percentage of the season for a UC opponent and the lowest point total, Cronin wasn't pleased with the defense either. The only player he singled out for praise was freshman Nysier Brooks, who blocked five shots and corralled four rebounds in 13 minutes.
Washington, who added three blocked shots to his double-double, said he understood why Cronin was so upset.
"I think it would be a disservice to everybody if he wasn't," Washington said. "That's the expectation that we have. I honestly knew that that's what I was signing up for when I decided to transfer here. It gets ugly, but that's what we expect and that's what's gonna make us better.
"It was just a rough day. We were disappointed in ourselves. Coach was disappointed in us. Coach said the only way we really won today was on the scoreboard. We didn't really get better as a team so we have to take that into perspective, really move forward and get better because we're trying to do something big in March."
Bill Koch covered UC athletics for 27 years - 15 at The Cincinnati Post and 12 at The Cincinnati Enquirer - before joining the staff of GoBearcats.com in January, 2015.