Crawford, Memphis handle Pirates

GREENVILLE — Miguel Paul was still panting like a fat dog in the summertime when he sat down to face the media Wednesday night.

The East Carolina point guard had done all he could, and it wasn’t nearly enough.

Chris Crawford scored 16 points and Wesley Witherspoon had a double double as Memphis clamped down on Paul and the Pirates in a 70-59 Conference USA win at Minges Coliseum.

The loss snapped a three-game winning streak for ECU (12-11, 3-7 C-USA), which fell well short of upsetting the league’s onetime overlords at home for a second straight season.

Paul,a 6-foot-3-inch junior, managed to score a team-high 13 points despite his role as the focal point of the Tigers’ handsy, ethernet-quick defense.

“Y’all excuse me. I’m tired,” Paul, who was double-teamed for much of the night, said before answering his first question.

“You can’t take nothing from them. They’re a good, athletic team at every spot. They just made us work. For the most part, I’m proud of our effort.”

Indeed, the Pirates went on a 10-0 run — finished off by Paul’s 3-pointer from the right wing — to cut what had been a 16-point deficit 4 minutes earlier to 46-40 with 14:27 left in the game.

But the Tigers (17-7, 7-2) capitalized on a series of ECU mistakes to reclaim control, stretching the lead to 17 by the 6:53 mark before hitting the cruise button.

Pirates forward Darrius Morrow picked up his fourth foul midway through the second half, just minutes after junior guard Erin Straughn took an elbow to the mouth and departed for good.

ECU was left to drive the lane and throw up awkward shots, which the Tigers happily swatted away. They finished with six blocks and forced 15 turnovers.

Memphis, statistically the league’s best shooting team and its toughest to shoot against, went 28 for 60 (47 percent) from the floor and held the Pirates to 39 percent.

“Defensively, I thought they were outstanding,” ECU coach Jeff Lebo said. “Their defensive numbers are off the chain.

“We struggled to get everything that we got. And then when we did get some shots, we missed a lot of them.”

The Tigers’ press made it difficult for Paul to even get the ball up the floor.

“By the time we got in our offense, we had a half a clock,” said Morrow, who finished with 12 points. “We just had to make do with what we were getting.”

Third-year Memphis coach Josh Pastner, meanwhile, was pleased that his team’s 28 field goals came from 19 assists.

“That’s a good stat,” he said. “We were unselfish.

“I thought we had good energy for 40 minutes. We were sloppy at times in the second half, which we’ve got to get better at.”

Witherspoon, a 6-foot-9 senior swingman, scored 12 points and hauled in 11 rebounds for his first double double of the season. Will Barton, who entered scoring a league-high 18.4 points per game, added 15 for the Tigers.

Maurice Kemp, a junior forward, scored four points but pulled down 11 rebounds, sacrificing himself on the boards for the Pirates.

Paul tried to direct his team’s offense on a night when it seemed impossible at times.

“They just try to take your point guard out of it and make him work, and we don’t have a lot of ball-handlers besides Miguel,” Lebo said. “They did a nice job of making him work.”

And, Paul said, it was maddening at times. His body language often reflected it.

“You see seams and little gaps and creases that you normally hit, and they collapse on you,” Paul said. “It’s just frustrating. It was just frustrating. That was good defense on their part.”

The Pirates hung with Memphis through most of a back-and-forth first half. But the Tigers broke it open by going on a 10-0 run to take a 30-20 lead with 5:37 to go in the half.

Memphis took its largest lead of the first half on Joe Jackson’s transition layup with 19 seconds to go, accounting for the Tigers’ led 37-25 halftime lead.

NOTES: Lebo hadn’t gotten a report on Straughn, who bled onto the floor in front of ECU’s bench as officials called a flagrant foul on Jackson. ... The announced attendance was 5,460.

David Hall can be reached at (252) 559-1086 or at dhall@freedomenc.com.