It wasn’t quite the bounce back performance out of Wes Moore’s crew that we were looking for, what with scoring nine points over the first 10 minutes, but it was more than good enough to take care of Maine.
Three games into the season, NC State still hasn’t put together a good shooting performance, with production from the perimeter an ongoing problem.
State shot 3-20 from beyond the arc on Tuesday night, and one of those makes came from Tilda Trygger. Devyn Quigley, Destiny Lunan, Qadence Samuels, and Adelaide Jernigan were a combined 0-11 from three. Samuels didn’t score a point in 21 minutes.
But State put together a 14-0 run in the second quarter to break the game open and got solid performances from Khamil Pierre (18 points, 10 boards) and Zoe Brooks (14 points, nine boards). Zam Jones was only 1-5 from three but was 3-5 inside the arc.
Defensively, NC State shut down the paint, limiting Maine to 37.8% shooting on twos while controlling the boards. That was the big difference in a sluggish game from both sides. Maine kept this one nice and slow and didn’t feed State’s transition game with a lot of turnovers. Probably the less said about any of this, the better.
