Pittsburgh junior guard Brandin Knight will play in Friday's NCAA Tournament first-round game against Central Connecticut State after Sunday's MRI was negative for structural damage to his right knee, Panthers assistant Jaime Dixon told ESPN.com.

Dixon said Knight would practice Tuesday in preparation for the NCAA Tournament. He said Knight had a slight limp Sunday but was already walking better than he did Saturday night in New York after he banged knees with his co-Big East player of the year Connecticut's Caron Butler with 32 seconds left in regulation of the Big East tournament title game at Madison Square Garden.

Knight missed the final 32 seconds in regulation and didn't return until the final 1.7 seconds of the first overtime when he attempted a game-winning 3-pointer from 35 feet that hit the rim and missed.

Knight didn't play in the second overtime in the loss to the Huskies.

"I thought something might be torn because of the amount of pain I had when I went down," Knight told the Associated Press Sunday night. "There's still a lot of pain, but there's no swelling. But when they told me that everything was intact (in the knee), I let out a big sigh of relief."

So did Pitt coach Ben Howland, who learned a few hours later that the seventh-ranked Panthers will stay in town to play Central Connecticut State in an NCAA South regional game Friday at Mellon Arena. If the third-seeded Panthers beat the 14th-seeded Blue Devils (27-4), they will meet either sixth-seeded California (22-8) or 11th-seeded Penn (25-6) on Sunday.

"Thank goodness Brandin's fine," Howland said. "But this is what it's been like for us all year, everything seems to be falling into place."

Andy Katz is a senior writer for ESPN.com. The Associated Press contributed to this story.