[dropcap]Trailing[/dropcap] by six points with under three minutes remaining, the 19th-ranked Butler Bulldogs (19-7 overall, 9-4 Big East) closed the game on a 10-2 run to escape with a 58-56 victory over the upset-minded Creighton Bluejays (12-15 overall, 3-11 Big East) on Monday in front of 17,971 fans at CenturyLink Center Omaha.
Butler senior guard Alex Barlow grabbed an offensive rebound with under 30 seconds remaining to give his team the final shot with the game tied at 56. Barlow’s teammate, junior forward Roosevelt Jones, cashed it in with a runner off the glass with 1.9 seconds left that proved to be the difference after Creighton’s final shot by senior guard Devin Brooks was off the mark.
“It takes toughness to beat a tough team, and we were tough about 95% of the time. The 5% that we weren’t got us beat,” said Creighton head coach Greg McDermott.
The Bluejays looked to be squarely in the 95% range early as junior center Geoffrey Groselle and senior guards Austin Chatman and Devin Brooks took turns carrying the Bluejays and igniting the sold-out home crowd in the first half. Groselle scored his team’s first six points to begin a back-and-forth affair before Butler guard Kellen Dunham provided a similar impact on his end, scoring eight points during a 12-4 run that gave the Bulldogs a 14-8 lead with 13:20 to go in the first half.
Then Chatman knocked down a pair of 3-pointers, one from the right wing and the other from the left corner, to even things up before the under-12 media timeout. A nifty reverse layup by Ricky Kreklow answered a Butler score out of the break in the action. After a few minutes of scoreless action to follow, the Bluejays busted the Bulldog zone, resulting in Groselle finding senior guard Devin Brooks for a go-ahead 3-pointer with 4:34 left in the half.
After a Butler turnover on the ensuing possession, Brooks found Chatman for another 3-pointer to make it 22-18, Bluejays. Then Brooks buried another 3-pointer of his own two possessions later to cap off Creighton’s 17-4 run.
That run helped the Bluejays take a 29-25 lead over the 19th-ranked Bulldogs into the locker room. Chatman led Creighton with 13 points on 3-of-4 shooting from beyond the arc in the first half. Kellen Dunham matched the Bluejay senior with 13 of his own to lead his team.
The second half saw the two teams trade runs in a what was proving to be battle of wills. The Bulldogs started the half with a 7-0 run to take a three-point lead. The Bluejays swung back with an 8-0 run to make it 37-32 at the first media timeout with 14:38 remaining. Out of that timeout, Butler used a 10-2 run to once again gain the lead only to be outscored by the Bluejays 11-2 over the next four and a half minutes. Devin Brooks capped off Creighton’s response with a floater in the lane to give the Bluejays a 50-44 lead with 5:40 left to play.
Butler would cut that lead down to two, but Brooks helped push it back to a six-point advantage after his jumper that initially bounced high off the back rim eventually dropped through the cylinder with just over three minutes to go.
That favorable bounce had some thinking it might be Creighton’s night once again, but it only set the stage for one last critical run by the Bulldogs. Dunham started it with a layup, then Alex Barlow tipped an errant pass and raced down the court for a layup and the foul. He converted the free throw to make it a one-point game with 2:39 left. After Austin Chatman missed the front end of a one-and-one, Roosevelt Jones scored down low and drew a foul on Creighton senior center Will Artino in the process. Jones hit the free throw to give Butler a two-point lead, but the Bluejays tied it up with 1:29 to go on a nifty euro step by Brooks that allowed him to beat a stationary Butler defender who was trying to draw a charge on the Bluejay senior guard.
With the score still tied, a missed three-pointer by Chatman with just under a minute remaining set the stage for Barlow and Jones to provide their heroics. Chatman forced Dunham into an off balance jump shot that was off to the right of the iron, but Barlow chased down the rebound and got it to Jones for the final shot. Jones got a step on Creighton senior forward Avery Dingman going to his right and lofted the ball up and in off the glass, over Artino who tried to provided some help on the drive.
“I didn’t know I was going to get the ball, but I wanted to get the ball [at the end],” Jones said while breaking down the final possession. “Coach ran a play for me, he wanted me to make a play and I did — the shot went in.”
Butler head coach Chris Holtmann interrupted Jones to assure reporters that his star forward was indeed supposed to get the ball in that situation.
“He was going to get the ball. We were going to make sure of that,” Holtmann said. “The play is called ‘Get It To Rose And Get Out Of The Way’, so that’s kind of what we drew up there and he did a great job, and our guys did a great job spacing the floor. The timing of it was important, he went at the right time. We wanted to leave maybe a chance for a tip in for us, but nothing more than that, so he went at a great time.”
With 1.9 seconds left on the clock, Creighton called a timeout to set up a play to tie or possibly win the game. With senior forward Ricky Kreklow throwing the ball in from the opposite baseline, Chatman screened for him to give him a clean throwing lane. Butler senior forward Kameron Woods actually ran over Chatman on the screen, but no foul was called. Kreklow tossed the ball into Artino who tipped it to Brooks facing the basket from about 30 feet away, but the shot was well off the mark giving the Bulldogs the win and delivering the Bluejays another heart-breaking defeat in conference play.
“We were looking to see if Austin could potentially draw a foul [on the screen] on Woods, and I thought he was close,” Kreklow said. “It’s too bad we didn’t get the call, but we were looking for Will in the middle there, then looking for a kick wide to see if we could get a shot similar to Seton Hall when we ran the same thing. Didn’t quite get the look we wanted, it was a tough shot. We were close.”
Brooks finished with 17 points, five rebounds, and three assists to lead the Bluejays, while Jones carried the Bulldogs when they needed him most, finishing with 18 points, six rebounds, and a game-high six assists.
The two-point loss dropped Creighton to 1-4 in conference play in games decided by three points or less, with two of those losses coming at home in the final three seconds.
“We’re close, I mean what is it the fourth game we’ve lost where we led in the last minute or last thirty seconds? So we are close,” McDermott said, “but in this league this year, as good as it is, you’ve gotta hook it up not just every game, but every play. We just went south enough plays. Whether we just relaxed for a second and [Butler] has played together long enough, and Dunham is a fabulous cutter and can make that pull-up, and as soon as you relax for a second he’s going to make you pay. As soon as you forget to block out somebody on their team is going to make you pay, and that was certainly the case tonight.”
The Bluejays will not play again until February 24 when they travel to Chicago to take on a DePaul team that has lost five of their six games in Big East play. McDermott said his team will use the week to get healthy, but also to clean up the things that seem to keeping this team from turning in consistent performances each game.
“Like we’ve done as a coaching staff all year we have to pull some positives out of it,” McDermott said. “We’ve had enough adversity that if you’re just going to pull all the negatives out of every game you’re going to beat yourself up, and you’re not going to get any better. We have to pull the positives things we did in this game out of this game and try to build on them. But we also have to look at that 5% of the time where I didn’t think we were tough enough. We have to try to fix it, because our next two games are on the road in this league against two teams that are fighting for their life.
“So we’ll take some time off, we’ll get healthy, but we also have an opportunity this week to really work on ourselves and try to maybe clean up some of these issues that keep cropping up. You’d like to think in the 27th game of the year that they wouldn’t show their face, but unfortunately they did.”
