Key Stats: Seton Hall outrebounds Creighton 34-20, and 10-3 on the offensive glass. Seton Hall outscores Creighton 15-4 on second chance points, CU’s second-largest deficit of the season on that stat. CU goes a ghastly 20-31 at the free throw line.
Favorite Moment: Off the court, my favorite moment was securing a Doug McDermott bobblehead — we got to the arena at 1:30 and discovered a line of perhaps 500 people in front of us at the main entrance, but waited it out. That line quickly swelled to 1,500, snaking down the hallway of the convention center and out the doors to the sidewalk. Similar reports from the south entrance had the line extending nearly to the street corner across from DJ’s Dugout. It was just crazy. Hopefully they’ll do another bobblehead in greater quantities next year so everyone that missed out on this one can get their own.
On the court, my favorite moment was being there in person to witness McDermott enter the top ten on the all-time scoring list. PA Announcer Jake Ryan was right on when he said during his announcement of the feat, “You are witnessing history.” I’ve seen all but two home games in his career in person, and that’s something I’m really grateful for. He’s a once-in-a-generation player, and watching him has been a treat.
Quick Recap: Where to begin? Ho-lee-crap.
Up 70-67 with 1:59 to go, Doug McDermott stuck a jumper to put his team up 72-67. They would not score again, yet somehow won the game. It all happened so fast, especially the final sequence, that it was hard to figure out how the heck they won, so let’s start by looking back at how they nearly lost.
First, Ethan Wragge had his pocket picked by Fuquan Edwin, who took a break from hot dogging up and down the court long enough to make a play. He was fouled and made two free throws to make it 72-69. Then there was a long possession that didn’t result in a good look, ending when Doug McDermott inexplicably kicked it back out of the post with five seconds on the shot clock to Jahenns Manigat for a long — and errant — three. Thankfully, Seton Hall’s Brandon Mobley missed a three-point attempt, and Austin Chatman grabbed the rebound. He got the ball to McDermott, who was fouled. An 88% free-throw shooter and clutch performer late in games, he’s exactly the guy you want at the line if you’re Creighton, right? You’d think so, but McDermott missed both free throws — something I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him do, at any point in a game — and just like that, the Pirates had a chance to tie it.
On the other end, Edwin beat Chatman off the dribble, and CU’s point guard made the smart play by fouling him — not only did it make him earn the two points from the line, it stopped him from potentially tying the game with a three. Edwin made two more free throws to make it 72-71, and that’s when it really got ugly.
Oh, you thought the stuff in the two preceding paragraphs was ugly? Just wait.
On the inbounds pass after the last of Edwin’s free throws, McDermott got trapped in the corner between the baseline and the Seton Hall bench and panicked, trying to pass the ball back toward the center of the court but ultimately losing the ball. It spent a full second or more rolling on the court untouched right underneath the Seton Hall basket, as seemingly the entire arena yelled “Oh no!” all at once. Wragge pounced on it, and was fouled with four seconds left. He’s an 87% free-throw shooter, so again, just who you’d want at the line if you’re a Creighton fan, right? You’d think so, but unfortunately, he missed the first free throw, and with a sense of panic-slash-doom engulfing the arena — the groans were audible and the panic was palpable — he also missed the second.
With no timeouts, Seton Hall’s Stephane Manga grabbed the rebound and appeared indecisive on where to go with the ball. He took several dribbles upcourt, and by the time he got it to Edwin, the clock was already nearly at triple-zeros. All he could manage was a 45-foot desperation heave at the buzzer, which clanged off the glass harmlessly.
I looked around after the horn, and it seemed like half the arena was completely dumbfounded at what had just occurred, and the other half was letting out a HUGE sigh of relief. Part of it was the way the wheels fell off — two possessions without a basket and four missed free throws in the final 90 seconds of the game. The other part was how quickly it ended. Since Seton Hall had no timeouts, literally four seconds of time elapsed between the devastation of missing a fourth straight free throw and the Pirates missing a desperation shot. There was no time to process it, no time to worry about what they might draw up, just…four seconds, most of which went by before you could catch your breath.
At the outset of the game, it appeared there would be a shootout. Seton Hall made 7 of their first 10 shots and four of their first seven 3-pointers, taking an 18-15 lead after eight minutes. Without second-leading scorer Sterling Gibbs, who was back on campus serving a one-game suspension, the Pirates were actually a tougher team for Creighton to defend because they gave the enormous Eugene Teague more touches in the paint, working their offense inside-out. That kind of traditional post-play is difficult for the Bluejays to defend because of their lack of a true post — Wragge tried valiantly to stop him, Artino a little less so — and Teague was able to either get up good shots of his own or kick it out to open shooters.
The Pirates led for a majority of the first half, with Creighton finally going on top, 23-22, with a jumper by Isaiah Zierden with 7:53 to play. Grant Gibbs threw down a dunk on the next possession, then made a runner the next trip downcourt, and after Ethan Wragge and Zierden made consecutive threes, it was 33-25 Bluejays. It felt like the eighth-place Pirates had spoken their peace, made their run, and now it was time for the first-place team to exert their will.
That’s not how it played out. A 9-0 Seton Hall run erased the lead entirely, and if not for Gibbs’ three at the buzzer, they’d have been the first team this season to lead Creighton at the half at home.
A 10-2 Creighton run to open the second half gave them a double-digit lead, 48-38, keyed by a three-pointer from McDermott and three free throws from Wragge. Once again, it appeared CU was about to step on the gas and peel away from the Pirates, but once again, the wily Buccaneers came back. They immediately cut the lead in half, and for most of the second half, the Bluejay advantage hovered around five points. Creighton used Will Artino to front Teague and deny him touches in the paint, and it was effective at negating his dominance, but Fuquan Edwin got hot, scoring 14 points in the second half on 4-8 shooting and 5-6 from the line. He also made a three pointer late in the half, then ran down the court wagging three fingers quite demonstratively as a majority of the sellout crowd booed him lustily.
Creighton played a pretty bad game by their standards, and still figured out a way to win the game. They missed 11 free throws, they turned it over uncharacteristically, they got manhandled on the boards, and they missed defensive assignments too often. And despite all that, when the wheels began to get wobbly, there was no finger-pointing, no frustration, just a calm determination to finish the job.
72-71. One point wins count exactly the same as 30-point blowouts in the standings.
Quotables:
“That was way too close for comfort. Sometimes, you just have to find a way to get it done, and today we did. People are down in the locker room, of course, because we didn’t play great. On the other hand, we put another ‘X’ in the left-hand column after this one, so that’s all that really matters. We’ve got three games left, and we need to focus on those and not on this one. We’ve got a full week of practice coming up with no games, so we have to work hard.” -Austin Chatman on 1620AM Postgame
“Games like this give us something to work on and learn from. I don’t really have any explanation for what happened today. They just came out fighting and played a great game. You have to take your hat off to them. Teague was huge today. The last time we played them, he was out so that was a big difference. They got the ball moving a lot better than they did the first time we played them, and they hit open shots that they didn’t hit the last game.” -Austin Chatman on 1620AM Postgame
“No knock on Sterling Gibbs, but I think without him they did a much better job of getting the ball inside to their big guys. Sina isn’t as much of a threat, offensively, on the court so he moves the ball around a lot better. We’d prepared all week for him playing, and found out this morning that he wasn’t here so that changed our gameplan a little bit at the last minute.” -Austin Chatman on 1620AM Postgame
“Doug and Ethan going 0-4 on free throws was kind of mind-blowing, although Ethan said he missed the last one on purpose (laughs). It worked out. It ended up being good. But man, we have to work on that.” -Austin Chatman on 1620AM Postgame
“Fouling Edwin on their second-to-last possession (with 13 seconds left) wasn’t planned. I was late to the switch and he was breaking free for the rim so I went ahead and fouled him so he had to earn it from the line.” -Austin Chatman on 1620AM Postgame
“Missing three free throws down the stretch was so frustrating. I just have to go up there and knock ’em down. To be honest, I wasn’t even thinking about it — the second one, I thought for sure was good. It just happens sometimes. We gotta loosen up that rim a little (laughs) but yeah, we’ll be fine. I’m so glad we escaped with a win.” -Doug McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“Teague is a load down there. He’s huge. He’s ‘Gregory Size.’ We didn’t have to play against him last time, so we didn’t really know what to expect, because he’s gotten a lot better since he was at Southern Illinois. We had to come and double-team him, but he’s a pretty good passer. He made the right reads most of the time, and they were able to get some good looks out of it.” -Doug McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“I think people kind of overlook Grant at times. They don’t think he can score, but he’s capable. When me and Ethan set ball screens for him, our defenders don’t leave us so that gives Grant a lot of room in the lane. He’s crafty around the rim and he’s worked on his three-point shot a lot. Even though he was injured he could still shoot threes and I think that helped him.” -Doug McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“This is a much better way to go into the next week than if we’d blown them out. We were far from perfect today. There’s obviously a lot of areas we need to get better at. It’s frustrating with the mistakes we made, because it’s stuff we don’t do often, but I think it’ll be huge for us the next four days of practice to have the feeling that we kind of got away with one.” -Doug McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“The fact that they didn’t have as much in transition without Sterling Gibbs was a negative for them, because they didn’t really push it. They were going to grind it and run the shot clock and get it inside, and that was a positive for them. They made a bunch of passes, they made us defend deep into possessions. The first half was a 29-possession half, which is relatively low, and the second half was 30. So this was a really low-possession game compared with how we would like to play.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“When you put Edwin and Sina and Mobley and Oliver out there with Eugene Teague, you’ve got four shooters and a guy that’s really good on the block one-on-one. When we fronted them in the second half I thought that helped us a little, it made it a little more difficult. And we also tried to heat it up a little bit because they only had one point guard. It some ways I think that helped us and in some ways I think it wore us out.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“We had some guys that didn’t play as well as they normally play today. In a long season like in college basketball, you’re not going to play perfect every game. You hope that when you look back at the end of the season, you can say you won a couple that you shouldn’t have, and today was one of those. We were a little lucky.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“We have four days off this week, four days of practice with no game. As I told the team after the game, this is really our last chance to improve ‘us.’ Because after that, it’s two days of practice and a game, two days of practice and a game, a day or two of practice and then the Big East Tournament, a day or two of practice and then the NCAA Tournament. So we won’t have a lot of time to get better at the things that we do, it just becomes a lot of game prep. We have to take advantage of this.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“My message to the team was, we found a way. That’s number one. But second, let’s be mature enough to learn from what happened today and try to clean some of that up. The press break stuff is an example of that. We go through it in practice, we do five-on-zero drills, and this group of guys have done it so many times that sometimes you lose your focus on exactly what you have to do. We got the ball in, we got it to Doug, and over the course of his career he’s made good decisions there. He made a bad one today, but we got lucky that the ball bounced to us. We’ve been unlucky on the other end of that, too. It’s takes a little bit of luck to be in the position that we’re in sometimes.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
And Now, Here’s What You Had to Say:
Wow, look at the CenturyLink. Now that’s how you pack them out. And to think people thought Thursday’s showing at Rock was a good turnout.
— SOrangeJuice (@SOrangeJuice) February 23, 2014
Gotta support @JManigat12 aka The Canadian RedBull #RollJays pic.twitter.com/qnKyqPJaJT
— Nick Olsen (@NICKgatoOLSEN) February 24, 2014
Is it bad I have two jays legends as bobble heads?? @dougmcd3 @KyleKorver #ROLLJAYS pic.twitter.com/qNKGEneWoY
— Coach Pat (@Pneil_3man) February 24, 2014
This just happened. Hahaha go Jays! pic.twitter.com/bjkpo5BDgR — Ryan Holmgren (@ryanholmgren) February 23, 2014
Gene Teague is guarding Ethan Wragge. File that under things I never thought I’d tweet.
— Brian Otskey (@botskey) February 23, 2014
Didn’t realize @heathwgunderson had a taller identical twin that plays for Seton Hall (#50)
— Tyler Anderson (@TylerA_Anderson) February 23, 2014
Shot clock running down and Zierden makes a play. He’s been getting better and better every game. 4 points so far in this one. — Jacob Padilla (@JacobPadilla_) February 23, 2014
Fans holding Canadian flag behind CU bench to honor Jahenns Manigat, who is reveling in his country’s gold-medal performance in hockey — Steve Pivovar (@PivOWH) February 23, 2014
Gibbs is doing it all for Creighton. Hitting threes, dunking, rebounding, driving it in for a layup… Jays up 27-22 as SH calls a TO.
— Jacob Padilla (@JacobPadilla_) February 23, 2014
As good as Creighton is offensively with their own chances, you can’t give away possessions like that and expect to compete.
— Raphielle Johnson (@raphiellej) February 23, 2014
*profane words after that Wragge three* He pulled that one from deep. — Raphielle Johnson (@raphiellej) February 23, 2014
Teague didn’t play vs Creighton the first time. His presence on the floor directly created every single aspect of the #shbb counterpunch. — Jason Guerette (@JPGuerette) February 23, 2014
I love how if a college basketball coach wants a free timeout all he has to do is tell the ref that someone threw an elbow.
— Matthew DeMarinis (@mjdemarinis) February 24, 2014
Let us never speak of this again. #rolljays
— Michael McNeil Jr. (@michaelkmcneil) February 24, 2014
1-point grind-em-out wins count exactly the same as 30-point blowouts in the standings. #gojays
— Rob Simms (@IamRobSimms) February 24, 2014
Not all gonna be pretty..one more left at the clink..thanks for all the support!
— Doug McDermott (@dougmcd3) February 24, 2014
