Bluejay Beat Podcast:
Inside the Box:
Christian Bishop was a menace, with 19 points, seven rebounds, five assists, four blocks and three steals. If there was an area to positively affect the game, he did it. His dunks electrified the crowd, but it was frequently his defense — blocking or altering shots, stepping into passing lanes to steal the ball, denying post touches altogether — that truly changed the game.
“Christian was unbelievable,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “Marcus (Zegarowski) talked about a play he made where he got out and hedged a ball screen hard, got them to pick it up, took off and sprinted back and deflected the pass as it went into the post. And he got back behind the defense running the floor a lot. He got to the free throw line and made his free throws. I thought he was terrific. He’s made great strides as this season has gone on. And he’s only scratched the surface of where he can be.”
“My two biggest things I’m always thinking about are my mindset, and consistency,” Bishop added. “When you have the right mindset, you’re able to develop consistent habits. Running the floor every single play. Doing the same ball screens over and over. Talking to your teammates. When you can do those things, you’ll be successful.”
Marcus Zegarowski scored 25 points on 9-of-12 shooting, and was a perfect 7-for-7 from three-point range. He had just one assist, primarily because he had the hot hand and his teammates were all too happy to feed him. Ty-Shon Alexander had four assists. Mitch Ballock had six. Bishop had five. With Butler’s defense focusing so much energy on slowing down Ballock and Alexander, and on preventing Bishop from getting behind them after ball screens, it frequently left openings for Zegarowski — and because this team is so unselfish, they happily went with it.
“I just think we’re all on the same page at all times,” Zegarowski said. “No one cares who scores or who does what. We just want to win, and play for each other.”
The biggest number? 11 Bluejay steals and 16 Butler turnovers. The Bulldogs simply don’t beat themselves in that fashion very often.
“Forcing Butler into that many turnovers is hard to do,” McDermott said. “Our guys followed our plan in the post really well. We fought to keep it out of there. When it did get in there, we were very active with our hands, and guys were covering up for each other. Christian and Kelvin (Jones) were outstanding. They got to ball screens, they did what we wanted them to do when the ball screen got back, they made deflections and got back in front of the post, it was just a complete effort the first 28 minutes or so.”
Recap:
The first 30 minutes of Sunday’s 81-59 win over #21 Butler were as good as Creighton’s played in his ten years as head coach, according to Greg McDermott. There’s been some pretty great performances over those ten seasons, so that seems like a preposterous statement on the surface.
And yet, is it?
After 30 minutes on Sunday, Creighton had doubled up the Bulldogs 70-35. To that point of the game, they were unstoppable offensively and scoring both on three-pointers and poster-worthy dunks, often making Butler’s vaunted defense look stuck in the mud. They were stifling defensively, routinely stepping into passing lanes for steals or deflections, blocking shots, and making every shot attempt difficult. And as a result, they made a team ranked in the top 25 and headed for the NCAA Tournament look like a SWAC team playing a buy game in November. The level of domination was that thorough, the gap in execution that complete.
How good is this Creighton team? The short answer is that we don’t know, because they continue to move the mile marker further and further ahead, piling up progressively more and more impressive wins as the season heads toward its climax. In going 6-1 through the month of February, they beat four ranked teams — including three on the road at #8 Villanova, #10 Seton Hall, and #19 Marquette — and smacked around DePaul, St. John’s and #21 Butler at home.
What we do know is that the third team of the McDermott Era to crack the Top 10 in the AP poll is doing something the first two did not — play its best basketball of the season heading into March.
“I’m just really pleased with the progress that we’re making. We continue to get better,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “Christian (Bishop) has really grown in his role in our offense. His ability to know when to hand off, know when to fake hand off, when to throw it and go set a ball screen, when to look for the backdoor pass — it’s probably the one thing that’s improved most on our team from the start of conference play until now, his ability to operate at the top of the key.”
Bishop had his fingerprints all over the game from the opening tip, literally. After winning the jump ball, he set up a three-pointer for Mitch Ballock with a pass from the top of the circle. On the very next possession, he took the ball from nearly the same spot and blew past Butler’s center, Bryce Golden, with a quick first step and dribbled to the rim for a dunk.
Less than a minute later, he stepped in front of a pass from Sean McDermott, intercepted it, and brought the ball up the court. He found Marcus Zegarowski for a jumper and a 7-3 lead. Then he scored on a layup when Ballock zipped a pass into the lane, and he’d either scored or assisted on all nine of their points.
Four consecutive three-pointers followed, as Creighton opened a 23-15 lead with Zegarowski hitting a pair, and Denzel Mahoney and Ballock hitting one each. Zegarowski’s first was the end result of this possession, where unselfish ball movement spaced out the Butler defense and got them out of position. His second came from #BallockBomb territory, and brought the capacity crowd to its feet.
Ahead 23-19 with 6:57 to go, the Bluejays ended the half on a 17-2 run to blow the game wide open, holding Butler without a field goal during the stretch. The burst included three more 3-pointers from Zegarowski:
Against the ropes, Butler smartly tried to see if they could intimidate the Jays with tough, physical play. Ballock took a whack to the face that re-injured his broken nose that had been surgically repaired midweek. Zegarowski took an elbow to the back of the head on a hard screen. No matter. After another dunk by Bishop and a corner three by Alexander as the clock neared all zeroes, Creighton had taken a 40-21 lead.
McDermott talked to his team at halftime about how important their start to the second half would be. He told them Butler wasn’t going away unless CU put them away.
“We were going to have really one chance to knock them out, and that was the first four or five minutes. So our execution on both ends had to be great,” McDermott said in his press conference after the game. “Because instead of us taking it to 30, if you let them get it to 10, it’s a totally different basketball game.”
Message received. The Jays scored 30 points on their first 16 second-half possessions, making 10 of their first 13 shots and all four 3-pointers they attempted. They scored on eight straight possessions at one point. Over a 17-minute stretch that spanned those final 6:57 of the first half and the first 10 minutes of the second, the Jays outscored Butler 47-11 and averaged an other-worldly 1.74 points per possession.
Their second basket of the second half was a microcosm of the entire game, and reminiscent of the 1980s “Showtime” Los Angeles Lakers. Bishop blocked a shot at the rim and tipped it to Ballock. The big man sprinted down the floor, and was rewarded when Ballock got to the top of the circle as he used his eyes to move the defense — then threw a no-look bounce pass to Bishop who finished it with an authoritative slam. Stunning.
“We were feeling like the Lakers out there,” Bishop said on the postgame radio show. “Man, Mitch did a no-look bounce pass and then shifted the defense to give me some space to rise up and show off. Crazy.”
“A lot of those plays are just plays where you move the defense with your eyes,” Ballock added. “You can deceive with your eyes. I knew where I was going with the ball. Hopefully he knew it was coming (laughs). I just kind of played with the defense, looked this way, and threw it the other way.”
Zegarowski’s sixth 3-pointer without a miss pushed the lead out to 49-24. Then Ballock went back into Showtime mode, bringing the ball up the floor and throwing another no-look pass — this time to Alexander in the corner for a three-pointer. Sadly, it came out of frame for FS1’s cameras, but Alexander was so certain the shot was good he turned and smiled at the fans sitting courtside before the ball even reached the basket stanchion. When you’re good, you’re good.
Zegarowski then took advantage of the defense over-playing him on the perimeter to drive into the lane — where he scored anyway. That basket made it 59-30, and at that moment Zegarowski had nearly outscored the Bulldogs by himself (25 for Zegarowski, 30 for Butler).
And as the clock ticked under 10 minutes, Damien Jefferson flipped a one-handed pass to a cutting Bishop for an emphatic dunk. 70-35 Bluejays. Zegarowski and Bishop had combined for 39 points on just 20 shots after that dunk, and had only attempted one free throw. Unbelievable. Or as WBR’s Matt DeMarinis called it on Twitter, “idiotic efficiency.”
Creighton soon emptied the bench, and got extended minutes for Jalen Windham, Nic Zeil, Jett Canfield and Jordan Scurry while cutting down the minutes for everyone else. Butler took advantage of them to turn what had been a 35-point embarrassment into merely a 22-point blowout.
It moves the Jays to 22-6 and more importantly, 11-4 in the Big East. It keeps pressure on Seton Hall, one game ahead at 12-3, to keep winning ahead of the regular season finale between the Pirates and Bluejays in Omaha. And it earned the Jays a bump in the rankings — to #9 in the NET, to #10 in the AP Top 25, and #11 in the Coaches Poll.
“Next week is one of the more important weeks in the ten years I’ve been the head coach,” McDermott said. “We have a chance to do something special. And that’s not easy to do in our league.”
Three games in six days to decide the Big East Regular Season champion. If CU can win at St. John’s on Sunday and against Georgetown at home on Wednesday, it won’t matter what Seton Hall does in the interim — the finale will be for the title, one way or the other.
McDermott ended his postgame radio show by saying the crowd had been electric. “Anytime we get that, and the guys give them something to cheer for, this becomes an impossible place for opponents to play in.”
Highlights:
Press Conferences:
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