So this is what Jack Torrance had to go through up at the Overlook Hotel? With winter pounding away at my sanity (not to mention the insolated gloves I wear when I shovel), I decided to stay at the house and work from my home office as not to lose a few hours yesterday morning and evening fighting a presumably tough commute. And with today’s temperatures hovering just above “you’ve got to be friggin’ kidding me” levels of cold, I chose to make it two straight workdays away from the office.
And now I’m faced with a window full of deceptive sunlight. I know that once I head to the driveway to start my car (because Mrs. Creighton Otter’s ride gets first dibs on the toasty goodness that is the garage), my face will feel like the little cloth tomato where my mom stored all of her pushpins and little sewing swords when I was a child. But it looks like it might be warm right now, with a full sky of sunshine beaming into our windows.
What a tease. You know, like Creighton’s home win against Drake.
First, don’t confuse Drake with a good basketball team. Sure, they’re young — DU suits up just five upperclassmen, with four of them getting decent minutes; the Bulldogs’ roster includes 9 freshmen, 6 of which are true frosh. And sure, they’re only into the second year of Mark Phelps’ regime. But their best win came on the road at Austin Peay, and their other 4 victories came against teams with an average RPI of 274. You almost feel sorry for Josh Young.
What does it say about Creighton that the strength of the Bluejays’ wins statistically matches that of Drake’s Ws, more or less? Take away the Jays’ best win (at home against Nebraska … ugh), and the average RPI of Creighton’s victims comes in at 298. But surely the Jays could get past the Bulldogs at home for the first time in three seasons, right? Right?!
It looked that way, at least for the first 30 minutes of action. The Bluejays, minus any offensive production from their guards (CU got just 4 points the entire first half from anyone resembling a perimeter player), managed to take a 13-point lead with 16 minutes to play in the game. Kenny Lawson was feeling it again, scoring 15 points in the first 20-plus minutes of the game, and Justin Carter, Casey Harriman, and Ethan Wragge each added 6 points in the first half to aid Lawson offensively.
The teams exchanged points back and forth for a few minutes midway through the second half, but when Justin Carter finished a traditional three-point play with 9 minutes to go and pushed Creighton’s lead back to 12, I’d be lying if I didn’t relax a little bit. The Bulldogs are done, I’m sure I thought to myself. Even this year’s Jays team won’t let them back in. Wrong.
I felt like I fell for the fake-warm rays of sun shining through my window. It took Drake 8 minutes, but the Bulldogs shaved 10 points off Creighton’s lead and had a chance to convert an awkward tip/layup with 4 seconds left off a Lawson turnover before the Bluejays finally handed DU its fourth straight loss to open Valley play.
I continue to believe that the Bluejays are better than they’re playing, and that they’re bound to put an entire game together before the end of the season. But this Creighton team continues to reward my confidence with cold smacks in the face, much like the arctic air encircling the town in which I live.
Near-blizzard conditions (and the promise of a local television broadcast of the game) kept a few thousand Jays fans from heading downtown, limiting the actual crowd inside the Qwest Center to shy of 10,000 (no word if those missing in action were in fact the fans P’Allen Stinnett deemed “fair-weather” a few weeks back in a Facebook posting). But Stinnett’s shot was colder than anything outside. In what seems to be a case of feast or famine, while he has cut down on his turnovers during wins against Evansville and Drake (1 combined), the junior preseason All-Valley selection scored just 7 points on 2-12 shooting from the field (including a 1-9 effort against the Bulldogs).
Sure, he is grabbing a few rebounds and dishing a few assists per game, but his offensive production against Drake marked the third time in four league games he made just 1 field goal. The other game, a loss at Indiana State, saw Stinnett drill 8 of 13 shots for 19 points, his second-highest scoring total of the season. For a team whose only consistent trademark has been the tendency to give up second-half leads, a streaky Stinnett only exacerbates the Bluejays’ problems.
But P’Allen’s struggles aren’t Creighton’s only problem: even when someone is performing well the Bluejays can’t seem to take advantage of it for too long. Lawson had another monster game, statistically, but you have to wonder just how much more he would have been able to do had he taken more shots in the second half. Lawson hit 6 of 9 shots in the first 20 minutes of play, and he scored Creighton’s first basket of the second half to reach 15 points on the evening. The next 19 minutes saw him shoot just one more time. How is that possible?
These issues, combined with ill-timed turnovers and a penchant for missing free throws at the most frustrating of times (even though missed free throws are always frustrating), leave me faced with a reality much colder and harsher than the one I continue to try and convince myself exists for this team in the future. Wednesday night was the perfect opportunity to seize some confidence and the expense of a visiting conference team. Instead, another late-game meltdown preceded the fans’ foray out to the bone chilling cold of the parking lots.
As the winter wears on, and with it the Bluejays’ season, fans will fail to fall for the deceptive sunlight surrounding this team. The cold weather doesn’t look to be warming any time soon. Hopefully the same won’t be true for Dana Altman’s club.
