I’ve been attending Creighton basketball games since 1987, when my father starting taking me to the Civic Auditorium. Over a beer Sunday, we estimated that we’ve seen approximately 450 CU home games since then. So I asked my dad where he’d rank Saturday’s regular season finale against Wichita State, all things considered.
Top five, he said. Probably the best, he added.
Ask him, me, or any of the 18,611 other people in the CenturyLink Center a few years from now, and the legendary status surrounding Saturday’s win is sure to have grown. The second-largest home crowd in Creighton men’s hoops history witnessed something spectacular and unfortunately all too rare in recent seasons: the Bluejays’ first outright regular season Missouri Valley Conference championship since 2001.
Seriously, name a better atmosphere you enjoyed for a Creighton home game than the one Saturday afternoon. It was fun to see Kentucky play in Omaha a few years ago. But that was a rather meaningless NIT game, albeit an entertaining one that saw the Jays fall just a few excruciating possessions short of a win against one of the nation’s premiere college hoops programs.
Kyle Korver versus Kent Williams in the winter of 2002 was absurd, two exceptional teams trading blows before the Bluejays rallied around their superstar for a win. But SIU still won the Valley that season.
No, nothing quite holds up when compared to what we witnessed Saturday. Winner takes a title. Senior Day for Gregory Echenique, Grant Gibbs, and Josh Jones. A sold-out crowd being crammed a little tighter thanks to standing room-only ticket sales the morning of the game. National television in the house. The rival Shockers there, too.
Thanks to Doug McDermott, everything turned out OK. The junior All American had a game for the ages, high stakes and increased pressure be damned. It was evident early that McDermott was in a groove, as he scored Creighton’s first 9 points and established himself offensively against WSU’s Carl Hall. With every outstanding move that McDermott made against the Shocker defense, the intensity inside the building grew.
The Jays built a 9-point lead midway through the first half, but the Shockers rallied to take a lead that would change hands back and forth until late in the half. That’s when McDermott tied the score at 29 apiece with a nifty move in the lane. A little more than a minute later, double-teamed by WSU defenders, McDermott found Avery Dingman with a cross-court pass that set up a wide-open look for a three-pointer. Dingman drilled it, and Wichita State wouldn’t lead the rest of the afternoon.
That was one of McDermott’s three assists. But as well as he passed out of defensive pressure, people won’t talk about his three assists 20 years from now.
In what will surely go down as one of the greatest single-game performances in Creighton history, McDermott scored a season-high 41 points. He dazzled fans, coaches, teammates, and his opponents with an array of pivot moves, face-up jumpers, and deft three-point shooting. He went a perfect 10-10 from inside the arc, 5-8 behind it, and 6-6 from the free throw line en route to one of CU’s most spectacular offensive performances ever.
A year ago, with Wichita State in Omaha and the Bluejays just a game behind the Shockers in the Valley standings, McDermott buckled under the pressure. He went 5-14 from the field in that game, scoring 13 points but watching as Wichita State all but assured itself a league championship. Things got heated on the sidelines between McDermott and his father, CU head coach Greg McDermott, too.
But with 27 seconds left and the Jays up 16, league championship firmly in hand, the McDermotts embraced on the sideline Saturday, celebrating much better circumstances. A frustrating February behind them, father and son could cross a major milestone off their to-do list: in three seasons, the McDermotts had won as many outright league titles (1) as Dana Altman had in his 16 seasons at the helm on the Hilltop.
In the deciding game, Creighton’s offense was simply unstoppable. Doug’s performance paced an offense that clicked at every level. Since the start of the 2007-2008 season, Wichita State allowed only three teams to score 80 points or more in regulation before the Bluejays dropped 91 on Saturday. The Shockers hadn’t given up 90 or more points in regulation since a January 2007 game against Missouri State.
Yet Creighton made 70% of its field goals, 52% of its three-pointers, and 87.5% of its free throws in the title-clinching game. The 70% shooting performance was the best this season. The 52% shooting from deep was the best since late January. And the accuracy at the charity stripe was one half of a percentage point shy of the 88% the Jays shot against Wisconsin in Las Vegas back in November.
Late in the game, the Birdcage student section showered McDermott with chants of “One more year! One more year!” A potential NBA draft pick, McDermott will have a decision to make about his basketball future once this season is done. But the Bluejays hope that isn’t for awhile. Thanks to his hoops heroics against the Shockers, McDermott and the Bluejays are the top seed in this year’s edition of Arch Madness.
The chant could have just as well been about Creighton’s position in the ever-changing landscape of conference tectonics. Two days before one of the most hyped home games in school history, multiple media outlets reported that Creighton was the preferred program to join Xavier and Butler in entering a newly reconfigured version of the Big East Conference — in four months.
Suddenly, the biggest home game in years could have been Creighton’s final one as a member of the Missouri Valley Conference. Say what you want about whether CU could/should/might be shifting conference alliances. That the school is being publicly and/or privately courted by the likes of Marquette, Georgetown, DePaul, Providence, St. John’s, Seton Hall, and Villanova is huge news. Don’t think that it didn’t play at least a small role in how jacked up the crowd was Saturday. The atmosphere inside the CenturyLink Center as Creighton and Wichita State tipped off was electric. And thanks to McDermott, it only amplified during the afternoon.
Creighton has been the No. 1 seed in the MVC Tournament four times (1978, 1989, 1991, 2001). The Bluejays won three of those tournaments. Here’s hoping CU adds a fourth trophy as the tournament’s top seed this weekend in St. Louis.