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Men's Basketball

Morning After: #11 Creighton 85, Marquette 70

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[Box Score]

Key Stats: Creighton goes 17-22 from the free-throw line, while Marquette makes only 20-36 from the charity stripe. CU draws even on the boards overall, 29-29. Ethan Wragge chops down six t(h)rees.

Favorite Moment: All night long, Creighton would build a double-digit lead only to see Marquette cut into it, forcing CU to answer. With just over seven minutes to play in the game, Marquette made a last stand, trimming the lead to just five at 64-59. The crowd was suddenly into it, momentum was shifting, and if felt like with one more defensive stop Marquette’s comeback would be an unstoppable locomotive.

They looked to be en route to getting that stop, as Creighton ran most of the shot clock down without being able to get an open look. Then, with the clock under ten seconds, Doug McDermott put up a three-pointer from NBA range, buried it and immediately silenced the crowd. He’d make a tough one-handed layup on a nice drive to the rim on the next possession, and then Jahenns Manigat made the play of the night. Will Artino had a shot blocked by Chris Otule, and on the ensuing fast break, Manigat chased Todd Mayo down and got in front of him a few feet from the basket. It looked like another momentum-shifting play, a sure-fire foul-and-one. Instead, Manigat stripped the ball clean, dished an outlet pass to Devin Brooks, and Austin Chatman took advantage of a mismatch in transition to bury a three. It was a six-point swing, effectively ending any comeback hopes Marquette was still harboring.

Quick Recap: Of Creighton’s 12 Big East wins, Wednesday night’s in Milwaukee was one of its’ most impressive — the Golden Eagles had won three straight, needed a marquee win to continue their late-season drive to the postseason, and were motivated to get it against Creighton. Though they never led after the first TV timeout, they pushed the Jays all night, refusing to go away, answering every CU attempt to put the game away with a run to make it closer.

A less experienced team might have folded to any number of factors — to the rowdy crowd that tried to fuel a rally, to the physicality of Marquette’s players, to the referees’ attempts to reign in the physicality by calling lots of fouls, or even to their own missed shots. Creighton’s four seniors saw to it that they didn’t.

In a first half where Marquette successfully contained Doug McDermott, Ethan Wragge and Jahenns Manigat made them pay by raining in threes. The two seniors were a combined 7-9 from three-point range in the first half alone, with Wragge going Full Lumberjack Mode during a 90-second stretch where he made three consecutive threes. It was vintage Wragge, the sort of flurry where he makes three after three, never touching the rim on any of them, each one further out than the last. The distance of the shots wasn’t as absurd as his flurry against Xavier, and the volume wasn’t as vast as the flurry against Villanova, but it was amazing all the same.

After halftime adjustments sought to contain Wragge and Manigat’s barrage of threes, McDermott went to work. He scored 17 points in the second half, going 6-8 from the floor on a variety of mid-range jumpers, drives to the basket and fadeaway shots. They kept Marquette at arms length, with the home team never able to get closer than five points in the second half.

It was 64-59 Creighton with 7:27 to play when the sequence outlined in our “Favorite Moment” took the wind out of Marquette’s sails. From that moment until the end of the game, Creighton scored 21 points on their next 11 possessions, an other-worldly 1.91 points per possession (nearly double the D1 average). The 12th possession ended the game.

Creighton’s seniors not only refused to fold, when Marquette seemed to be making their last gasp, they broke their will with a 15-3 run and closed out the game on a 21-11 spurt. They’re now 22-4, 12-2 in the Big East, and with four games left, are in the drivers seat to win the regular season title. How does that sound?

Pretty damn good, that’s how.

Quotables:

“Otule and Gardner are big guys, and they had trouble staying with me. They’re not used to running around the perimeter. On the first three, I just kind of ran a staggered screen at the top of the key, and created some space. Then once I hit one, my mentality changed. I’ve played with these guys forever, so their mentality changed a little too — they know once I get one, to really look for me the next time down because my threes tend to come in flurries.” -Ethan Wragge on 1620AM Postgame

“This was a big game. We knew we would get their best shot. It seems like forever since we last played them, and they’re playing really hot right now. Plus this is a tough place to play — it got loud there in the second half. To get this win, it was a good test.” -Ethan Wragge on 1620AM Postgame

“I’ve really worked with the coaches to figure out a way to get open, we’ve worked on movement and screens and coming off curls. They’ve worked with me on setting screens, to make them decide — sometimes they get so locked up with me that Austin or Devin will drive right past them and make a jumper or a layup, and my guy won’t even know they scored. If they’re going to defend me like that, we’ll just do some other things to beat you.” -Ethan Wragge on 1620AM Postgame

“I thought it was pretty big to get me and Ethan hot at the beginning of the game, especially because of the way they were defending us. They were paying a lot of attention to Doug, and obviously he deserves it. For the first couple of possessions, for some reason, they were rotating off of me. Those were the best looks I’ve had in a long while. It felt really good to get back in the rhythm and knock those down.” -Jahenns Manigat on 1620AM Postgame

“It’s so difficult when you play two different defensive styles back-to-back. But we have such a veteran group, when we’re asked to flip the switch from one game to the next. I thought tonight was a great example of that. My job wasn’t too different, I had to chase Jake Thomas around. But Austin and Devin and Grant did an excellent job of understanding they needed to help me on some of those curls that he was coming off of early in the game, so kudos to those guys for understanding the scouting report on how we needed to defend them.” -Jahenns Manigat on 1620AM Postgame

(On the fastbreak steal/strip) “I usually go for a charge in that situation, but the way the game was being called I felt like I wasn’t going to get that call. At that moment, they were building momentum, their crowd was getting back into it, and I just said to myself, if you’re going to get called for a foul, you might as well go for the basketball. I just made my mind up from the time I hit the ‘Big East’ logo in the paint that I was going to try and strip it, and if they called a foul, so be it, but I wasn’t going to let him get a layup. The way he brought the ball up, my hand hit the ball and the referee was in the perfect spot to see that it was a deflection and not a foul.” -Jahenns Manigat on 1620AM Postgame

“I thought in the first half, Doug really let it come to him. I was talking to him at timeouts and said, Doug, if they’re going to do this, Ethan’s going to make them pay, Jahenns is going to make them pay, so just stay patient, keep moving, and the way they’re calling fouls especially inside, if you go down and get in the fight a little bit more, work from block to block, I think we can rack up fouls and get you to the free throw line. It was a physical game, we’re going to have some sore bodies tomorrow. Everytime a shot went up it was a wrestling match going for the rebound, so for us to hang in there and be even on the boards, I’m pretty pleased.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“It’s tough to be disciplined sometimes especially when your motor gets running and things are going good. You want to get out in passing lanes, you want to put a little more ball pressure on, and you can’t. You have to stay true to your roles. Our guys did a good job of that. There were a few breakdowns but for the most part, we kept Thomas off the three-point line pretty well and made him take some two’s off the dribble, which is what we wanted.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“Jahenns strip on the fastbreak was a huge play. Obviously he only played ten or eleven minutes against Villanova because of foul trouble, but he’s continued to play with such confidence, and continues to play hard. It was a hard-fought game, and we needed that.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“Devin gave us a little bit of everything tonight. I didn’t like the three in the first ten seconds of the shot clock, and when he came out I explained to him, Devin, you’re out there with Ethan, Doug and Jahenns. Three guys that are 50 percent three-point shooters. You’re like 20 percent. We need them to shoot the threes. You can drive to the basket and score, and Ethan can’t. Ethan doesn’t try to drive to the basket. He does what’s best for the team. I explained it to him that way, and I think he was like, ‘Oh. He doesn’t try to do that, does he.’ (laughs). It’s a fine line. You never want a player to lose his aggressiveness. I don’t want him to stop coming in to work on his three-point shot. And that shot in the last ten seconds of the shot clock is fine. But if we’re going to take a three early in the shot clock, we want our best shooters to take it. But Devin’s also doing some really good things. He got some great rebounds for us tonight. When your point guard gets the rebound, there’s no better transition offense in the world. He made a couple of great plays finding Doug and Ethan in transition. And the reality of it is I don’t think he’s turned it over in two games. He’s cleaned that up, and the bottom line is, we need him to do what he does best.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“This is a great win for us. We have great respect for Marquette. Where their program has been over the course of the last six or seven years is where we’d like to be. So for us to come in here and win, and sweep them in the regular season, is really a positive step for us. It keeps us in the chase for a conference title. At the end of day, that’s one of our goals. The deck is stacked against us a little bit with our schedule versus Villanova’s schedule, but as I told the team, we’ve won four games in a row before in our sleep. We can do it again. But we have to take them one at a time. We need tremendous focus for each one. We can’t get ahead of ourselves. We can’t celebrate what happened in the last game for very long. We need to get on to the next one, knock that one out, and move on to the next one. I’m confident that this group can do that. It’s just going to take a lot of hard work and a lot of concentration for the next ten days to two weeks.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

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