Only twice in Greg McDermott’s 18-year career as a head coach at the Division 1 level has a team of his ever allowed four consecutive opponents to shoot 50 percent or better from the field. On Friday night, his current players made sure they weren’t the first group to let it happen five straight times as they held Green Bay to a season-low 35 percent shooting in an 86-65 win at the CHI Health Center Omaha.
Sophomore sharpshooters Mitch Ballock, who led the team in scoring with 19 points, and Ty-Shon Alexander — who didn’t finish too far off that pace with 17 of his own — combined to go 8 for 15 from behind the 3-point line while helping to hold the Phoenix to 5 for 22 shooting from deep as a team. It wasn’t a flawless performance by any means, but when they needed stops they got stops, and then end result was holding a team that came in averaging 87.2 points per game to a season-low of 65.
“It wasn’t perfect, but there was certainly a lot more grit than what we’ve played with the last few games on the defensive end of the floor,” McDermott said. “Green Bay is a team that has pretty much scored on everybody all season long with the exception of maybe one game — they scored some points at Oregon, they scored some points at Iowa.
“They are an electric offensive team and I thought we did a good job for the most part at taking away their transition [offense] — we had 24 fast-break points to their nine, and that’s what they do … we wanted to take care of the ball and win the turnover battle, which we did, and we wanted to win the transition battle, which we did.”
After Green Bay junior forward ShanQuan Hemphill nailed a short turnaround jumper on the first possession of the game, the Jays responded with an 11-3 run — nine of which came on 3-pointers by Alexander and Ballock — on exclusively transition offense and looked poised to put the Phoenix away early. However, the visitors hung around and even tied the game at 19-19 and 22-22 midway through the first half. Leading 27-25 at the under-8 media timeout, Creighton rattled off a 10-2 run to stretch the lead to double figures for the first time, and they did it by creating some of their own good luck. Sophomore forward Damien Jefferson kicked off the run by crashing into the paint, corralling an offensive rebound, and rising up to lay it in at the rim. Ballock beat his man off the dribble and finished at the rim to push the lead to six, then tried to do it again on the following offensive possession. Only this time left the layup short and had to work extra hard to cash in on the possession. The 6-foot-5 guard out of Kansas tipped his own miss out toward the top perimeter, hustled after the loose ball to deflect it out to Alexander near the mid court line, bounced up off the floor, sprinted to the right corner, caught a pass from his fellow sophomore and buried the three to make it 34-27 with 4:18 left in the half. The final tally on the play was a missed layup, a tipped rebound, a floor burn, and a corner three. All in a span of seven seconds.
“[The energy level] was better,” McDermott said. “They watched the film of the Nebraska game and they didn’t like what they saw; they’re competitors. When you’re in the moment and you’re in that kind of environment — and it was a difficult environment to play in — I don’t think you realize some of the times you were half a step slow, or that you could have stuck your nose in there a little bit quicker.
“They watched all of that on film and obviously they took it personal, and we made it a point this week to make practices a little more challenging, especially for a finals week … but we had to get back to it.”
Ballock had one more big play left in him before halftime and he used it with time winding down in the first half. As Alexander was sizing up the defense for a last-second shot, Green Bay inexplicably left his teammate open in front of their own bench. Alexander swung it to him and Ballock buried it, again, to give the Bluejays a 44-34 lead at the break.
A ton of missed free throws and empty possessions early on the second half allowed the Phoenix to hang around until a personal 8-0 run from senior guard Kaleb Joseph provided Creighton with the final push they needed to seal the deal. With Green Bay within six at 62-56 with just under 10 minutes remaining, the Nashua, New Hampshire native popped a three from the top of the key, grabbed an offensive rebound and got a jumper in the lane to fall, then caught a slick behind-the-head, no-look pass from Ballock and banged home another three in transition to make it 70-56 with 7:42 to play.
Joseph scored all 11 of his points in the second half as he and freshman point guard Marcus Zegarowski combined for 24 of Creighton’s 36 points off the bench.
“I thought Marcus gave us a really good lift and got the ball moving a little bit better,” McDermott said, “and Kaleb was instrumental during that stretch where we created some separation.”
Creighton cruised to the finish line after extending the lead to double figures as Green Bay missed 16 of their final 18 shots after Joseph’s initial 3-pointer to kick off his 8-0 run. Green Bay entered the night ranked in the top 10 in tempo, according to KenPom. But in an 83-possession game, they were clearly having trouble keeping up with a pace that they normally feel pretty comfortable in.
“In the first half, coach kept telling us ‘listen, guys, they play fast, but they’ve never had a team play as fast as us,'” Zegarowski said. “The main point in our huddles was to play fast and wear them out, and eventually it started to hurt their pace on offense.”
The drop-off was noticeable in both the latter portion of the first and second half. Over the first 10 minutes of each period Green Bay outscored the Bluejays 44-40, shot 51.7 percent from the field, and only turned the ball over eight times. Over the final 10 minutes of each period, however, the Phoenix got outscored 46-21, missed 25 of their 31 shots (19.4%), and committed 10 turnovers.
“We were more locked in in the second half of both halves,” Ballock said. “They didn’t get a lot of second chances — I think they only had eight offensive rebounds. That’s huge for us. Against Nebraska that was a huge problem and it killed us multiple times. We cleaned that up a little bit, and it showed on the defensive end when we strung a lot of stops together.”
Creighton improved to 7-3 on the season with the win, and they will celebrate it by practicing on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday before heading out of town to take on an 8-1 Oklahoma team that is currently receiving votes in the Associated Press and Coaches’ Polls while also sitting at No. 17 in the latest update of the new NET rankings. The Jays and Sooners are scheduled to tip things off from the Lloyd Noble Center in Norman on Tuesday, December 18 at 8:00 p.m. (CST).
