Bluejay Beat Podcast:
Tuesday night in Norman, Creighton’s shortcomings were laid bare: against a long, athletic power conference opponent, they missed their first 12 three pointers, made just seven of 30 overall from long range, turned it over 18 times, missed nine free throws (going 5-for-14), and were shredded defensively in the paint to the tune of 44 points allowed.
And small mistakes defensively added up: They fouled jump shooters at crucial moments, they missed box-outs resulting in offensive rebounds and second-chance points, and they were late on rotations that resulted in open looks.
In losses to Gonzaga, Nebraska, and now Oklahoma, CU played well enough to win for 30 minutes but were done in by one long, bad stretch of basketball that buried them in a hole they couldn’t dig out of. In this one, they found themselves on the wrong side of a 20-2 run in the first half where Oklahoma repeatedly drove from the perimeter straight to the basket, and without a rim protector or a consistent lock-down defender on the wing, the Jays couldn’t do much to stop it.
Roster construction is a discussion for the off-season, so lamenting the lack of a rim protector or a defensive stopper isn’t going to help the 2018-19 Bluejays. But 18 turnovers — 13 of them by Damien Jefferson (3), Ty-Shon Alexander (3), Davion Mintz (4), and Marcus Zegarowski (3) — is something they can control, and need to fix. Making 35% of their free throws (and 61.4% for the season, ranking among the bottom 20 teams in D1) is something they have to get better at. And getting minimal production from two key pieces — Mitch Ballock missed all 11 shots he took, including nine 3-pointers, and Ty-Shon Alexander (nine points on 3-of-10 shooting) failed to score in double-digits for the first time all season — can’t happen for them to win. Those are things they can control, and will need to if they’re to finish where they hope to.
The 83-70 loss left a pretty vocal portion of the Bluejay fanbase frustrated. And it left the team at 7-4, having lost all four of the marquee games on their non-conference slate (Ohio State, Gonzaga, Nebraska, Oklahoma). There was a deflating sense to that loss.
In that sense, Thursday’s game against a woefully undersized, overmatched D3 Coe College team came at the perfect time.
The Kohawks of Coe College boast a roster with 24 (!!) players, including five without an official jersey number, but only one player taller than 6’6″. Creighton took advantage of that height advantage early on Thursday, with Martin Krampelj scoring 16 first-half points in the first nine minutes of the game — he made 7-of-9 shots during that stretch, most of them uncontested dunks. It was the kind of physical mismatch you don’t see very often in college basketball, and if the score had been closer, he might very well have challenged Doug McDermott’s arena record for points in a game.
As it was, he saw the floor for just two more minutes after that opening salvo, making his only other shot attempt on an alley-oop from Mitch Ballock before taking the rest of the night off.
It’s tempting to discount his line given the level of competition, but it came on the heels of a similarly big performance against Oklahoma. Krampelj had a season-high 19 points at Oklahoma, making 9-of-12 shots with five dunks against the Sooner front line. He’s still rounding into form after ACL surgery, and if this week’s games are any indication, he’s getting closer to his old self at the right time.
Coe played the Bluejays close for four minutes, and even held a lead briefly at 3-2. A pair of threes by Adam McDermott — the nephew and godson of Greg McDermott and the reason this game was scheduled — sent them into the under-16 media timeout trailing 13-9. Coming out of that timeout, Creighton scored 19 of the next 22 points, and opened up a 60-31 lead by halftime. It was a breathless half, literally, with so few whistles that the teams played over six minutes at one point without a stoppage — when Greg McDermott finally put an end to the madness by calling for a 30-second timeout with five minutes left in the half, there were eight players (EIGHT!) waiting at the scorers table to check in. The Bluejays scored on 14 of 16 possessions during that span, making six consecutive three-pointers.
The game’s first foul was whistled with 2:29 to go in the half; there were three total fouls in the entire half, and six for the game. Part of that was the sheer number of jump shots — Coe took 36 three pointers and made 16; Creighton took 37 and made 22 — and part of it was Coe’s lack of size leading to one of least-physical games you’ll ever see.
Creighton’s had a challenging slate so far, without the usual mix of cupcakes to allow them the chance to get extended minutes for the entire roster. In that sense, Thursday’s game was perfect — Christian Bishop and Connor Cashaw played 17 minutes apiece, Samson Froling played 21, Kaleb Joseph played 26, Jordan Scurry saw 11. And now there’s a ton of film for coaches to break down with them.
“Unfortunately, with the schedule we’ve played, tonight was really the first time we’ve had to let the guys play through mistakes,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame show. “This is great for Kaleb and Connor and Sam and Christian. It’s awesome for them to be able to play extended minutes, and play with some fatigue as well.”
The Jays set a team record for most threes in a game with 22, though if I’m being honest I’m torn about that — the record they broke was the 21 threes they made at Villanova in 2014, and replacing The Ethan Wragge Game atop the record book with whatever name you want to give Thursday’s 50-point romp is bittersweet. Finding their shooting stroke was nice to see, but some of the same issues that plagued them at Oklahoma were still bubbling near the surface of this one, too, and against stiffer competition might have led to a different result. They made just 50% of their free throws (4-of-8). They turned it over 15 times, many of them unforced errors on sloppy passes or overly-complicated maneuvers.
“We need to take better control of the basketball if we want to do what we expect to in Big East play,” McDermott admitted. “But we’re making progress. I see it on film, in small ways, and hopefully that continues. Hopefully we’re playing really good basketball in February, and hopefully we have a record that’s good enough to carry us into March.”
