St. John’s was all over the Creighton offense (Spomer / WBR) CLICK TO BUY
Even in their best moments all cylinders never fired at the same the time for Creighton on Wednesday night. If the offense was rolling, the defense couldn’t stop a nosebleed; if they strung together stops, they missed shots or turned the ball over. Add in a St. John’s team that rolled into Omaha ready to fight for their lives, and the result was a deflated Jays bench and an almost completely emptied out arena watching the Red Storm roll to an 83-67 win that didn’t feel even that close for much of the second half.
Despite coming to Omaha having lost four of their last five games with road trips at Creighton, Duke, and Marquette awaiting them in their next three outings, St. John’s head coach Chris Mullin wasn’t worried about how his team was going to bounce back.
“We had a nice little talk yesterday, but really my message to them was we’re in good shape,” Mullin said. “Coming in we had 10 more league games left and we haven’t played terrible basketball. We’ve had some tough stretches, tough breaks, but who doesn’t? It’s called sports, it’s called life. I felt very confident that we were going to come out and play a good game.
“I thought we executed really well defensively. I thought our transition defense was really good. We guarded their 3-point shooters well, we fought in the post, we rebounded. We went out and played great.”
Junior guard Shamorie Ponds was the heartbeat of the game tonight. As he went, everything went. The St. John’s superstar filled up the stat sheet with a game-high 26 points on 10 of 17 shooting to go along with a game-high eight rebounds, a game-high eight assists, and a game-high six steals in 35 minutes of action. Three other St. John’s players joined him in double figures as junior guard Mustapha Heron had 17, sophomore guard LJ Figuerao had 15, while sophomore Bryan Trimble, Jr. chipped in 11 in 33 minutes off the bench to fill the role of junior guard Justin Simon who started, but was limited to just seven minutes of game time due to a migraine.
Creighton tried to get touches to Martin Krampelj in the post, but it was difficult (Spomer / WBR) CLICK TO BUY
Creighton ended up with three players in double figures led by sophomore guard, and reigning Big East Player of the Week, Ty-Shon Alexander with 15, junior center Martin Krampelj with 14, and freshman point guard Marcus Zegarowski who added 13 points to go along with six assists, three steals, and only one turnover in a game-high 39 minutes.
For the second game in a row, the Jays struggled from behind the 3-point line. After shooting 30.4 percent in the win over Butler, they followed it up with an even worse performance by going 9-for-34 (26.5%) against the Red Storm.
St. John’s, on the other hand, knocked down 13 of their 31 attempts from long range, and it began and ended with The Shamorie Show.
The Big East Preseason Player of the Year sank three in a row from long distance over the final 1:52 of the first half to spark a 12-2 run that resulted in a 44-34 halftime lead for the Red Storm. Thirteen of his 16 first-half points came over the final 8:20 of the opening period. He finished the game 4 of 8 from beyond the arc, and five of his eight assists led to threes as well. When the dust settled he was responsible for 56.6 percent of his team’s scoring between that 26 points that he scored on his own and the 21 that his eight assists produced for his teammates.
“We put him in some match-ups that we liked,” Mullin said of how his star play-maker got uncorked. “They were moving Krampelj around on different guys, and what we really tried to do tonight was be really aggressive initially. If we had a nice open look or a layup, we wanted it, but if not we were going to come back out and be a little more decisive in who we wanted to attack. I thought Shamorie did a great job in controlling that.
“He was doing a good job in attacking offensively, sharing it, and also being aggressive in transition, and like I said, when he didn’t have anything he brought it back out and made sure we got the match-up that we wanted.”
Creighton tried to establish more of an inside presence with Krampelj in the second half, and had some success early as they cut the deficit to 48-40 with 17:19 left, but St. John’s answered with a 9-0 run to build their largest lead of the game two and half minutes later.
See Photos from the Game Courtesy of Mike Spomer
The Bluejays eventually trimmed that lead to 11 with about eight minutes to go, but the Red Storm again countered with a big run to build an insurmountable 83-62 lead with 4:13 remaining. St. John’s didn’t score another point the rest of the way, but then it didn’t matter. The Jays had waved the white flag and the arena had all but entirely emptied out as Creighton fell to 12-9 overall and 3-5 in Big East play.
“We haven’t had a ton of clankers this year where we just haven’t hooked it up or played the way I think we are capable of playing,” Creighton head coach Greg McDermott said, “but we had one tonight. You have to credit St. John’s for a lot of that … but when a team isn’t ready to play — or they don’t handle success properly — generally, in my experience, that manifests itself on the practice floor, and as I told the team I felt like we had two great practices the last two days. I felt as good about our preparation and our mental state going into this game as I have any one of our conference games, but for whatever reason we didn’t have it. And we had a couple guys that have been playing really well that had poor games.
“It happens in the game of basketball sometimes, and we just have to make sure this doesn’t impact us more than tonight. I’ll watch it tonight, we’ll share some things with the guys tomorrow, then we need to wipe it and get ready for an important game against Xavier on Sunday.”
Creighton will practice tomorrow afternoon and Saturday morning at the Championship Center and get ready for a Musketeers squad that will bring a similar amount of urgency to the court as Creighton on Sunday regardless of how their game at Georgetown plays out between now and tip time in Omaha.
The Jays and the X-Men are scheduled for a 12:00 p.m. (CST) tip-off in Omaha on Super Bowl Sunday.