Molly Mogensen found herself in a precarious situation that all playmakers get into at some point throughout a 40-minute game. As the third quarter was winding to a close, she deflected an exchange between Maddie Burke and Lucy Olsen and slid to the other side of mid-court to beat Olsen to the loose ball. There she laid, flat on her back, waiting. Those milliseconds of time slow down for the savviest of decision-makers, and they did once again in that instance as Mogensen found her window to flip a pass over a Villanova defender and into the hands of her teammate of four years, Emma Ronsiek, to initiate a fast break that resulted in an uncontested layup.
“I knew my teammates were going to swarm when I was on the floor,” Mogensen said. “It happened to be Emma, and then Kennedy [Townsend] got the layup.”
Molly Mogensen made plays in crunch time at the end of quarters (Williams / WBR)
That play gave Creighton its largest lead of the game at the time. It was a microcosm of the type of plays Mogensen made all day in crunch time at the end of quarters. She crossed up Olsen in the lane and beat the first quarter buzzer with a layup. Right before halftime, she hit a pull-up jumper in the lane, then stole the ball from Maddie Weber and flipped it to Lauren Jensen for a 3-pointer in transition that gave her team their first lead of the game, then the steal, dive, and flip to Ronsiek to put them up by 11 late in the third quarter. Those moments were part of a 13-point, 6-assist, 4-steal effort from the senior point guard that helped the Bluejays overcome a 15-point deficit to lead by as many as 21 points in a 79-69 win over Villanova in front of 2,188 “pinked-out” fans at D.J. Sokol Arena on Saturday afternoon.
“I think the some of the plays Molly made early were huge,” Creighton head coach Jim Flanery said. “Just in terms of steadying us and getting us a little bit back into the game with our heads up.”
Villanova entered the game with a sense of desperation. At 17-9 overall and 10-5 in Big East play, they not only needed a win over Creighton to keep themselves in position to steal away the No. 2 seed in the Big East Tournament, but a NET ranking of 47 and a KPI of 42, a signature win over the Jays would greatly enhance their chances at earning an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament. Their intensity from the second the ball was tipped reflected all of those scenarios. After shooting 0-for-17 from 3-point territory in the first meeting with Creighton this season — a 63-49 home loss back on January 21 — the Wildcats buried their first four attempts from long range on Saturday. Two of those makes came on their first two offensive possessions of the game, which prompted Flanery to call a rare early timeout just 48 seconds in.
“I normally would not even think about calling a timeout that quickly, but we just weren’t attentive the first couple possessions,” Flanery said. “I knew what frame of mind Villanova was in based on what I had seen [against Providence] on Wednesday, and the importance of this game for them. They are playing for their lives to get in the NCAA tournament. I just felt like the urgency piece was not there at first. I know it’s only a few possessions, but it has to be there because they’re too good of a team to have it go too many more. Because they got confident and that was the frustrating thing to me. When you give up a couple that you don’t need to, a team gets confident, and then they make tougher shots. Then you’re playing with fire at that point.”
Creighton was more locked into the details out of the timeout, but they still kept getting burned by that aforementioned metaphorical fire as the Wildcats knocked down five threes in the opening 10 minutes to build a 15-point lead. That’s when Mogensen put the Big East’s leading scorer, Lucy Olsen, on skates with a right-to-left crossover into a scoop layup as the first quarter expired.
“I think [it sent a message] that we’re still here and we’re not going to fold,” Mogensen said.
Lauren Jensen hit some key shots in the game (Williams / WBR)
Typically, a buzzer-beater to trim a deficit to 23-10 going into a stoppage isn’t something that flips momentum from one team to the other, but in this case it clearly did. Creighton came out and scored on five of its first seven possessions of the second quarter to pull within five at 27-22. The Bluejays got over the hump a few minutes later when after a pair of her own buckets, Mogensen chased down an errant dribble by Maddie Webber, drove down the right sideline, and pitched it back to Lauren Jensen for a go-ahead 3-pointer with just over a minute remaining in the second quarter. That gave Creighton its first lead of the entire game at 33-31 and they went into the break tied at 33 after trailing by 15 before Mogensen’s saucy, buzzer-beating layup.
The Jays’ mojo still had some steam to start the third quarter as senior Morgan Maly got her go-to, one-legged fall-away jumper in the lane to go on the first possession of the third quarter, then cashed a 3-pointer from a few behind the line in front of her head coach on the second for a personal 5-0 run in the span of 50 seconds. This spurt came after she scored seven of Creighton’s first 12 points in the second quarter to get the team rolling offensively and pump some juice into the crowd.
“I think in the second half what was different compared to the first is I wasn’t aggressive and like trying to catch the ball on those spots,” Maly said. “We knew with Emma’s matchup that mine was better, especially in the mid-post, so I just tried to make one play at a time.”
Morgan Maly did her part in the win over Villanova (Williams / WBR)
Maly scored again out of the mid-post after a basket by Villanova’s Kaitlyn Orihel. The Wildcats again got within a possession on a tough mid-range jumper by Olsen, but the floodgates burst open shortly after that. Over a 10-minute span of game time from the end of the third quarter to just past the midway point of the fourth, Creighton scored on 14 of 15 possessions, hit 13 of their 16 shots — including six of their seven 3-point attempts — to extend their lead to 76-55 with 3:40 left in the game. The Bluejays averaged 1.51 points per possession during that back-breaking, game-deciding stretch. Villanova scored on their final six possessions of the game to cut a 36-point swing down to a more respectable 10-point loss.
Creighton made 12 threes and shot 60.0% for the game from beyond the arc, both season-highs given up by Villanova’s defense. Lauren Jensen put up 20 points for the second time in the last three games to go along with four assists and no turnovers. Maly added 18 points, which as was the case with Jensen’s 20, all came over the final three quarters. She also had a team-high eight rebounds. Emma Ronsiek rounded out the production from Creighton’s fantastic four with 15 points, five assists, and a pair of blocked shots. All together, they shot 10 for 16 from 3-point range and produced 66 of the 79 points.
“They are extremely tough,” Villanova head coach Denise Dillon said. “Unfortunately, we did what we cannot do you know [against Creighton]. We were leaving scorers to go crowd the ball, and it’s too easy for them to make those passes to another threat on the floor. We’re asking for that one on one coverage, but you know, it’s hard for a team to watch when you’re seeing Maly get comfortable as you’re working to get her out of position when she’s catching. So of course, someone tries to run at her and it’s easy for her to make that pass that extra pass and Jensen knocked down shots; Ronsiek got shots from the outside. They just have so many scoring threats.”
The comeback win moved Creighton’s overall record on the season to 22-4. More significantly it improved them to 13-3 in Big East play to help them wrap up second place in the Big East standings behind UConn.
The Jays will take Sunday off and return to the practice floor on Monday to prepare for their regular season home finale against Xavier. That game is scheduled for a 6:00 p.m. tip-off from D.J. Sokol Arena on Tuesday, February 27 and will be streamed live on Flo Hoops.