Bluejay Beat Wrap-Up Show:
Recap:
Creighton won the opening tip, and nineteen seconds later Ty-Shon Alexander opened the scoring with a three.
An already juiced crowd went crazy, and CU rode that energy to an amazing start. They made nine of their first 14 shots, and six of their first nine from 3-point range. And after going ahead 6-5 on a three by Davion Mintz, the Jays led or were tied for the next 25 minutes of the game — by as many as 11 points. They weren’t exclusively scoring outside, either; Martin Krampelj backed down a defender and drove 20 feet to the hoop for this dunk, too:
And battled multiple Gonzaga defenders to come away with an offensive rebound, and then a layup:
But the threes kept piling up, and when freshman Marcus Zegarowski stuck this one with under a minute to go, it gave the Jays a 48-39 lead — and even the most pessimistic Jays fan had to be impressed with their play over the first 20 minutes.
Then again, we’d seen this show before, hadn’t we? Creighton took a seven point lead to the half on the road against Gonzaga a year ago, only to be blitzed early in the second half and blown out by games’ end. And sure enough, Gonzaga came out on fire in the second half once again — they scored on six of their first seven possessions, and after 90 seconds had trimmed the lead to a single point. But this time Creighton’s response was emphatic, answering every Gonzaga punch with a haymaker.
After a pair of free throws by Perkins cut the lead to 50-49, Alexander hit a three to put them back up by four:
A three by Zach Norvell Jr. was answered by an offensive rebound and putback by Krampelj, their only defensive stop of the stretch, and then a layup by Alexander. Opposing big men Jacob Epperson and Rui Hachimura traded layups. And then there was a 20-second stretch where it looked like Creighton was ready to play the role of the aggressor instead of letting the nation’s number one team come into their arena and steal a win — Damien Jefferson fought off a pair of defenders for an offensive board and scored on a putback, and then Davion Mintz did THIS:
Driving the length of the floor, he split two defenders at the free throw line and EXPLODED through the lane for a thunderous dunk. Just like that, the arena was rocking, Creighton was back up by seven, and Mark Few had to call timeout to keep the game from getting out of hand.
“We had a real opportunity to start the second half,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio interview. “We started with scoring on seven out of eight possessions to start the half. But we were still only up by seven. Generally you’re taking a seven point lead and turning it into a 15-or-16 point lead if you do that. But they matched us basket for basket.”
The key player in last year’s surge, Zach Norvell Jr., was 2-of-8 and 1-of-6 from three point range in the first half this time around. Everyone kind of figured he’d get hot at some point. Unfortunately, just like last year, he made the second half into the Zach Norvell Show.
On the very first play of the half, he had a driving lane open up because Creighton’s help-side defense was late to rotate. He scored a relatively easy basket, and compounding matters, Krampelj was whistled for a foul — his third — that would limit his aggressiveness defensively. Norvell converted the three-point play, and like all great shooters, that was all he needed to get rolling. He hit back-to-back threes in the span of a minute immediately afterward.
“One of those was a really tough shot,” McDermott said. “The other was a miscommunication on a switch. And against a great player like that, you can’t make those kind of mistakes. He will make you pay. We talked to our team about the fact that Gonzaga was going to try to get him going early in the second half. They did just that, and we made a couple of mistakes that let him get started.”
For awhile, Creighton kept pace. They still led by seven even after Norvell had scored nine quick points out of the break, and managed to keep Norvell scoreless for the next five minutes. A breathless four minute stretch ensued where the teams ran up and down, scoring points in bunches, trading one huge bucket for another, raising the ante. GU’s Corey Kispert hit a three to put them ahead 66-65. Zegarowski hit one for the Jays to go back ahead 68-66. Brandon Clarke converted a three-point play to give GU a 69-68 lead. Alexander hit a three to put Creighton back up 71-68. Kispert hit a second 3 for Gonzaga and they led again. Samson Froling made a nifty move in the paint to score a layup, and Creighton was back on top 73-72. Creighton was getting #1 Gonzaga’s best shot, and answering it, literally and figuratively. This was fun stuff.
But in order for the fun to continue, Creighton either needed to start getting stops defensively, or continue matching Gonzaga shot for shot. Neither of those things happened in the game’s decisive stretch.
Gonzaga turned that 73-72 Creighton lead into a 84-73 lead for themselves over two very quick, very excruciating minutes. The 12-0 run started at the 10:58 mark with a three by Josh Perkins, continued with back-to-back threes (again) from Norvell, and ended with Norvell scoring at the rim after Creighton missed three shots at the rim on one possession.
“We were up 73-72, and we got a couple of pretty good looks at threes, they scored, and then we turned it over three times in a row,” McDermott said. “And on two of the turnovers, we had dunks on the backside. Marcus’ pass got tipped, Davion’s got picked off, and in both cases we were behind the defense and our big men had wide-open dunks if we could have gotten them the ball.”
They didn’t, of course, and combined with Norvell making five of his first six 3-pointers in the second half, Creighton found themselves on the wrong side of a second half avalanche for the second straight season.
More excruciating than watching Norvell bomb them from 25-feet out time after time? With 8:35 to go, Krampelj had a shot at the rim blocked by Brandon Clarke. A scrum for the offensive rebound ensued, and Damien Jefferson came away with the ball. His putback was also blocked by Clarke. A second offensive rebound led to a third shot from point blank range, and a third shot altered by Clarke — this one wasn’t blocked, but it missed, and ended with Norvell making the layup that put his team up by 11.
Norvell shot the Bulldogs into the lead, but he also nearly shot the Jays back into it. He missed his last five 3-point attempts, including a couple of bad, forced looks, and with 2:30 left Creighton had clawed it’s way back into the game at 90-85 after Kaleb Joseph drove to the rim for a layup. Though they’d get no closer, the fact that this was a two-possession game that late is one that Creighton’s coaching staff used to hammer home a point about focus and valuing every single possession.
“A five-point game is as simple as we communicate the switch where Norvell hits that three, and we stop a two-pointer because our help rotates early, and those five points are gone,” McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “And if we eliminate a bad shot, and we eliminate a bad pass, we score five points on those two possessions instead. A five-point deficit is just two possessions that you change on defense and two possessions that you change on offense — and then you’re up five. It’s that close.”
“Our guys have to understand that every possession matters. When you’re playing a great team you cannot take a possession off. We had stretches where there weren’t a lot of whistles, and it was up-and-down for multiple possessions at a time, and fatigue started to set in. I told our guys, we want games like that! We cannot act like we’re ever tired. That’s for the other team to do. I think there’s going to be enough plays when we re-watch the film where we’ll see we were a half-step slow, because we were a little bit tired, and we have to be able to fight through that.”
McDermott was disappointed in the loss, but encouraged by the growth his team showed. The overwhelming majority of Creighton fans on social media and the Bluejay Underground seemed to echo those sentiments. And why not?
For most of Saturday, the difference between the Bluejay team who struggled to score, to defend, to make smart decisions, and was nearly upset by Western Illinois and ETSU to open the season — and the team on the floor Saturday afternoon — was night and day. Basketball teams don’t usually grow up this quickly. But between the loss to Ohio State on November 15 and Saturday’s game against Gonzaga, a span of just over two calendar weeks, Creighton’s young team has grown into a confident offensive group who’s improving defensively and on the glass. In two weeks the conversation has changed from “how good can this team be in February?” to “this team’s pretty damn good right now — and will be even better by February.”
Mitch Ballock, for one, wasn’t having any of that. At the end of his interview with 1620AM following the game, he sounded annoyed at the very idea of this being a moral victory, and bristled at the notion of even being happy with their effort.
“There is a lot we can take from this, but we don’t want to be close going forward. We want a (win). But thanks.”
In the hallway outside the locker room, he told the Omaha World-Herald’s Tom Shatel that he wanted his teammates to forget about the good things that happened and focus on improving the things that went badly.
“In my two years here, we’re always talking about the good things,” Shatel quoted him in his column, “but not doing anything about the bad. Scrap the first half. Forget it.”
Creighton looks to have the talent in place to be really good. And it’s happening quicker than most of us expected. If they embrace Ballock’s mindset, the ceiling for this team is going to be more than merely “really good.”
The ceiling could be “great.”
Key Stats:
Creighton made 14 three-pointers while shooting 40% from the perimeter, grabbed 11 offensive rebounds, turned it over just eight times, and still lost the game by 11 points. Those are usually numbers that get you a win. But not against a veteran, star-laden, national title contender. You have to play two complete halves to get a win against a team like that, and CU did not.
Creighton was even on the glass (17-17), had just three turnovers, made 9-of-20 from three-point range, and attempted the same number of free throws (6) as Gonzaga in the first half. In the second? They were outrebounded 24-16, surrendered 62 points (an absurd 1.55 points per possession), made a more pedestrian 5-of-14 from three, and attempted four free throws while Gonzaga attempted TWENTY ONE.
Individually, Mitch Ballock, Davion Mintz and Marcus Zegarowski combined to shoot 8-of-23 from the field with six assists and six turnovers, which aren’t numbers you can win with against teams this good. But Ty-Shon Alexander was once again fantastic, scoring 27 points with five assists and just one turnover in 36 minutes. Yes, he took 22 shots which is probably too many, but it’s hard to be too upset about it when he makes 50% of them. And Damien Jefferson was fantastic, too, falling one rebound shy of a double-double (15 points, nine rebounds including four offensive boards). And the big men all contributed positively — Martin Krampelj did good things offensively (10 points on 4-of-7 shooting) and on the glass (six boards, three offensive), though his defense left a lot to be desired; Jacob Epperson was a perfect 4-of-4 from the field and had two blocks while showing more aggressiveness and tenacity defensively than we’re used to seeing; and Samson Froling played nine important minutes when Krampelj and Epperson were both in foul trouble.
Unfortunately, Gonzaga’s stars played like stars. It’s not very often you see three players on an opposing team log double-doubles — Brandon Clarke had 27 points and 10 rebounds, Rui Hachimura had 22 points and 11 rebounds, and Josh Perkins had 13 points and 13 assists. And yet none of those three led them in scoring; that was Zach Norvell, Jr. who scored 28 points.
