Sydney Lamberty led the way in points for Creighton, but on 3-of-12 shooting. (Steur/WBR) CLICK TO BUY
For the second straight meeting the Georgetown Hoyas stifled the Creighton offense with their length and athleticism. The Hoyas improved to 12-9 overall and 5-6 in Big East play by holding the Bluejays to 25.4% shooting and hit big shots down the stretch to earn a 57-44 win on Sunday afternoon at D.J. Sokol Arena. The victory dropped Creighton to 11-12 overall and 5-6 in conference play, and also finished a regular season sweep at the hands of the Hoyas for the first time in the three years that they have been a member of the Big East Conference — the Bluejays were 4-0 against Georgetown prior to the 2015-16 season.
“I think they’re a good team. After watching them live both times I can see why we struggle to score against them,” Creighton head coach Jim Flanery said of why Georgetown has presented a particularly tough challenge for his team this season. “In the second half when our players are in front of our bench, and I’ve got a view of what’s going on, I see that they can defend the three and get to a help position differently than a lot of teams can.”
Creighton shot 7-for-30 from the field in the first half, and 8-of-29 in the second. That comes on the heels of an 8-for-30 shooting performance in the second half of the first meeting between the two schools back on January 3rd — a game they lost 69-57 — and brings their field goal percentage to an icy 25.8% over the last six quarters of action against the Hoyas.
“They’re just physically a different team than a lot of teams we play,” Creighton junior guard MC McGrory said. “I mean they’re all six-foot and very long. It seems like every team in the Big East has a little bit different style, and that’s their style. We just haven’t figured that one out yet.”
Georgetown started this game the way they finished the first meeting, by running the Bluejays into the ground in transition. Senior forward Dominique Vitalis scored six of her team-high 12 points in the first three minutes and change to help her team race out to a 12-2 lead. A 3-pointer by Creighton freshman forward Audrey Faber after a timeout finally got the Creighton offense going. Faber’s basket started a 13-2 run that was capped off with a layup by sophomore guard Sydney Lamberty to give Creighton their one and only lead of the game at 15-14 with 1:29 left to play in the opening quarter.
“I think we were screening a lot more than we were in the other quarters,” Lamberty said of how they overcame Georgetown’s initial onslaught. “We were moving and cutting and looking for the ball a lot more than we were in the other parts of the game.”
The lead was short lived, however, as Georgetown guard Jasmine Jackson beat the first quarter buzzer with a layup to give her team the lead for good. The Hoyas outscored Creighton, 17-5, in the second quarter — holding the Bluejays to 2-of-14 shooting in the period — to build a 33-20 lead going into the locker room. Georgetown rolled off the final 10 points of the quarter against a tiring Creighton team, something that Flanery regretted not handling differently after the game.
“The end of the second quarter was a killer. I should have used a timeout,” Flanery said. “I had already used one, and for whatever reason I didn’t call one there. The game kind of got away from us there too. Bri was exhausted and [Georgetown senior forward Logan Battle] hit two jumpers because she didn’t close out, I should have used a timeout when it got to 25-20. It was close and then all of a sudden it was 30-20, then we gave up the basket right at the end.”
“We didn’t end quarters well. We gave up a layup at the end of the first quarter, and the end of the second quarter was a killer. As much as we struggled on offense we still could have been better on defense in some places that would have kept the game closer. Then I think your belief is a little different, and their belief is a little different. That’s on me that we didn’t use another timeout there, because 33-20 is a lot of points against a team that defends the way they do. To be down six or eight would have been a whole different animal, because we know we’re going to make a couple threes, but we haven’t been able to go on the same kind of offensive runs against these guys — other than about the first quarter and a half we played them — that we have against a lot of teams.”
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See photos of the game from WBR Photographer Adam Streur
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Three-pointers by Lamberty and sophomore point guard Jade Owens cut Creighton’s deficit to single digits with 5:40 left in the third quarter, but Georgetown’s freshman of the year from a year ago, Dorothy Adomako, and a candidate for the award this year, Dionna White, nailed trifectas of their own to spark a 10-4 run for the Hoyas that gave them their largest lead of the game at 45-30 with 3:19 remaining in the period.
Thought Georgetown only had one player score in double figures, their young stars chipped in all-around efforts to keep them in front for the rest of the game. White finished with nine points, six rebounds, four assists, and three steals in 37 minutes; Adomako only shot 2-of-9 from the field, but still finished with seven points and a game-high nine rebounds in 36 minutes.
Sophomore guard DiDi Burton, another member of the young and talented Hoyas, entered Sunday’s contest averaging just 3.2 points per game. She connected on only three of her 10 field goal attempts on Sunday, but the final two were timely. After Creighton cut Georgetown’s lead to 49-44 on a jumper by MC McGrory with a little under three minutes remaining, Burton scored off the glass down low, then buried a jumper just inside the 3-point line to push the lead back out to 53-44. Adomako and White finished it off at free throw line as Creighton went scoreless the rest of the way.
Sydney Lamberty led the way for Creighton with 14 points and six rebounds in 32 minutes of action. Though she was only 3-of-12 from the field, she attacked the basket frequently and got to the free throw line where she converted on 7-of-8 attempts.
“My shot has definitely been off this year, so I’ve been working with the coaches outside of practice and we’ve been working a lot more on going to the basket instead of settling for threes. It helps that our team can shoot threes, so it’s hard for other teams to sag off, which gives me the lane.”
MC McGrory was the only other Bluejay in double-figures on Sunday (Streur/WBR) CLICK TO BUY
McGrory was the only other Bluejay in double figures. The junior out of Edina, Minnesota finished with 12 points, but she needed 16 shots to get there. Mostly everyone struggled with their shot, including star freshman Audrey Faber. After carrying the team through December and early January in the absence of Marissa Janning and Brianna Rollerson, Faber hit that proverbial wall that most freshman eventually find when they reach the point where they are playing more games and more minutes than they’ve ever played before.
In the loss to Georgetown she finished with five points on 2-for-10 shooting, and over the last five games she is shooting 22.9% from the field, and has hit only two of her 20 3-point attempts in that span after leading the country in 3-point field goal percentage entering that stretch. A definite cause for concern for her head coach, but not a problem Faber has to deal with on her own.
Freshman Audrey Faber struggled from the field in Sunday’s loss. (Streur/WBR) CLICK TO BUY
“It’s tough, because after Marissa got hurt we did a lot of things to build some offense around her. Now she’s going through what some freshmen go through,” Flanery said. “There are two courses, and you probably have to go somewhere in the middle. You’ve got to build her confidence and keep doing enough to get her shots, but you can’t force it, because we’ve enough other good players — MC and Lauren and Sydney and Jade, and Bailey has been playing well. We’ve got enough other options. We have to build up those guys too, so that we aren’t quite as reliant on Audrey.”
“The worse option is to throw more at her, put more pressure on her to score. She passed up a couple shots on out-of-bounds plays that we need her to squeeze. She had a wide open three with six seconds on the shot clock, but she passes it up and MC has to take a 12-foot runner at the end of the clock. Audrey still has to make those plays, but we also have to get other players to not necessarily look to her to the degree that we were looking to her in December and early January.”
“I think MC has made that adjustment, and to some degree Lauren [Works] has, and Sydney’s shooting stats aren’t going to reflect it, but I thought her willingness to attack was different this weekend than it had been, so that’s encouraging.”
Of greater concern is where Creighton stands heading into a final month of the season that features five of their final seven games away from the friendly confines of D.J. Sokol Arena. At 5-6 in Big East, the Bluejays — who were picked to finish fourth in the preseason — now sit in a tie for seventh place with the Georgetown team that owns the tie-breaker over them via the regular season sweep they just completed on Sunday. For a variety of obvious reasons, the Bluejays are not where they expected to be at this point in the season.
“We are a different team than we thought we were going to be without Marissa and with Bri being a different player than she would have been had she been healthy from the beginning,” Flanery said. “The thing is I’ve seen individual improvement from a lot of our players, and you tell them that, and you tell them that at some point we’re going to figure this out and put together more consistent stretches of good basketball.”
“I trust our players to keep working and stay positive, but it does seem like we’re two steps forward, one and a half steps back, and that’s frustrating. It’s frustrating as a coach, but it’s frustrating as a player too. You just tell them that we’re in it together. You keep practices short, but focused, and you watch a little bit more film this type of year, because I think that’s a way that you counter the physical fatigue that you could have. The second time through the league you have a blueprint for what worked and what didn’t work the first time, so that’s big. Just stay positive, watch more film, and keep practices short.”
Creighton will return to the practice floor on Monday before taking Tuesday off with Omaha bracing itself for a big snow storm that is supposed hit Monday night. They will hit the road later in the week for a weekend road trip against Butler (7-14, 2-8) and Xavier (15-6, 6-4).