Jim Flanery has never liked to take too long before allowing his team to get exposed against tough competition in a hostile environment. For the ninth time in his 15 years as head coach his Bluejays opened their season away from home, and for the eighth time in those nine games his team suffered a loss as they fell to 63-56 against a South Dakota State team loaded with experience.
The Jackrabbits, coming off a 66-65 loss at Stanford in the second round of the NCAA Tournament last March, returned 10 players from their 2015-16 roster, including all five starters. Senior point guard Kerri Young led four SDSU players in double figures with a game-high 17 points, while senior center Clarissa Ober chipped in a double-double with 11 points and 10 rebounds to go along with five blocked shots.
Young scored half of her team’s points as part of an 8-0 run to open the game. The Jackrabbits remained in front the rest of the night, leading for all but the first 20 seconds after the opening tip.
“We knew it was going to be tough,” Flanery said. “Not a lot of people are going to win up here, but we had done it a few different times.”
Those games he’s referred to were a 63-54 win in 2012 and an 88-81 win in 2014. Creighton shot 48.8% combined from behind the 3-point line in those two wins, however. On Friday they only shot 26.7% on just 15 attempts from beyond the arc, a byproduct of South Dakota State’s defense, but also Creighton’s reluctance at times to pull the trigger.
“They match up with us pretty well, so that kind of made it difficult,” Creighton sophomore forward Audrey Faber said. “We have to be ready to shoot our shots when they’re open. I think we were kind of reluctant to do that. We have to take our shots, because if we don’t it takes away from our offense. That’s one thing we need to improve on.”
Faber led the Bluejays in scoring with 12 points, but went 0-for-3 from beyond the arc in 30 minutes of action.
“I thought Thompson did a good job on Audrey,” Flanery said, referencing South Dakota State’s 6-foot-1 junior forward, Ellie Thompson, who had 15 points, seven rebounds, three steals, and a blocked shot in 31 minutes for the Jackrabbits.
“She shot 6-for-13 which is pretty good,” Flanery said of Faber, “but I thought we could get her more perimeter looks. For her to get shutout from the three is a credit to them.”
Creighton shot just 36.7% from the field in the first half, but held SDSU to 37.5%. That allowed them to go into the locker room trailing by just six at 30-24, but the Jackrabbits came out and scored the first six and the last eight points of the third quarter to extend the lead to 48-32 heading into the final period.
“The end of the third quarter really killed us,” Flanery said. “To fall down that much — we had kind of hung in there and had done some decent things defensively and on the glass to keep ourselves in the game, but they pushed [the lead] way out at the end of the third quarter.”
The Bluejays came out desperate to start the fourth quarter, ripping off an 11-3 run that ended with a 3-pointer by junior guard Sydney Lamberty to cut the deficit to 51-43 with 6:59 remaining. The Jackrabbits pushed the lead back out to 56-45, but a 3-pointer by senior guard MC McGrory and a traditional 3-point play by sophomore forward Ali Greene brought Creighton to within five at 56-51 with 2:31 to go.
Creighton got a stop on the ensuing defensive possession, but South Dakota State answered by trapping Greene in the post, getting a steal, and setting up Ober for a shot off the glass down low to make it 58-51.
“We ran kind of a horns set to get Ali in the post,” Flanery said as he broke down what ended up being the game-deciding possessions. “We figured they would switch the ball screen, and we had two options — either play through Ali out of the post or flip it back up top to Audrey, and have her play one on one in the middle of the floor against Thompson. She denied the pass, so we had Ali on the switch, and they did a good job fighting her off the block.”
“Then they got the late shot clock out-of-bounds basket. That was a big play where we had it down to six. Ober is a good late shot clock option for them.”
Creighton’s very next possession resulted in another turnover and the Jackrabbits finished off the game at the free throw line to improve to 1-o on the season, and drop the Jays to 0-1.
Jaylyn Agnew and Ali Greene keep Jays in the fight with contributions off the bench
South Dakota State wasn’t the only team on the floor on Friday that returned a lot of familiar faces. Creighton had 13 players back from a year ago, including their entire starting lineup, but many of the veterans in that group struggled against the Jackrabbits. The six upperclassmen (three senior and three juniors) that played combined to score just 33 points on 11-of-36 shooting (30.6%) from the field, and committed nine of the team’s 15 turnovers.
If not for the play of redshirt freshman forward Jaylyn Agnew and sophomore forward Ali Greene, the Bluejays most likely would have left Brookings, South Dakota with quite a bit more than just a seven-point loss. Greene scored seven points and grabbed six rebounds in 15 minutes, and Agnew added four points and six rebounds to go along with a steal and a blocked shots in her collegiate debut.
“Obviously it was a big game,” Agnew said. “It was their opener and my first actual game, so I was pretty nervous. After making some plays I tried to settle in and just go with the flow.”
If she was playing nervous at any point, she certainly had her coach fooled.
“I thought she’d be more sped up, to be honest,” Flanery said of the Andover, Kansas native. “For her first college game to be here, but I thought she did a really good job. She got her first game as a college player here, and then Sunday she gets to play at Wichita and she’ll have 50 people there. So I thought she would be nervous for both of these games, but she was not — she played well.”
Though she didn’t redshirt along with Agnew as part of Creighton’s 2015 freshman class, Greene didn’t exactly end up getting consistent playing time a season ago. The 6-foot-1 forward from Lino Lakes, Minnesota played 15 or more minutes in a game three times, scored seven or more points in a game just twice, and grabbed six or more rebounds in a game only once. On Friday, in front of 2,180 opposing fans at Frost Arena, she did all three.
“Last year I didn’t play a ton, so they probably didn’t expect a lot,” Greene said.
Those limited expectations didn’t stop her from working on her game in the offseason, though. She knew that despite the logjam for playing time in the front court that harnessing some of the “little things” would help her become a valuable contributor.
“We have a bunch of great posts,” Greene said. “For me, I knew I had to work really hard, and I did that in the summer and offseason. I knew everyone was really close, so the little things that I can control will get me playing time. I knew if I got really good at offensive rebounding and talking that it would help me.”