DePaul hit seven of their first nine shots from the field, building an early double-digit lead and never looked back in a 70-60 road over Creighton men’s basketball at the CenturyLink Center Omaha on Wednesday night.
Blue Demon senior forward Forrest Robinson hit a career-high four 3-pointers in the DePaul’s 71-68 win over Xavier in their previous game. He needed just 5:12 of game time to best that against Creighton. The 6-foot-11 big man hit his first five shots from downtown and the Blue Demons hit six of their first seven shots from deep to race out to a 20-5 lead over the Bluejays.
“We knew we couldn’t let him shoot,” Creighton freshman Toby Hegner said. “We knew all his shots were threes. We knew it coming in. We had a mental breakdown at times.”
The Bluejays got back up off the deck, holding Robinson scoreless the rest of the half. They then used a trifecta of treys from Devin Brooks, Isaiah Zierden, and Hegner to cut the DePaul lead to single digits at 30-22 with 4:51 to go in the first half.
Just as it looked like Creighton was stealing the momentum heading into the break, the Blue Demons tightened things up on the defensive end, holding the Bluejays scoreless for three and half minutes. DePaul closed the half on a 9-3 run to extend their lead to 39-25 at halftime.
Creighton started the second half with a small, perimeter-oriented lineup and started chipping away at the DePaul lead. After trading baskets for the first couple of minutes, Toby Hegner buried a 3-pointer from the top of the key to cap off an 11-2 run and make it 49-43 with 13:12 to go. The crowd knew it was good before the ball had left Hegner’s hand and their collective gasp was rewarded.
The small lineup paid dividends for the Bluejays despite the size they gave up on the backboards. It was one move Creighton head Greg McDermott said he would’ve made sooner if had it to do all over again.
“I would’ve started small and then adjusted when they came in with [Tommy] Hamilton,” said McDermott. “We felt like we could stunt and quickly get back to Robinson, and obviously we weren’t able to do that.”
DePaul turned to their hot hand in Robinson after a 30-second timeout and the senior forward, who finished with a career-high 20 points and nine rebounds, responded by halting the Creighton run with a baseline jumper before senior forward Jamee Crockett followed that up with a 3-pointer to push the lead back to double digits. Hegner, who led the Bluejays with 15 points for the game, dropped in another 3-pointer to make it an eight-point game, but Robinson answered with his sixth 3-pointer of the contest to push the lead to 57-46 as the game reached the midway point of the second half.
Trailing 62-48 with 5:10 to play, the Bluejays made one last push to get a victory they desperately needed. It started with a jumper in the lane by Isaiah Zierden. Then after the sophomore guard hit a pair of free throws, Creighton got consecutive three-point plays in the span of seven seconds by senior forward Avery Dingman to cut DePaul’s lead to 64-58 with 3:38 to play.
Dingman, who finished with 10 points and five rebounds, said the team felt confident they had enough time to get over the hump.
“We knew we could do it. We’ve had times this year where we’ve come back from more than that,” he said.
Unfortunately for the Bluejays, Wednesday night was not going to be one of those times. On their final seven possessions, Creighton missed five shots and turned the ball over when Isaiah Zierden traveled on a pump-fake as he tried to cut into the six-point deficit with 2:01 remaining. DePaul iced the game at the free throw line, hitting 6-of-8 at the charity stripe as the fans filed for the exits.
The win for DePaul improved them to 3-0 in Big East play, which puts them in a sole possession of first place after Seton Hall’s loss at Xavier earlier in the evening. It’s the first time in program history that the Blue Demons have won their first three games in conference play. An accomplishment almost nobody expected when DePaul was picked 10th in the preseason poll back in October.
“It’s early, but I’m just really happy that our team is getting better,” DePaul head coach Oliver Purnell said. “We came into league play struggling and I think each time out we’ve played better and better. I think it’s a result of our guys’ hard work in practice and staying together when it would be easy to splinter, and then believing in what we’re doing. Those have been our anchors, so that’s always pleasing to a coach if the guys are buying and trying as a result and implementing the things that you’re working on.”
The opposite is true for the Bluejays, who are making the wrong kind of history after starting 0-3 in conference play for the first time in the last 22 seasons. Not only that, but Creighton has not won a game of any kind since a 75-60 home win over Texas Pan-American on December 19, a span of 21 days will come and go by the time the Bluejays have a chance to do anything about it on Saturday afternoon against Seton Hall.
Though they are obviously frustrated and shaken by the recent struggles, Dingman says the Bluejays just have to remember what they have already done in the non-conference in order to get back on track.
“It bothers everybody,” Dingman said. “We just can’t put ourselves in that position. This is the same team that beat Oklahoma. This is the same team that won at Nebraska. I think maybe sometimes we forget how good we can really be. We have a really good group of guys and we’ve got a long way to go, but I think we still have a lot of optimism for the second half of the year.”