The Creighton men’s basketball team hits the road for an important two-game road trip. First stop: Cincinnati, to face Xavier on Saturday.
There have been several epic matchups between the two schools before meeting for the first time this season as members of the Big East. The one that sticks in my mind is the New Year’s Eve showdown back in 2002 when Kyle Korver and David West squared off. Another one includes a 2006 game: #24 Xavier came to Omaha after the Bluejays lost at Dayton and a fired up Jays team (and crowd) earned a 73-67 victory. One I would like to get out of my mind was the meeting down at the Old Spice Classic in the 2009-10 season after the huge letdown the day before against Michigan. The Bluejays were just spanked by Xavier 80-67 in a game where the score doesn’t represent how bad the Bluejays looked.
Now as a part of the Big East, we get to see these great match-ups between two Jesuit schools every season home and away. We all know how the first meeting turned out. But now it is time for the rematch. A standing room only crowd will be waiting for the Bluejays on Saturday.
To help get caught up with what is happening with the Musketeers since the first meeting. We talked to Joel D from Banners on the Parkway. (also @bannersparkway on Twitter). Here is what he had to say:
White & Blue Review: Semaj Christon seems like a great leader for the Musketeers. He can score from about anywhere on the court, gets to the free throw line, distributes the ball so well and is the workhorse in minutes. How has his effectiveness trended as the season has gone on? Does he try to do too much sometimes?
Joel D: Semaj is unquestionably Xavier’s MVP this year. Even when he is having trouble scoring the basketball, he has such a deep skill set (witness his 7 rebound, 6 assist performance against St. John’s) that he contributes in other ways. As the season has gone on, his play has picked up. His growth as a defender on and off the ball has been meaningful, and he has done a much better job of converting the free throw attempts he earns (74% in conference as opposed to 59% in non-conference play). As far as doing too much is concerned, Semaj is more likely to suffer from the opposite problem. It hasn’t been as frequent lately, but there have certainly been games where he would go the first 8 or 12 minutes working to get his teammates involved at the complete expense of trying to get his own buckets. While I appreciate the thought, he is too explosive a scorer to wait that long to get his feet wet.
WBR: Just looking at Matt Stainbrook, you wouldn’t think he was much of a basketball player, but in reality he does a great job working the paint and a big part of the offense. What kind of matchup problems does a team like Creighton cause for his effectiveness? If he gets pulled outside of the paint by Doug McDermott or Ethan Wragge on defense, is it more important to have him on the floor just for his offense or does Coach Mack go with the odds?
Joel D: One of the things that might give away Matt Stainbrook as a basketball player is that he is six feet and ten inches tall. I’m about 6’3″, and I occasionally have people come up to me and ask if I play basketball. I would be willing to bet at least half of the people he walks past look at him and make the same assumption about him. It’s profiling, but we live in a broken society.
As far as information that is of any use in actually answering your question, lateral mobility over wide spaces is not (as you may have guessed) Matt’s strong suit. The farther away from the rim you get him on defense, the less comfortable and effective he is going to be. With Wragge and McDermott on the floor, it’s tough to find a place to put Matt on defense. The trade-off is, as you’ve mentioned, the fact that Creighton doesn’t really have anyone in the starting lineup who can reliably keep him from doing his thing on the other end. Coach Mack is vocally pro-defense, so it will be interesting to see his thought process in terms of in-game substitutions.
One potential spanner in the works is freshman F/C Jalen Reynolds. He was a highly-touted recruit two years ago before running afoul of the NCAA’s inscrutable eligibility criteria. The dude is built like a pterodactyl and is incredibly athletic. He has demonstrated an almost unparalleled enthusiasm for fouling, but he stayed clean against St. John’s and demolished them to the tune of 17 and 16 on Tuesday. I’m not sure I want to see him on McDermott, but he might be able to check Wragge for portions of the game to give Xavier a more flexible defense without completely losing interior offense.
WBR: As a team, Xavier has appeared to have a lot of ups and downs this season including going 4-5 in the past 9 games. However, they seem pretty solid for an NCAA bid. What has kept them from winning some of the recent games and having the inconsistent play?
Joel D: It comes down to defense for Xavier, to the point that we just spent a series of posts discussing what exactly was happening at that end of the floor. Coach Mack is a proponent of the packline defense, which places the on-ball defender in his man’s pocket and has his teammates all within an imaginary line a set distance from the basket. Xavier’s line was too close to the rim for the speed of our forwards, and teams were able to get way too many clean looks at the basket from deep. There are, as it turns out, a lot of guys in the Big East who can hit a wide open three if given enough opportunities to do so, and that was killing X.
There were signs of an adjustment against St. John’s, but it’s hard to take too much away from one of their shooting performances since they can’t shoot. If Xavier is getting stops on defense, that frees up the transition game, gets our scorers into a rhythm, and generally makes life a lot better for the Musketeer faithful. The defensive end is the wild card right now; the more solid this team is there, the farther they are going to go in March.
WBR: Are you surprised by the success that Creighton and Xavier has had so far in the first season of this revamped Big East? How have things been different for the team this season compared to the A-10?
Joel D: I’m not surprised too much by Creighton, because they have a consensus first-team all American in Doug McDermott. He had already proven he could do it to any team in the country, so I figured the Bluejays would be able to compete on the basis of his presence alone. I’m not sure I figured them for winning the league though. I knew the talent was there for Xavier, but it’s hard to be too confident coming off of a 17-win season in the A-10. There have been hiccups along the way (as noted above), but if you had offered me third in the league heading into March back when the season began, I would have taken it.
The difference between the Big East and the A-10 is immense this time of year. If you’re on the bubble and staring down the barrel of @Fordham, Duquesne, @St. Bonaventure as your home stretch, you don’t feel good about the chances of boosting your RPI and impressing the committee. The at-large bid process in the A-10 was basically about trying to take care of business against bad teams and hoping other bubble hopefuls would falter. With a week left in Big East play, the Muskies can make their own luck. At this time of year, that’s the best place to be.
WBR: We know that the game on Saturday is sold out and for the first time the Cintas Center will have a standing room only crowd. How much will the crowd be pumped for this game and how important is this game for Xavier to get a win to bolster their NCAA resume? Where do you anticipate they would be seeded?
Joel D: I think there’s no question the crowd will be up for the game. If you put even a decent team on the floor at the Cintas Center, the stands will be packed with engaged, excitable folks. Since the building opened in 2000, Xavier is averaging an attendance of 10,010 in a 10,250-seat arena. Musketeer fans are some of the best in the world, and they make Cintas a tough place to play for opponents.
I’m going to cop out on the most meaningful aspects of that question. As you said, this is a potential resume game for Xavier, and there is another one on the way in their game against Nova on the 6th. Playing two games in less than a week against teams that every reputable rankings system has in the top 10 brings with it the potential for serious movement on the s-curve. To give you something of an answer, I think Xavier is in the tournament as long as they beat Seton Hall this week. If the Muskies win one of the home games and make a good showing in the Big East tournament, I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility that they find their way into a six seed if things break nicely elsewhere.
WBR: What is your final prediction? What will Creighton have to do to escape with a win?
Joel D: I predicted in a piece we ran Sunday that Xavier would win this one in a shootout, so I’m going to stick with that. For posterity, let’s call it 84-79 for the home team. Unless Coach Mack further tweaks the defense, Creighton is going to get looks from beyond the arc. If they want to win the game, they need to lift from deep at every opportunity and let their shooting prowess carry the day.
We did our own Q&A on with the Banners on the Parkway crew. You can read that here.