If you’d have known before the game that Creighton would shoot 41% from the floor, 36% from behind the arc, and get outrebounded by 15, would you have guessed the Jays would win by 10? Probably not. Yet that’s exactly what happened Saturday night in Berkeley.
For that to happen, the Jays needed two standout performances. Doug McDermott scored 34 points with nine rebounds, going 4-7 from behind the arc and making all ten of his free throws. Meanwhile, Jahenns Manigat played shut-down defense for 32 minutes on Cal’s biggest offensive weapon, Allen Crabbe.
The first of those two standout performances, for better or worse, got most of the attention. In scoring 30+ points for the second consecutive game, McDermott became the first Bluejay since Bob Harstad to accomplish that feat, and upped his season average to 23.7 points per game — nearly a full point more than his average a year ago.
In a first half when his teammates struggled to make shots, McDermott scored 18 points on 6-8 shooting, including 2-2 from three-point range and 4-4 from the line. He made as many field goals as the rest of the team combined in that first half, with the rest of the Jays going 6-23 from the floor and 1-9 from three-point range. The phase “single-handedly kept his team in the game” is over-used in basketball, because it is still a team sport, but this is one of those times where it’s absolutely the truth.
As you’d expect, he was much too humble to admit that himself. “I kind of just went with the flow tonight,” McDermott told T.Scott Marr and Nick Bahe on the postgame show. “I wasn’t really forcing too much, just taking what the defense was giving me and my teammates did a really good job of finding me.”
But going forward, it’s the defensive job Manigat did that could turn out to be the most important performance of the evening, if he can parlay it into becoming the perimeter defender this team so desperately needs. Tasked with guarding the leading scorer in the Pac-12, he face-guarded him the entire night and frustrated Cal’s offensive star in a way few defenders have been able to. In the first half Crabbe went 0-9 from the floor, his only points coming on two made free throws. Whether it was behind the arc or on mid-range jumpers, wherever Crabbe went, Manigat shadowed him, never allowing him a clean look. It was particularly impressive because in order to attempt to free Crabbe for a shot, Cal ran multiple screens on every possession — and yet Manigat was tough enough to fight through them while remaining in position to contest the shot.
“I tried my best to stay right behind him, to chase him as hard as I could, and to make his shots as challenging as I could without fouling him,” Manigat noted on the AM590 postgame show after the game. “Watching the tape on Crabbe, we knew all of his tendencies. He kind of has a tendency to kick his legs out a little bit when he shoots, and Coach Mac told me to watch out for that so I could avoid it and not foul him.”
For almost all of the 32 minutes Manigat played, he was literally chasing Crabbe around, fighting through screens, sprinting back and forth from sideline to sideline, non-stop. After doing it against Ray Gallegos in Lincoln, it was easier to dismiss Manigat’s effort as either a one-game anomaly or a product of Gallegos being over-hyped; after doing in twice in a week, it’s beginning to look more like Manigat is growing into the role of taking away the other team’s best perimeter shooter — and excelling at it.
Doug McDermott heaped praise on his teammate after the game on the postgame show. “Jahenns may not be the quickest guy laterally on the ball, but he’s our best defender when it comes to chasing guys off screens. We knew it was going to be a hard night for Crabbe because he hadn’t seen anybody like that who was willing to do what Jahenns did.”
Creighton isn’t blessed with any all-around great defenders, but when they play well defensively as a team, they can be a good defensive team. Manigat gives them a tough-nosed defender that can battle through screens, Austin Chatman gives them a player capable of stopping players off the dribble, and Gregory Echenique gives them a fearsome post presence. It’s the old “the whole is greater than the sum of it’s parts” adage — while none of the three players are individually great defensively, they’re good enough that when their forces combine, they make the team’s defense great.
Almost every team has a great shooter from outside the arc; if the Jays can count on Manigat to chase that player around for 30-35 minutes a night and harass him into taking contested shots, suddenly Creighton’s defense goes from liability to potentially formidable. And that makes Creighton that much tougher to beat — even on nights when their shots aren’t falling, like Saturday night in Berkeley, they’re able to win by double-digits.