Bluejay Beat Podcast:
Finding a way to win on nights when you have something less than your ‘A’ game is often what separates good teams from great teams. Saturday night in Chicago, Creighton didn’t even have their ‘B’ game, and still found a way to eek out a 69-62 win over DePaul.
“We just didn’t have the energy and the zip that I’ve become accustomed to with this group,” Coach Greg McDermott said. “It’s hard to explain.”
They wound up in a slugfest. But it didn’t begin that way. The Blue Demons were without leading scorer and starting point guard Charlie Moore, out with an injury. They were forced to drag the game down into the mud to give themselves a chance. On the game’s first set of possessions, they dumped the ball consistently into the post for Darius Hall, who assisted on one basket and scored another. DePaul led briefly, 7-6, three minutes in the game. And then the Blue Demons missed 13 straight field goals and went almost nine minutes without a made shot.
Creighton opened up a 21-10 lead in the meantime, but had an opportunity to bury DePaul, and didn’t do it.
While all of this was happening, most people couldn’t see it — the preceding game on CBS Sports Network, BYU vs Pacific, went double overtime. If not for a makeshift stream that CBS made available on their website, Creighton fans and their radio crew would have been left in the dark. In this pandemic world, visiting radio crews aren’t traveling, which leaves them at the mercy of the television feed as they announce the games from their homes. That’s not ideal, but it works. As long as there’s a television feed to watch, that is.
Once the cable channel joined the game, a half hour in progress, things began to get weird. Denzel Mahoney was whistled for a flagrant foul for, as best as anyone not wearing referee stripes could tell, being too strong. Defending a fastbreak layup, Mahoney fouled Javon Freeman-Libert hard enough to keep him from scoring an easy basket. But an overly-sensitive official took exception. The resulting four-point possession gave a previously stagnant, nearly out of it Blue Demons squad a lift.
A minute later, now leading 21-16, Damien Jefferson was called for a technical foul after blocking a shot by Romeo Weems and then reminding him about it as they ran up the floor. Two free throws later, it was 21-18 Jays.
On the next Creighton possession, Christian Bishop was hit in mid-air on a shot attempt and thrown to the court. To their credit, the officials were consistent and called Weems for a flagrant foul. And after making three out of four free throws, CU led 24-18. But what a strange sequence.
Given new life by that strange series of whistles, DePaul took full advantage and ended the first half on 19-8 run, making seven of their final 14 shots. Ray Salnave, a transfer from Manhattan who came into the night averaging 2.9 points and hadn’t scored more than five in any game all year, had 12 in the first half — including 10 in that final surge. And so despite leading 21-10 at one point, the Jays headed into the locker room tied at 29.
That DePaul had managed to do all of that with starters Pauly Paulicap and Romeo Weems on the bench with three fouls apiece was concerning. Back on the floor to start the second, those two helped the Blue Demons take the lead by scoring on eight of their first 10 possessions. The Jays battled back to tie the game at 40, only to self-destruct and give up five points in 34 seconds out of a timeout — turning it over on an inbounds pass and surrendering a long three to Kobe Elvis, turning it over on the inbounds pass again resulting in a quick layup, and then getting whistled for a foul. After back-to-back turnovers without completing an inbounds pass, now trailing 45-40, and coming off THAT sequence, it was hard to see many paths to a Bluejay win.
The bench, specifically Ryan Kalkbrenner and Shereef Mitchell, gave them a path. Kalkbrenner scored 10 second-half points with two blocks, and Mitchell had three assists and a steal after halftime.
Down 50-45, Creighton ripped off a 9-0 run to take the lead. The run started with Mitchell finding Kalkbrenner behind the defense with a lob pass for a layup. Then Marcus Zegarowski scored five straight, capped by a steal by Jefferson and a transition three.
A dunk by Kalkbrenner, who had once again gotten behind the defense in the post, gave CU a 54-50 lead thanks to a well-timed lob pass from Mitchell.
Still nursing that lead with three minutes to play, McDermott made a key tactical decision to help get his team across the finish line. The game had turned when Mitchell checked in at the 14:22 mark and his team down 45-40; his energy sparked a lethargic Bluejay team, and his aggressive defense staggered a DePaul team that had been driving into the paint almost at will. So instead of taking his spark plug out of the game in exchange for the better offensive threat in stretch time, he got the best of both worlds: he started subbing offense-for-defense with Mitch Ballock and Shereef Mitchell.
How many senior starters would be cool with that scenario?
“If you’re coaching the right guys, they’ll all be cool with it. We’re trying to win,” McDermott said. “They trust me in those situations. Shereef was terrific defensively, and with DePaul playing without a point guard essentially, they had people handling the basketball that weren’t accustomed to it. Especially against the kind of pressure that Shereef can put on the ball. We had three timeouts so it made sense to try to get our best defensive unit on the floor, and we lucked out that we had a few deadballs in there where we didn’t have to burn a timeout to get Mitch back.”
So the Jays got both the offensive prowess (and defensive attention that goes along with it, opening up shots for other players) of Ballock, and the on-ball pressure defense of the pesky Mitchell, for the decisive stretch of the game. And it paid off.
CU ended the game on a 10-2 run, giving up just two points on DePaul’s last six possessions. It wasn’t pretty, but they found a way just in time.
“Sometimes you’ve got to win games like this when you’re not perfect,” McDermott said.
Key Stats:
The irony of this Creighton team winning a game because of free throw shooting should not be lost on anyone. They entered the game 293rd in D1 in free throw percentage (65.3%) and two of their four losses are directly attributable to missed free throws. But on a night when they made just 6-of-22 from three-point range (27.3%) they were 17-of-20 at the line and a perfect 11-of-11 in the second half. And the points that put them ahead for good with 3:02 to play?
Two free throws by Denzel Mahoney. We all saw that coming, right?
Speaking of surprising, Creighton shot 54.2% in the second half and had 10 assists on 13 made baskets. They scored 40 points on 30 possessions. Those are tremendous numbers, obscured by the choppy nature of the game and their horrendous defense.
Creighton is now 8-0 against DePaul in Chicago since joining the Big East, and the Blue Demons became the first team Creighton has ever beaten eight straight seasons on the road, including all of their years in the MVC.
Zegarowski (19), Bishop (14), Kalkbrenner (12) and Mahoney (14) each scored in double-figures for CU. And the Jays’ two primary bigs, Kalkbrenner and Bishop, combined for 26 points, 10 rebounds, two blocks and a steal.
Perhaps most encouraging? Zegarowski continued to look like his 2019-20 self, following up a comeback win over Seton Hall where he was the offensive catalyst with a comeback win over DePaul where his five consecutive points put them ahead.