Key Stats:
Loyola scored a very similar 25 first-half points and 27 second-half points, but turned it over 13 times in the second after just five in the first. Meanwhile the Bluejays went 4-13 from three-point range in the first half and attempted just five 3’s after the break, scoring 38 of their 52 second-half points in the paint, and 22 of them off turnovers.
Standout Performance:
Justin Patton picked up two early fouls and played just eight minutes in the first half, attempting just one field goal (though he did make it). In the second half?
From lob dunks to fastbreak layups, from cuts to the rim to dunks in the halfcourt, and just about everything a big man can do offensively in between, Patton schooled the Greyhounds. He was a perfect 7-7 from the floor, grabbed five boards, and scored 14 points in just 11 minutes of action after the break. If there was a silver lining to the lethargic first-half play of the Jays, it’s that it led to the highly entertaining second half above-the-rim show — Loyola coach G.G. Smith noted after the game that when their man-to-man defense worked in the first half, they opted to continue using it in the second instead of doubling the post. Once Big East play rolls around, teams will have the experience and size to play him straight up, but for the rest of non-conference play, Patton is likely to see a lot of post doubles. Watching him adjust will be fascinating.
He wound up with a career-high 17 points, but that will be a short-lived record, I can almost guarantee it.
Recap & Analysis:
There was very little energy in the CenturyLink Center at tipoff on Saturday — on the floor, in the crowd, anywhere. The extremely late-arriving crowd, who I’d like to think were at a downtown bar watching the Creighton volleyball team win the Big East title moments before the game but who were probably watching the second overtime in the Michigan-Ohio State football game if I’m being totally honest, saw the Bluejays come out looking a step slow.
Loyola-Maryland had something to do with that, as their stubborn insistence on milking 25 seconds off the shot clock each possession ground the tempo of the game to a halt. What little energy there was, both on the floor and in the crowd, dissipated every time the Greyhounds got an easy basket late in the shot clock or secured an offensive board that allowed them to slow it down further.
“It’s very frustrating when they make you defend for the entire shot clock,” Patton said on the 1620AM postgame show. “Loyola does a good job of running their stuff, the backdoors and stuff like that. Coach Mac told us we were not just going have to focus for the first 25 seconds, but that the last five seconds of the shot clock would be vital to getting a stop or not.”
A cold-shooting start on the offensive end only compounded matters. Creighton went 4-13 from three-point range, and almost all of the misses were good, open looks. They weren’t much better inside the arc, though, connecting on just seven of 17 two-pointers. The Jays appeared to respond to Loyola’s plodding offensive possessions with rushed shots in an effort to speed the game up, and as the misses piled up, it became a vicious cycle.
“Early on, the problem was focus and our energy was low,” Patton noted on the postgame show. “Our first five didn’t bring it, which isn’t acceptable but it happens. We just have to find a way to fight when that happens, and we did that in the second half.”
Of course, it’s hard for your starting five to bring energy when two of them are saddled with early foul trouble. Patton and Maurice Watson both battled foul trouble and saw limited first half minutes, and with both on the bench, Loyola held a 20-18 lead with just over five minutes to play in the half. Marcus Foster, who Greg McDermott noted in the postgame show was battling a sore back, took the game over. He scored nine straight points, beginning with a jumper to tie it, followed by another to give them the lead and then a three-pointer to extend it. By the time he hit a pair of free throws to cap his personal run, it was 27-22 Creighton, and he’d single-handedly shifted the momentum of the game. The Jays took a 30-25 lead into the locker room, and while certainly better than the alternative, was a closer game than most expected. Despite the late flurry, it would have been a reasonable expectation that the Creighton halftime discussion would be heated.
Not so.
“I think the guys expected me to be upset at halftime,” McDermott noted on his postgame radio show. “I really wasn’t. It’s just…we needed to play with a little more energy, a little bit more enthusiasm, and run around a little bit more. I told the starters it was up to them to get us off to a better start with their energy and effort. They certainly did that.”
Patton said the halftime discussion was nowhere near as bad as it was in the Ole Miss game at the Paradise Jam last weekend, saying as he held back laughter that “There wasn’t as much swearing or stuff like that. He was pretty calm actually.”
“That’s because I wanted to strangle Justin at halftime of the Ole Miss game!,” McDermott responded jokingly on his postgame show while laughing. “I know exactly what he’s referring to. I trust our guys. They know what we have to do. We didn’t play that well in the first half, but the reality is we’re not going to play at a 52-point-half-pace every time, it’s just not going to happen.
“I told them, we don’t have to make threes to win. I felt like when we missed open threes in the first half, the whole building was deflated including our team. We’re going to miss shots. Three years ago, Doug and Ethan’s senior year, we led the nation in three-point shooting percentage at 41.2%. Well that means you miss six out of ten. So you have to get over it, and get on to the next play. It’s an important part of what we do, but it doesn’t have to be who we are.”
That 2013-14 team McDermott referred to was able to overwhelm opponents with three-pointers at a historic rate, but they lived and died by the three more often than not. This team can overwhelm opponents with the three, too, but they’re not going to die on nights when the shot isn’t falling — like Saturday. They missed eight of their first 10 three-point attempts, and had that continued, it might have doomed a more one-dimensional team. Instead they went to work attacking the paint, and before Loyola knew what hit them, the game was a blowout.
Creighton scored on 16 of their first 20 second-half possessions, made 15 of their first 18 shots, and attempted just three shots outside of the paint during that stretch. They scored six points in less than a minute coming out of the break, and by the second media timeout of the half, led 55-38 without making a single three-pointer and while attempting only one.
Over the next couple of minutes, they put the game out of reach with an escalating series of dunks that the 2013-14 team could have only dreamt about. First, Patton caught an alley-oop from Ronnie Harrell in traffic and dunked over two Loyola defenders. Then he got loose in the open court after a Mo Watson steal and threw down a thunderous two-handed jam that left the basket shaking for a good 10 seconds after he let go. And to cap it off, Foster drove downcourt with the ball, dribbled into the paint, and elevated over a helpless Loyola defender for the most vicious, nasty dunk by a Bluejay since the days of Rodney Buford.
That sequence of three dunks in five possessions, each more highlight-reel-worthy than the last, is something previous Bluejay teams would simply not have been able to do. These Bluejays, on the other hand? They’ll dunk on you with no remorse. The 2013-14 team had 35 dunks as a team for the season; Patton has 17 all by himself through six games.
Even on an afternoon where they came out sluggish and allowed their opponent to dictate tempo, a low-scoring, tightly-contested affair for 20 minutes became a 30-point blowout because the Bluejays have such a variety of ways to score that most defenses won’t be able to contain everything for 40 minutes. They’ll be a nightmare for teams to gameplan for, and with Buffalo and Akron on tap this week, they should have two more chances to get meaningful minutes for Martin Krampelj, Davion Mintz, and others who will be asked to contribute as the season goes on.
For Krampelj, he’ll be thrust into a big role out of necessity because of Zach Hanson’s injury, and while he’s not the big physical bruiser that Hanson is, he’s a capable post player. He had his finest game as a Bluejay on Saturday, with 10 points, five boards — three of them offensive — and at least three or four others where he tipped the ball out to a teammate for a board. He also had this play where he chased down a streaking Loyola player on a fastbreak and blocked the shot from behind:
Krampelj may not be as big as Hanson on the block, but if he can fight for rebounds and block the occasional shot, he’ll be a more than capable backup to Patton. He gives them something Hanson doesn’t (as that block above shows). And if Hanson returns later this year, the Jays will be that much tougher, that much more versatile, in March.
They Said It:
“Putting the ball on the floor wasn’t really something I’d needed to showcase yet this year. But as we get into Big East play against tougher competition that’s something I want us to be able to rely on. With teams like this, we just want to be able to exploit them any way we can. They didn’t double the post, so we went to work down low.” -Justin Patton on 1620AM Postgame
“Martin was aggressive, and I liked that. He has the talent but his confidence gets down sometimes. So I told him he was the best player on the floor, because when he believes that, he can be great. You can see the difference he can make — I’m proud of him and how he played today.” -Justin Patton on 1620AM Postgame
“Actually, halftime with Coach Mac today wasn’t as bad as when we were playing Ole Miss. There wasn’t as much swearing or stuff like that (laughs)! He was pretty calm actually. I’m proud of the way Coach Mac held his composure (laughs)! I try to tell him that (laughs)!” -Justin Patton on 1620AM Postgame
“We’re going to challenge ourselves to not let another letdown happen. We’re going to make sure we come out with a lot of energy and step on the pedal quickly.” -Justin Patton on 1620AM Postgame
“Coach Mac had a little dinner, my family had like two dinners, and then we went to Harrah’s Casino for the buffet. It was a lot of fun. My top four things? Obviously ham — I go for turkey only if there’s hot sauce. Just like average hot sauce, not too spicy. Not Tabasco. Like Red Hot. Then I’ll go for some sweet potato pie, and then I always have to have some macaroni just to get it down. And a water. No greens. They make me eat greens, but I don’t like that (laughs)!” -Justin Patton on 1620AM Postgame
“Loyola did a great job of controlling the tempo in the first half, and we did not respond well to them using the entire shot clock each possession. We talked a lot in practice about our defense getting stronger as the shot clock dwindles down towards zero. In the first half, I think we got weaker. We got tired of playing defense, we let up, lost focus, and they made easy plays. We turned it up a little more defensively, let the guys get into passing lanes in the second half, and that was able to turn some defense into offense.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“The second half we got to the rim, we attacked the rim, we made them stop that, and we got easier things happening. I was pleased with how we came out, we survived foul trouble with Justin and Maurice, and had the score been different, if we hadn’t been in the lead, I probably would have gone back to Maurice for sure. But with Justin, he still has to earn my trust that he can play with two fouls and understand that he’s still got to do his job and be in the right place.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“Our post play was good today. Martin gave us great minutes, he was active with his hands, he tipped several offensive rebounds out, he ran the floor. We need to be able to throw it into the post and score, or get something easy on a backdoor cut or a backside three that’s easy because the ball touched the post. There’s a lot of ways to put pressure on the paint. Off the dribble is one, but certainly throwing it into the post is the other. Losing Zach is such a loss because he’s a guy that could post up at two feet and hold that spot. We don’t have that anymore. So we have to be creative in the way we do it. Justin and Martin are both better on the move than they are with their back to the basket.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“Part of the decision to go with Tyler as the main backup to Maurice today was the gameplan. Davion was the backup the first game of the season. Now you move forward to the Wisconsin preparation, and it’s double-teams, it’s rotations all over the place, and if you’re a freshman that hasn’t been involved — ‘OK, the ball’s going in the post, so I know this guy’s going to double, I know I have to get to there, my teammate has to get here’ — it’s just hard. It’s a lot to ask of a freshman. Frankly if we had to play a couple of freshmen, we wouldn’t have used that philosophy against Wisconsin because we’d have been asking something out of guys that hadn’t been there and done it. I’d like to get Davion more and more minutes as we go. We can still play Z there or Marcus some at the point if we needed to.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“Maurice waved me off when he picked up his third foul, and I talked to him about it afterwards because I know he wants to be out there. I said, it’s a 12-13 point game, I can get to the TV timeout quickly and the last thing I want to do is for you to get a cheap one and we both look foolish because now you’ve got four fouls and there’s 15 minutes to go. He knows I trust him to play hard, to be aggressive, and be attacking on the offensive end even with three fouls. The thing with Maurice is, he gets to the paint a lot offensively, but he doesn’t get a lot of offensive fouls. He’s able to kind of jump around the defense and avoid charges. A lot of guards go in there and run over whatever’s between them and the basket.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
“Marcus got off to a rough start. He wasn’t good defensively, and when I took him out a couple of minutes in he said his back was really bothering him. Of course after he had that dunk I said to him, that back looks like it’s improved a little bit (laughs). That was quite a play. But he said he woke up with a stiff back this morning, and had a hard time getting it loose in shoot-around. I know Ben McNair really worked on it to try and get it loose. We’ve talked about it a lot — Maurice was the guy that could make plays for us last year, for himself and for other guys. Now Marcus adds to that. We’re a little bit more complete than we were a year ago. Certainly his shot-making ability is a huge plus for us.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame
You Said It:
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