Inside the Box:
Creighton scored 87 points on 76 possessions (1.14 points per possession). WBR’s Matt DeMarinis pointed out on Twitter that with their “Death Lineup”, as he calls it, on the floor CU scored 1.50 points per possession. That’s astounding.
Moreover, the Jays are now averaging 1.14ppp over the last five games. And according to Ken Pomeroy, their opponents in those fives games — Seton Hall, Villanova, Providence, St. John’s and Xavier — are the top five teams in the Big East in defensive efficiency.
The Jays hit enough jump shots (8-of-21 from three) but they were surprisingly able to score in the paint much more often than most expected. Seton Hall’s defensive strategy of taking Mitch Ballock out of the game and denying Marcus Zegarowski from getting the ball back after passing it to a teammate created openings elsewhere.
“There’s a price to pay for guarding Mitch like they did, and for trying to deny the ball back to Marcus,” Greg McDermott explained. “You get so spread out. First half, we got some threes in transition as a result. Second half, we shot layups. If you’re going to guard us like that, I’ve got some guys that know how to play basketball and they took advantage of it.”
Zegarowski led the way with 18 points on 7-of-10 shooting with eight assists and six rebounds. With the game on the line and the ball in his hands, Zegarowski said he never felt flustered. “Coach Mac trusts me with the ball in my hands,” Zegarowski said. “I put in a lot of work and I just try to make the right play, the simple play, every time. If I see a good shot, I’ll take it. If I see a good pass, I’ll make it. I play with my instincts.”
Alexander also scored 18, cashing in four 3-pointers. Three of them came in a 15-2 first-half run. But his defense was the headline — he held Myles Powell to just 12 points on 3-of-16 shooting and 1-of-11 from three point range. And the one three that Powell hit was a garbage-time shot that had no effect on the outcome, so in all reality, when the game was in doubt Powell was 0-for-10 on threes with 9 points.
But two other players also scored 18 apiece. Damien Jefferson was 7-of-10 from the floor with 9 rebounds (four offensive) and two steals, and made huge plays on both ends of the floor in the second half. Denzel Mahoney scored his 18 thanks in large part to six free throws, and hit two mammoth three-pointers in the closing minutes.
“You just gotta stay ready,” Jefferson said of he and Mahoney’s mindset. “With the team we got, with the scorers we have, you just never know. Like tonight, Mitch went scoreless and was still effective in our offense. Making plays, getting rebounds. With those three guys, they do a great job of leading. Guys like me and Denzel and Christian, we just gotta stay ready. They make plays we can’t make with their shooting, and we make plays they can’t make like crashing the boards and getting tough steals like that one I laid out for.”
Recap:
In a game with 15 ties and 20 lead changes, the two best teams in arguably the nation’s best conference took turns throwing haymakers at one another, changing momentum nearly as often as they changed the score. It’s a game Creighton doesn’t win a year ago, which is something we can confidently say because they played games similar to this a year ago and found ways to lose nearly all of them. But on Wednesday night against the toughest team in the league, it was Creighton who was tougher, and it was Creighton who made the bigger plays.
After the Pirates scored seven straight points to go ahead 66-62, it looked and felt like so many of those games Creighton played a year ago — a good effort turned into a loss in crunch time. Except this time was different. Because this team is different.
Denzel Mahoney drove into the paint and drew contact on the next possession, and hit both free throws. 66-64 Seton Hall. Christian Bishop knocked the ball loose from Myles Powell on a jumper, and Damien Jefferson scored a stylish layup in transition to tie it at 66.
Then Kelvin Jones blocked a shot, starting another transition break. This one ended with Mahoney splashing home a three from the corner in front of his own bench, giving Creighton a 69-66 lead. No big deal, just your everyday run-of-the-mill 7-0 run on the road to erase a deficit.
Moments later, if it wasn’t clear already how much different this team is from those of recent vintage, Damien Jefferson made it crystal clear. He deflected a pass to the opposite end of the floor, beat the nearest Seton Hall player in a foot race to secure the ball by laying out onto the floor, and threw a pass the other direction while starting to slide on the floor to a streaking Marcus Zegarowski, who coasted to the rim for a layup.
“Man, that was huge,” Jefferson said on the postgame radio show. “That really gave us a spark. It really got us going. I told Coach Huss, I was going to try to outrun him so I could get a dunk but that would have been selfish of me. I knew the coaches would want me to lay out for that ball instead.”
Huge is an understatement. Jefferson’s hustle gave Creighton a 71-66 lead, capping a stunning 9-0 run, and sparked by his effort the Jays made all the plays they needed to in the final four minutes to secure a massive, massive victory.
***
In WBR’s Pregame Primer, we wondered if Seton Hall would be forced to voluntarily abandon their size advantage inside because of Creighton’s speed. Time after time this year, teams have found it difficult to defend the Jays’ smaller lineups with traditional big men, and chosen to bench their bigs in an effort to keep up. The Pirates had their hand forced midway through the first half when Christian Bishop picked up his third foul at the 12:36 mark. Faced with the choice between putting Kelvin Jones back in with one foul of his own, or going small with Denzel Mahoney at center, the Jays went small.
“I was kind of forced to (go small) because of foul trouble,โ Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. โBut Coach (Kevin) Willard decided to put his bigs on the bench. Frankly, thatโs probably better for us.”
The small lineup paid immediate dividends, slicing up Seton Hall’s defense on this bucket in transition that cut their lead to 18-17.
It really paid off later in the half. Trailing 27-22, Creighton scored 11 straight points to wrestle away the lead. Nine of the 11 points came on a trio of three-pointers by Ty-Shon Alexander. The first was created by Denzel Mahoney, who collapsed the defense with a pump fake, and then kicked it out to Alexander.
Alexander created his own opening for the second three, using a step-fake to give himself space and then draining the shot.
On the third, he brought the ball up the floor, juked a defender into over-compensating for a pass that didn’t happen, and used the opening to sink a wide-open three. Just like that, it was 33-27 Bluejays.
It eventually became a 15-2 run, as the Jays scored on six consecutive possessions. As they did all night long, Seton Hall answered with a 7-2 run of their own. The Jays’ only points in that stretch came as Zegarowski knocked the ball loose from Myles Powell, retrieved it, and raced down the court for a layup and a 39-33 lead.
And though the Pirates scored six straight to tie it at 39, including a three by Shavar Reynolds, the momentum was short-lived as Zegarowski untied it at the buzzer with a jumper from ten feet out.
Zegarowski ended the half with 10 points and four assists with zero turnovers. His counterpart, Quincy McKnight, was just as good with 10 points and two assists. Meanwhile, All-American Myles Powell had been held in check almost entirely — in 17 minutes, he was 0-5 from the floor and had five points all from the line.
Creighton was whistled for 11 fouls to Seton Hall’s six in the first half. Christian Bishop and Mitch Ballock had three each, and Damien Jefferson had two. With depth already a concern, having three of their key contributors in danger of fouling out was not ideal. Seton Hall going 13-of-16 from the line in the first half kept them in the game, too, despite a half where they were just 4-of-17 from three-point range.
“Somehow we managed all that foul trouble the first half,” McDermott said. “We really talked to the team at half about flipping this foul deal. I told them, ‘We cannot foul. I can’t promise they’re going to call fouls on them, but they can’t call ’em on us. We have to keep them off the foul line.'”
Between the foul trouble and the (seeming) impossibility to holding Powell down for two halves, a 41-39 lead felt tenuous at best. Both issues were intertwined; with his jump-shot closed off by Alexander’s defensive effort, Powell was likely to start driving directly at the defense. He’d get his points from the line, and further exasperate the Jays’ foul woes. The first four minutes loomed large.
Powell did exactly that, but the Jays were ready for it. In the first minute of the second half, Powell drove into the paint…but Alexander poked the ball away for a steal. Twice in the next three possessions, Powell forced up contested three-pointers, and missed on both. He did finally get his first field goal of the night, courtesy of a steal and a fastbreak dunk, to put SHU up 45-43. But instead of turning the momentum of the game, it was simply the first haymaker in an impending heavyweight boxing match.
Alexander answered with a three, as FS1’s Bill Raftery called the shot before he even had the ball. “Look for Alexander to get free,” Raftery said. Done and done.
Romaro Gill answered by throwing down a thunderous dunk in traffic, putting the Pirates back ahead 47-46. Damien Jefferson drew a foul and hit a pair of free throws, and it was 48-47 Bluejays. Quincy McKnight stuck a jumper from 10 feet to make it 49-48 Seton Hall. Christian Bishop came right back with a layup, and it was 50-49 Creighton. Two ties later, Bishop untied it when he saw an opening in the paint and decided to take it — his vicious, emphatic dunk made it 56-54 Bluejays.
The back-and-forth continued, as a few moments later Seton Hall’s Jared Rhoden hit a three-pointer to put them back in front 59-58. Mahoney drew a foul, hit two free throws, and CU took the lead back at 60-59. And after Alexander drove for a layup, Creighton led 62-59 with 9:15 to play. Whew.
Seton Hall’s 7-0 run, and Creighton’s 9-0 run to answer it, sent the game into the final five minutes with the Jays ahead 71-66. Bluejay fans everywhere were sweating bullets. The Bluejays themselves, meanwhile? Calm as can be.
“We’re right where we want to be,” McDermott recalled telling his players in the huddle. “You couldn’t ask for anything more. With five or six minutes left, when we had that timeout, I thought ‘We’re exactly where we want to be. We’ve got a four point lead, we’re on the road against a great team, let’s go finish it.'”
“This is why we put in all the hours of practice for moments like this,” Zegarowski added. “Last year, we came up short in similar games. This year, we didn’t hang our heads when they made runs, and we sealed the deal.”
Ahead 71-68 after Powell drove into the paint for a layup, Jefferson battled for an offensive rebound, got it, and scored on a second-chance layup. He scored a second-straight bucket created by this pass from Zegarowski to push the lead out to 75-70:
“Coming into the game, Coach Mac told me that the last couple of games I wasn’t crashing the offensive glass hard enough,” Jefferson said on the postgame radio show. “I felt like I wasn’t aggressive enough. So I listened to him and I got my nose in there a couple of times and man, I sniffed out some rebounds.”
Seton Hall scored four straight points, while a shot clock violation and a misfired pass caused empty possessions for the Bluejays on their end. And then with 1:08 left, clinging to a one-point lead, Mahoney sank the dagger. Or as FS1’s Gus Johnson called it, taking the words out of his partner Bill Raftery’s mouth, “Onions!”
Mahoney had two absolutely enormous threes in the closing minutes, and time after time was able to calm the team down — and quiet the raucous crowd at The Rock — by driving into the defense to draw fouls. And just as he was at SEMO, once he gets to the line it’s almost automatic, even in the highest pressure situations.
“Denzel brought a pretty big three to the game tonight, I know that much,” McDermott said. “But he can score in a lot of different ways. And he gets to the foul line and makes his free throws. Nobody talks about his defense, and he’s pretty good at that too. He’s settled in to what this team needs him to do, and his teammates have a better understanding of what he needs to do. I thought he played terrific tonight.”
His counterpart on the Seton Hall bench agreed. Kevin Willard called Mahoney a difference maker. “He gives them such a different dynamic at the four spot, and even at the five spot,” Willard said in his postgame press conference. “He could just drive anybody, heโs so aggressive, and I really thought him and Jefferson were the difference in the game, they were aggressive driving.”
The Jays made nine of 10 free throws to close out the win from there, earning an absolutely massive 87-82 win over the tenth-ranked Seton Hall Pirates — their second road win over a top-ten team in as many weeks.
One of the unsung keys to the second half was keeping Seton Hall off the line. McDermott’s halftime message of defending without fouling resonated with his team, and they did just that: after being whistled for 11 first-half fouls and giving up 16 free throw attempts, they were called for just six fouls in the second and gave up only four free throw attempts. Meanwhile, they completed the script-flipping by taking 18 free throws of their own in the second half, and making 17 of them.
“Our ability to defend without fouling in the second half was critical,” McDermott said. “I’ve got a great group over there, they believe in each other, they never felt like this game was out of reach. And I’m proud of them for sticking with it.”
And continuing their tradition this season, they celebrated the win by picking someone to dance in front of the team; this time, it was Bishop, with some help from Zegarowski.
McDermott said that his postgame message to the team centered around congratulating Jefferson for his hustle and effort plays, Mahoney for his huge shots, and Ballock for his unselfish play. But after leaving the locker room, he realized he’d neglected to mention how well Ty-Shon Alexander had played defensively. So he went back in and told his All-Big East guard personally.
“It’s because I’ve gotten accustomed to the way you’re playing defense game after game after game,” McDermott recalled telling his guard. “I said, ‘I didn’t congratulate Tazz for shutting down somebody after every game because it just became expected. Ty, that’s a sign of respect.’ He was there on the catch every time. He made Myles’ life really difficult.”
With two-thirds of the Big East Conference season in the books, Creighton is in second place at 8-4. With four of their final six games at home, they’re now just two back of Seton Hall — and the Pirates have to come to Omaha on the final day of the regular season. It may seem unlikely, but the chance exists for the final game of the 2019-20 season to be a one-game, winner-take-all championship for the regular season Big East title, contested on the Jays home court. Seton Hall would need to lose another game beforehand, and Creighton would need to win out. Unlikely, probably.
Then again, winning on the road at Seton Hall seemed unlikely 24 hours ago. You never know.