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Men's Basketball

Morning After: #3 Villanova 83, Creighton 58

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[Box Score]

Key Stats:

24 of Villanova’s 45 first-half points come at the free throw line and via second-chance points. Meanwhile, 19 of the Jays’ 27 field goal attempts in the first half were three-pointers, and though they made seven of them, they had just two offensive rebounds on the misses, leaving them with far too many empty possessions. In the second half, Creighton rebounded better and had better shot selection, but defended horribly. 27 of Villanova’s 38 second-half points came from three-point range, as they went 9-13 from behind the arc in the half.

And so as it’s been of late, defense, rebounds, and empty possessions were once again Creighton’s nemesis, and against the third-ranked Wildcats, those weaknesses were laid bare.

Standout Performance:

As you’d expect in a 25-point blowout, no one played particularly well. Maurice Watson led the Jays with 16 points, but missed all four of his field goal attempts in the second half before being pulled with 10 minutes left in the game. Some people on social media wondered if it was a benching, but that’s looking for controversy where there is none. The fact of the matter is, when you’re getting your butt kicked as badly as Creighton was, there comes a point where it no longer makes sense to keep your best player on the court for the rest of it, and that’s where the Jays found themselves halfway through the second half.

Ugh.

Recap & Analysis:

In the early going, it looked like offensively Creighton was channeling the spirit of Ethan Wragge, as they made three-pointers on four of their first seven possessions. Defensively, they were channeling the spirit of Rick Johnson, as they allowed Villanova to make an equal number of three-pointers — two each from Kris Jenkins and Jalen Brunson.

The teams continued to trade baskets, Creighton continued to rain in threes, and after back-to-back bombs by Maurice Watson and Toby Hegner, the Jays led 24-20. The problem with trading baskets with your opponent, of course, is that if you stop making shots, and your opponent doesn’t, you get blown out.

CU scored just eight more points over the final eight minutes of the half, while allowing Villanova to score 25. That  17-point edge gave Villanova a 13-point halftime lead, and the game was never as close again. The Wildcats scored on nine out of their last eleven trips down the floor, went a perfect 6-6 from the free throw line, and scored four of the five times they grabbed an offensive rebound. It was an atrocious eight minutes of basketball. There’s no sugar-coating it. The third-ranked team in the country puffed out their chest, demanded that Creighton give them their lunch money, and the Jays instead gave them their entire wallet to avoid a fight.

The second half was no better. Just like they did on Saturday night against Seton Hall, they allowed their opponent to use a big run right out of the locker room to put the game on ice. Over the first five minutes of the half, Villanova went on a 14-6 run to take a 21-point lead, scoring on five of their first seven trips. The Jays never got any closer than 18 the rest of the way and trailed by as many as 31 points as the Wildcats did what good teams do when given the opportunity: they blew out a less-talented opponent instead of letting them hang around.

What happened? Creighton won five of their first seven Big East games, including three on the road, and a home win over a then-ranked Butler team. They dominated Georgetown for 37 minutes, were playing as well as anyone in the league, and had all the confidence and momentum in the world. Then they collapsed at the end of that game, and they’ve not been the same since.

Over the last two games, they’ve been a listless, lethargic team that had no fight in them once their opponent landed a punch. Against both Seton Hall and Villanova, their opponent made a run late in the first half to build a lead, and in both instances, the Jays faced the adversity not by competing harder, playing tougher, and refusing to give in, but instead by letting their opponent go on another run to open the second half that blew the game open. Their defense has had no teeth, they’ve been out-worked for rebounds, they’ve been out-hustled for loose balls, and they’ve been blown out in both contests. On the postgame show, analyst Nick Bahe commented that “There’s a non-negotiable standard of effort and energy that has to be there. And from my vantage point, that’s not there right now. They have to identify that and fix that first, before they move on to anything else.”

It’s been really disappointing to see, and makes me wonder if their season died in those last three minutes in Washington, D.C. It sure looks that way. Creighton needs to do some serious soul-searching over the next 48 hours and decide how they want the final month to go, because their season is on the brink.

They Said It:

“The most disappointing thing to me tonight was coming out so focused and locked in, and then it just went south. We abandoned our gameplan. They ran a lot of shot-fakes, we fell for them, and in the second half they took a lot of comfortable threes. We didn’t really make them uncomfortable. The number three team in the country, you better make them uncomfortable. You can’t give them confidence. They got on their run, they felt good about themselves, Jenkins made some shots, Archie made some shots, and Reynolds was a beast on the glass. That’s the disappointing thing. We keep losing games where we get out-rebounded, where we give up too many offensive rebounds and second-chance points. We like to run in transition, but we have to get stops in order to do that. And we’re getting the stops, but then we’re not getting the rebound, our opponent hits a shot, and it takes the air out of us.” -Maurice Watson on 1620AM Postgame

“I don’t think all our three-point attempts in the first half were from us trying to keep up with them. We haven’t been shooting the ball well, but once we saw it go in a lot at the start, as shooters we want to keep shooting. And Geoff isn’t 100%, Zach isn’t 100%, Cole isn’t 100%, so other guys needed to step up and I needed to lead these guys and get the most out of them. Regardless of who comes into the game as the coach on the floor I have to be able to relay what Coach Mac tells us to everyone. I need to do a better job of that.” -Maurice Watson on 1620AM Postgame

“The key to getting back on track is staying true to ourselves. We have to play for each other. We have to realize that everything that we do is affecting the entire game and the entire team. If one person doesn’t do their job, it forces another person to help or another person to cover for you. When you’re playing a good team like this, you don’t have that margin for error. We can’t let this stretch define us. We can’t let this knock us back. We’ve come a long way. We’re doing it for 20 minutes, or for 38 minutes, or for 35…we’re just not doing it for the last four or five. We have to find ways to stay locked in for those minutes because the margin is very slim in this league. 6-4 is third place, 4-6 is eighth place. There’s no time to sulk, there’s no time to pout. We have to learn from this, execute, start doing our jobs, and hold each other accountable. Coaches can’t do that for us.” -Maurice Watson on 1620AM Postgame

“I don’t like the way we’re playing right now. And neither does anybody in that locker room. We’ve got to have each other’s back. Some guys need a kick in the rear, and some guys need a pat on the back to get ’em through this period of time. Hopefully we can turn it around on Saturday.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“I think we only had one turnover in building that 24-20 lead, and then we had five or six after that. I thought we got a little lazy with the ball, made a couple of ill-advised decisions, the threes we were making early we missed during that stretch, and then defensively some of our turnovers led to easy baskets. We went to the zone and got some stops, and then we gave up offensive rebounds. We talked about it in the pregame how I was a little bit worried trying to rebound to out of that zone. And we just didn’t get it done. They had 12 points from the foul line and 12 points on second-chance points in the first half, and that’s a big portion of their first-half output.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“I told the team that I don’t think we’re competing at the level we competed at (prior to the Georgetown collapse). I don’t think we’re competing through adversity in particular. I thought we competed early tonight when our shots were going in, but when things got tough, when they made shots where we defended them well, we didn’t respond. That’s going to happen. Once in a while you’re going to defend it well and they’re going to make it anyway. You can’t think about that. You have to go get ready to play the next possession. We’re not playing through adversity very well as a group right now. As I told the team, when you do that, when you go off on your own and break out of a gameplan — whether it’s a post double-team coverage, whether it’s a dribble-drive where we rotate over and nobody takes the basket — you’re abandoning your team. With that decision, you leave your team hanging for that two or three seconds. A lot of times, it results in a positive play for the other team. I’m disappointed in that regard.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“On the other hand, we’re a game out of third and a game out of eighth. We’ve got some decisions to make. We’re facing a team that’s feeling as good about themselves as they’ve felt in a long time, in DePaul coming to Omaha to play Saturday. We shot the ball like Villanova shot the ball against us tonight against them, and that’s why we scored 91 points in that game. We didn’t really have an answer to stop them defensively. So we’re going to have to play better defensively than we played at DePaul if we expect to win. They’re a team that’s much better than maybe their record would indicate. So we’ve got to get home tonight, get off our feet, get to class tomorrow, and then we get back to work. There’s eight games left, we’ve got four at home and four on the road. We’ve got some difficult challenges ahead of us. But we have an opportunity to finish in a place in this league where nobody thought we could be, and we’ve positioned ourselves after ten games to do that.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“We’re missing opportunities in the post. I thought early in the Seton Hall game we had three or four chances to get it to Geoff and missed all of them. And I thought tonight we missed Zach a few times early. When we do get it in there, those guys have to make good decisions with it, too. But that needs to be a focus of our guards, to find them and not just — with post play you can’t just find them, you have to find them at the right time. When that seal takes place, you have a split second where you can catch and shoot a real easy shot. If it’s a second late, now an easy shot becomes a post move where you have to score over top of somebody. Your success rate with that is not going to be near as high. Our posts are taught to create that angle and create that seal, and our guards are taught to deliver it at that time. I thought we missed opportunities tonight. It’s something that will be a focus of ours in practice the next two days.

Now, obviously Zach couldn’t practice much the last two days, and Geoff hasn’t practiced at all. We couldn’t focus on it this week because we didn’t have the bodies. And not having Cole practice isn’t good for him, either, and not great for the team but we have to try and manage that the best we can. My guess is Geoff isn’t going to practice a whole lot  tomorrow, and I doubt Zach will, so mentally they have to be so sharp as we go through the preparation so they’re ready to go. Getting it inside has to be more of a focus of ours, no question. And it’s across the board, it’s not one guy that’s missing them. It’s too many guys. And we played Ronnie a little more because he’s making those passes. Granted he’s making a few mistakes, but that’s part of being a freshman, and he’s also making a few positive plays with his passing.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

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