When you’re favored by 13 against a team below .500, you need to take care of business — and Creighton did not do that on Wednesday in Las Vegas. Instead, they lost by 15, and opened themselves up to criticism and scrutiny because it looked a heck of a lot like the loss to another Mountain West foe two weeks ago.
Their gameplan was not great, their execution was poor, and their adjustments came too late. Other than that, no problem.
“They came out with a little more energy than us today,” Mason Miller said on the postgame radio show. “Unfortunately, it looked like they just kind of wanted it more out there.”
With 9:10 left in the first half, Creighton trailed 22-21. By the time UNLV opened up a 28-21 lead a minute later, their defense had allowed UNLV to score on 12 of their first 19 possessions and given up four made 3-pointers, but they’d made enough shots to keep them in it. And the shots were coming from the players they needed them to, like Ryan Kalkbrenner at the rim:
And Trey Alexander on a long three:
Then the script reversed: they strung stops together defensively, but stopped scoring. Over the last 9:10, the Jays made just two more baskets and scored just seven more points. They weren’t finishing through contact or drawing fouls, and couldn’t hit open threes. The result was a 36-28 halftime lead for the Runnin’ Rebels.
UNLV’s Dedan Thomas, Jr. scored 14 points in the first half on 6-of-9 shooting, mostly while guarded by Steven Ashworth. When the Jays switched Alexander onto him in the second half, he scored just two — but while he couldn’t get shots off against Alexander, he created offense for his teammates with seven assists.
Big man Kalib Boone was the biggest beneficiary, scoring 17 second half points on 8-of-10 shooting. Most of them came right at or over the top of Ryan Kalkbrenner. And with the Jays’ offense stagnant, they once again had multiple long scoring droughts. Far too often in the second half, CU’s offense was four guys standing around watching the fifth player on the floor try to make a play, with no one moving until the ball-handler had stopped his dribble.
But so was Keylan Boone, who hit a pair of threes in the second half and scored 10 points after being declared eligible earlier in the day by a court injunction that held the NCAA’s double-transfer rule to be illegal. The Ole Miss transfer wasn’t on the scouting report because he wasn’t on the active roster until about six hours before tip-off. Boone is a smaller, quicker player with a better shot than the players UNLV had been using at the ‘4’ spot so far this year, and made them a tougher team to guard.
“He adds spacing to their offense because the guys that they were playing at his position weren’t necessarily shooters,” McDermott said. “For him to be out there 30 minutes, you had to account for him. He’s a fifth-year guy so he’s played a lot of basketball. There’s no question he impacted the game, and he’s gonna be a really good player for them.”
If there’s any consolation to this abominable loss, it’s the idea that Keylan Boone’s addition could spark UNLV to a better season than they were on track to have. They moved up from #210 to #146 in the NCAA’s NET rankings with the win, taking this loss from a Q4 black eye to merely a Q3 shin kick.
But both leave a mark.
Inside the Box:
In the first half, Creighton took 16 of their 29 shots from three-point range — and made four. It’s easy to say “take fewer threes”, except they couldn’t make anything else either. Of the 13 two-point shots they took, they also made just four.
After some halftime adjustments renewed their focus on getting the ball inside, they had success — the Jays made 10-of-13 on two pointers, with Kalkbrenner scoring 14 and Baylor Scheierman 12. But they remained ice cold from three-point range, and saw their defensive lapses become more frequent.
Of bigger concern: the Jays’ two leading scorers, Trey Alexander (2-of-13 overall, 1-of-6 from three) and Baylor Scheierman (5-of-14 overall, 2-of-8 from three) shot 7-of-27 and combined to score 23 points. Scheierman made 9-of-31 against Colorado State and UNLV, which is bad; Alexander made 3-of-29 shots in those two games, which seems impossible.
Shot making is a variable skill, and if you rely on that as your best or most likely avenue to victory, it’s going to be tough to advance deep in March. Over the last three years as CU has achieved their greatest postseason success in the modern era of college hoops, their defense has saved them on nights like this where they couldn’t score.
Last year, the Jays made just 3-of-20 from three-point range in a first round NCAA Tournament game against NC State that they won by nine. In the Elite Eight, they made 2-of-17 from three and were one possession away from winning. That team could win (or very nearly win) games where they couldn’t make shots. This year’s team cannot (yet).
In this game, Creighton got 28 points at or near the rim, 24 points on three-pointers, and 12 points at the line. 64 points in a 61-possession rock fight with that sort of scoring breakdown is good enough to win — if you’re defending at the level they have the last three years. But therein lies the rub.
“All you have to do is look at their assist numbers,” McDermott said. “If they have 19 assists on 32 baskets, our defense is not doing what it’s supposed to do. We’re supposed to force them into situations where they have to make plays one-on-one. That’s how our defense works, and if we’re gonna be successful, we better get it back pretty damn quick.”
Indeed, the second half numbers are atrocious — UNLV had 13 assists on 17 made baskets, owing to poor rotations and slow closeouts.
Meanwhile, UNLV was 6-for-13 from deep in the second half and 10-for-22 for the game. Four different players hit two or more, and all of them are the guys the scouting report lists as their top perimeter threats: Isaiah Cottrell and Dedan Thomas were shooting 38.1% from three coming in; Justin Webster was 37.3% for his career; and Keylan Boone was 41.0% at Pacific last season. In this game, those four were 9-of-18.
Creighton’s goal is to take (and make) lots of threes, yes, but it’s also deny their opponent from doing the same. When both things don’t happen, like last night, you get this type of game. 49.86% of Creighton’s FG attempts have been threes this year, while just 26.93% of their opponents’ have been. In this one, the Jays shot just 8-for-29 (28%) from long distance, while UNLV shot 10-for-22 (46%).
In addition, the Runnin’ Rebels were 22-of-39 inside (56.4%), and scored 38 of their 79 points in the paint. They had 1.30 points per possession. This was a complete system breakdown.
And now they have Alabama coming to town on Saturday night — a more physical, more athletic, more explosive version of the two Mountain West teams CU has been flattened by this year. In two weeks, they head to Milwaukee to take on a Marquette team who’s arguably even better at all of those things than Alabama. Time is short to improve, in other words.
“Like anything else, there’s some bad and some good. There’s not a lot of good out of this one, though,” McDermott said. “But we’ll look at it, we’ll try to grow from it, and then we have to flush it because we don’t have time to feel sorry for ourselves. We’ve got an important game on Saturday.”