Inside the Box:
In his first game as a Bluejay, Baylor Scheierman did a little bit of everything in logging a double-double. He had 11 points, 10 rebounds, three assists, a steal and a block in 34 minutes. And he hit back-to-back three-pointers in the second half to bring his new team back from the brink of an upset.
“This was a lot of fun,” Scheierman said on the postgame radio show. “After the exhibition game, I told my parents that it was like I was back in Buffalo for the NCAA Tournament (last year with South Dakota State). It had that type of feel in this building. I was really looking forward to tonight and it didn’t disappoint.”
But there was a lot not to like in the box score. 34 of Creighton’s 66 shot attempts were three-pointers; they made eight of them. They had an assist on just 11 of their 26 made baskets. They went just nine-deep because of the tightness of the score, and played their starters heavy minutes.
But of the newcomers who did play, all of them made positive impressions.
Francisco Farabello played 17 minutes, missing all four of his three-pointers and making just 1-of-5 overall, but he “did some good things defensively, made a couple of nice assists and got a big basket late,” according to McDermott. That shot? With the score tied at 52, he took his defender off the dribble at the top of the key and got all the way to the rim, where he scored on a layup.
Mason Miller “did some awesome stuff,” McDermott said, including a corner three in their big first-half run. He had eight points and three rebounds, and hit both of his three-point attempts. The other three also came from the corner, with an assist from Farabello who dribbled into a pair of defenders and fired a pass to the wide-open shooter; the shot broke a 49-49 tie.
Fredrick King played eight minutes as Ryan Kalkbrenner’s backup, and had five points, two boards and a block. McDermott hoped to play him more, but “Fredrick chasing guys out around the perimeter is a hard thing for him to do at this point in his development. We needed Kalkbrenner out there.”
Speaking of Kalkbrenner, he’s been battling the flu and it was noticeable. He was a step slow all night, he didn’t have much lift, and shots he’d normally block or alter found the bottom of the net instead. Still, he nearly had a double-double with nine points and eight boards — five of them offensive.
“I’ve got to do a better job of making sure that I don’t have (our freshmen) all out there together. That happened a couple of times tonight,” McDermott said of his rotations. “We need Fredrick out there playing with three starters rather than three bench guys. I just have to manage that a little better. It’s a little bit better level of comfort — I’d rather have Fredrick playing next to Art than next to Mason.”
Of the newcomers, Trey Alexander had the best night overall with 12 points, three blocks, three boards and great defense on Riley Miller especially in the second half. Miller hit three contested threes in the first half, and in the second he only attempted three of them — and missed all three.
“This was a good test for Trey defensively, because Miller is a crafty player,” McDermott said. “He never stops moving, he kinda knows what he can get away with from a physicality standpoint to create space, and Trey did a great job on him.”
Arthur Kaluma led the way with 17 points, but took 17 shots to get there. He was an ugly 1-of-7 from three-point range and committed two turnovers. And Ryan Nembhard scored nine points with five assists (against zero turnovers) but struggled to convert at the rim and his line was buoyed by going a perfect 6-of-6 from the line. They’ll have better nights, and the Jays will need them to.
Recap:
With just under 10 minutes to play, a three-pointer by St. Thomas’ Brooks Allen gave the Tommies a 57-56 lead. It was a dangerous moment, a 25-point road underdog taking the lead and all the momentum, with hot shooters who were feeling it. For 30 minutes, Creighton had let them hang around, and now they had a battle on their hands. For the second straight year, Creighton was on the ropes at home in the season opener and in need of a late-game surge to avoid an unexpected loss to an opponent they were paying to play them.
Enter Baylor Scheierman. Jays fans knew the star from Aurora, Nebraska had a knack for big shots from his days at South Dakota State, and he showed it to them up-close in his very first game. Just seconds after Allen’s three gave St. Thomas the lead, Scheierman put the Jays back ahead with a long three. He hit a second one on the next possession. Those back-to-back threes kickstarted a 14-0 run that brought the Jays from brink of upset to a 72-60 win.
“Basketball is a game of momentum,” Scheierman said in the press conference afterward. “It felt like a momentum shift, the crowd started to get into it, we started to feed off them.”
After St. Thomas took the lead, they had 14 more offensive possessions in the game. Creighton stopped them on each of the first 11, including a pair of shot clock violations where they covered up St. Thomas’ shooters so completely that they didn’t come close to a decent look either time. They only let them score once — a three-pointer with 2:45 to go, after the game was basically in hand for the Jays.
“I think the first shot clock violation was huge,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “They took a timeout, they had some momentum, and they came out and they didn’t even come close to getting a shot off. That needs to be our identity. That’s who we were last year. We have to get back to that.”
Meanwhile, the offense started clicking. That it happened once Ryan Nembhard finally settled in was probably not coincidental. With eight minutes to go, he drove to the rim, collapsed the defense on him, and dumped it off to Kalkbrenner for a dunk; moments later he found Arthur Kaluma in transition for a baseline dunk. Three of his five assists and four of his nine points in the game came during the decisive run.
They had an opportunity to put the game away far earlier than they ultimately did. Tied 9-9 after the first media timeout, they built a 26-11 lead thanks to defensive plays like this one from Scheierman:
And threes from unexpected places, like this corner shot from freshman Mason Miller:
But a barrage of threes over the last eight minutes of the first half nearly erased that 15-point deficit entirely — with 1:16 to go, a tough, contested three by Andrew Rohde cut the lead to 37-35.
“They have a lot of guys that can shoot,” Scheierman said on the postgame radio show. “They don’t have a lot of size, but they have a lot of skill. And they play together on both sides of the floor. They did a good job of making everything difficult for us. We were up 26-11 and then they hit a couple of tough shots to get back in the game. But at the same time, we kind of fell asleep defensively. We short-cut some assignments. It’s a good learning experience. We’ll learn a lot from this game and we’ll be better on Thursday because of it.”
Miller agreed, saying on the postgame show that Greg McDermott told the team in the locker room that they needed to remember the lesson of this one. “Coach told us in the locker room that we probably needed this: a game where we don’t hit shots, and we had to figure out what to do to win.”
The 12-point win didn’t do the Jays any favors in computer metrics that already were lower on them than human pollsters; they dropped seven spots to #29 in KenPom after the win, and fell in all the other major computer rankings, too (such as Haslametrics and T-Rank).
But it could be worse. They could be Oklahoma, losing at the buzzer to Sam Houston State.
Or #14 TCU, who trailed Arkansas-Pine Bluff by 11 at halftime, rallied to go ahead, and won when a would-be-UAPB buzzer-beater fell short. Winning is always better than losing, and one game is too small of a sample to draw any meaningful conclusions from, tempting as that may be. If there’s one thing that can be gleaned from the game, it’s that Ryan Hawkins was even more important to the Jays’ success than we thought.
“Our defense was a little quiet tonight, and I talked to a couple of our guys that I’ve been prodding a bit to be leaders with their voice about that,” McDermott said. “Their example has been outstanding. But now I need their voice, because Hawk brought that last year. He was great at that. We miss it. We miss that when adversity sets in, guys need to hear that consistent voice. We have the guys to do it, and hopefully they learned some lessons tonight on how important that is.”
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