Recap:
Creighton had led for over 30 minutes of Friday’s first-round NCAA Tourney game, but with 2:23 to play, they were nursing a slim 62-59 advantage. Greg McDermott called a set play out of a timeout that they’ve practiced all year but haven’t run — Trey Alexander threw a one-handed pass into the lane to Ryan Kalkbrenner, who was a decoy on the play with the intent of collapsing the defense on him. It worked, he kicked it out to an open Baylor Scheierman, and he drained a massive three to give Creighton a six-point edge.
“It felt like an appropriate time (to call it),” McDermott said. “And like I said in the locker room to the guys, a play like that takes five guys. R2 set a good screen to free Ryan, Trey made a great pass to Ryan right where it needed to be. Art set a great screen for Baylor up top and then Baylor has got to finish it by making the shot. As a coach you save a couple of those in case you need them, and you hope when you need them, we execute it, and to our guys’ credit it was executed to perfection.”
That Kalkbrenner was the one to make the assist was only fitting, because for most of the afternoon it was battle between two superstars. He scored 31 for the Jays, while Terquavion Smith had 32 for the Wolfpack, both players trying valiantly to carry struggling teams across the finish line. But in the end, Kalkbrenner’s supporting cast made winning plays, Smith’s did not, and the Jays pulled away.
With how the game started, late-game heroics didn’t seem like they would be necessary. NC State missed their first eight shots, leading-scorer Smith picked up two fouls in two minutes…and the Jays were only able to build a 7-2 lead. But Kalkbrenner had made his presence felt: he had two points, two rebounds, a dime and a block all before the first media timeout.
The Jays were cold, too, though. They went nearly four minutes without a point, and made 1-of-9 from three to start the game, eventually missing 16 in a row. If not for Kalkbrenner dominating the game on both offense and defense, things might gone sideways. Soon he drew the second foul on DJ Burns, too, and converted a three-point play to make it 18-12 CU. He had 11 of Creighton’s first 20 points, and the Wolfpack’s frontline wanted no part of him on either end.
Meanwhile, CU’s guards executed the gameplan of running Smith off the three-point line (and from several feet behind it) — the problem was, he scooted around them time after time and then made a series of tough shots inside the arc. He single-handedly brought the Wolfpack back, and with 3:30 to go in the half the game was tied at 24.
Trey Alexander answered with a fallaway jumper in the lane and Kaluma hit a pair of free throws, and the Jays went to the locker room up 28-26. But Smith had made things interesting.
“Yeah, I mean, what do you do?,” McDermott asked rhetorically after the game. “He was effective against our drop coverage. But he’s really good. I thought Trey did a great job of really chasing him and making it difficult. He makes a lot of threes, so we tried to make him do things that he doesn’t normally do. And to his credit, he was able to make us pay, part of the time anyway.”
In the first half, Smith had 14 points…but took 15 shots to get there. The rest of NC State’s team took 17 shots combined, and shot 22.2%. Creighton had made the decision to live with him taking the shots they wanted him to take — midrange twos — while locking down everyone else. It was working exactly as they drew it up. Trouble was, they couldn’t score (missing their last 12 threes) and had sloppy turnovers that led to points (turning it over six times).
Whose supporting cast would step up first?
It was NC State, at least initially. They used an 11-0 run early in the second half to go ahead 37-30, all while Greg McDermott let his guys play through it. The Jays were pressing from three, trying so desperately to see one fall — after 16 straight misses — that they were starting to take quick or bad shots without moving the ball around to generate better looks.
“Well, they know I have faith in them,” McDermott said of his decision to not call a timeout. “I trust these guys. We work on all that stuff in practice. And basketball is a game of runs. There’s ebbs, there’s flows, and I think good teams have to figure out a way to play through some of that. We play basketball a certain way, and when we play that way, we’re pretty good.”
Then in the span of 29 seconds, Burns picked up his third foul while fighting for a rebound, his backup Ebenezer Dowuona picked up his third and fourth fouls on consecutive possessions, and suddenly the Wolfpack found themselves with their entire frontline in foul trouble. And then Kalkbrenner — Kalkbrenner of all people! — broke the string of 16 straight missed threes with a three at the 14:30 mark. He’d made five 3-pointers all season before that one, attempting just 17, but none were bigger. This one tied the game at 37, and the Ball Arena crowd, comprised of thousands of Bluejay fans, exploded.
Burns picked up his fourth foul on the next play, and then CU went back inside. Kalkbrenner hit a pair of free throws, and the Jays had answered the 11-0 NC State run with a 9-0 run of their own.
A drive to the rim by Kaluma made it a 15-5 CU run, and a 45-42 lead. Then a lob to Kalkbrenner, his 22nd point of the game, made it 47-44, and a pair of free throws from Kaluma pushed it to 49-44.
By the 6:40 mark, CU’s lead had grown to nine following a monster block by Kaluma on a drive by Darrell Morsell and a transition bucket, leading to a timeout.
In the NC State huddle during that timeout, things got heated with Smith and Jarkel Joiner yelling at each other — but they responded with back-to-back threes to make it 59-56. The second came on a frustrating possession where the Wolfpack secured two offensive rebounds, the second one tapped out to Jack Clark at the top of the key where he drained a three.
Nembhard answered with a layup at the rim. And then another. Those two shots were massive: they settled the Jays down and stopped the Wolfpack’s momentum. And then they delivered the knockout punch. After a couple of tough shots by Smith — including a dunk off the dribble over Kalkbrenner — his next shot was blocked by Trey Alexander. Then Scheierman hit two huge shots, the second one an absolute dagger from from the right wing, to give Creighton an eight point lead with 62 seconds left.
There was pandemonium on the Bluejay bench, kisses being blown to the crowd from Scheierman — it was a moment.
“It’s March Madness. It’s a great crowd, an atmosphere. And growing up that’s what you dream of playing in,” Scheierman said. “That kiss, I don’t know, I just — Jayson Tatum does it, it was just in the moment thing, it wasn’t necessarily to anybody. I like to have a lot of fun and interact with the people, and I think that’s what it’s all about.”
Fun? How’s a 72-63 win in the NCAA Tournament to set up a battle with Baylor on Sunday night for the Sweet 16 sound? You bet.
Inside the Box:
Ryan Kalkbrenner’s career-high 31 points are the most ever by a Bluejay in an NCAA Tournament game, breaking Doug McDermott’s record of 30 set against Louisiana in 2014. He was 11-of-14 from the floor (78.6%), tying Sleepy Floyd’s Big East record for highest shooting percentage in an NCAA Tournament game (minimum 30 points scored) — set all the way back in 1980 when Floyd starred for Georgetown.
He drew 10 fouls (!) en route to making 8-of-9 from the line. He had seven rebounds, three blocks, two assists, and played 38 minutes. Those three blocks made him the first Bluejay with three in an NCAA Tournament game since Joe Dabbert in 2003. And he scored so many points he passed FOUR separate players on Creighton’s all-time scoring list in one game — Kalkbrenner now has 1,118 to move past Tim Powers (1,093), Doug Brookins (1,115), Daryl Stovall (1,15) and Kenny Evans (1,116) and into 34th place.
Kalkbrenner shredded NC State’s interior defense all game, so much so that he single-handedly skewed their team shooting percentage. They shot 46.4% from the floor in spite of making 3-of-20 from three-point range (15.0%) — mostly due to Kalkbrenner’s efficiency at the rim.
An all-time performance by an all-time Bluejay, for sure.
“Nothing surprises me from Kalk. He’s just continued to get better and better and better,” McDermott said of his star. “We were joking going into the locker room, I said, I can’t believe you missed a free throw. He shot 47, 48 percent as a freshman. Two years later he’s on the line with the game on the line late in the game, and he’s knocking down free throws. He’s just improved in every facet of the game, and he was able to score on Burns. But then when they had to go small, we did a good job of executing some offense to get him the ball around the rim, and then he did the rest.”
But he wasn’t alone, and that’s why Creighton prevailed. In 38 minutes, Ryan Nembhard had zero turnovers and was the conductor of a disciplined, patient attack. He spent the entire game setting up Kalkbrenner to succeed, and then when his team needed buckets late he drove to the rim twice to get them.
Arthur Kaluma nearly had a double-double, logging 10 points with nine rebounds, four assists and one very big block.
“Art had his fingerprints all over this game, nine rebounds, he had four assists, and they were all for easy baskets,” McDermott said. “I thought defensively did a good job, made a couple great plays. And he got into the paint off the dribble but under control, and then made really good plays out of it. Only took six shots, only made two of them, made all of his free throws, almost had a double-double. That’s a heck of a tournament game.”
Baylor Scheierman made only 2-of-8 from three-point range and 4-of-12 overall, but half of them came in the final three minutes when the Jays desperately needed them. And he added six rebounds, four assists and a block of his own.
“You’ve got to be able to impact the game in different ways. If shots aren’t falling, I try to do my best to rebound or try to create for other people or just as simple as just encouraging my other teammates,” Scheierman said. “Because I know they have belief in me, so when things aren’t going well for me, I just continue to encourage them.”
Defensively, their plan to let Terquavion Smith get his while shutting down everyone else worked. He scored 32 points (12-of-27 shooting, 1-of-5 from outside). Jarkel Joiner, his scoring partner all year, had 13 points on 5-of-18 shooting and 0-for-5 from three-point range. Everyone else? 18 points on 7-of-19 shooting.
On the surface, it might seem crazy to say Trey Alexander’s defense on Smith was solid — he scored 32 points, after all. But he ran him off the three-point line consistently and forced him into tougher shots, that to Smith’s credit, he made. The Jays were willing to live with that versus letting Smith hit the kind of 25-foot three pointers that have keyed so many NC State wins this year. And though Smith scored a lot on him, Alexander got the last word by blocking a shot in the final 90 seconds.
“I know the second half we tried to throw a couple different ball screens coverages at him, and the big boy (Burns), he set some big screens. It’s hard to get over his screens,” Alexander said. “On the block, I kind of got over (a screen) and I was barely able to get on the side of him. And then I saw that Kalk was getting back to his man, so I was able to barely get my fingertips on it. Obviously it was a big play in the game and it changed the momentum of how we were able to play going down to the end.”
And finally, there’s this: two of Creighton’s five worst shooting performances from three-point range in an NCAA Tournament game have come in the last two years — and unlike the other three, which are horrible memories for Jays fans, those two ended in wins.
- 2013-Duke 2/19 (.105) L
- 2022-San Diego St 2/14 (.143) W
- 2023-NC State3/20 (.150) W
- 2007-Nevada 3/19 (.158) L
- 2001-Iowa 5/28 (.179) L
Defense!
