Inside the Box Score:
Thursday night against San Diego State, Ty-Shon Alexander and Marcus Zegarowski combined to score 15 points on 6-of-27 shooting. In the first half alone Friday night against Texas Tech, they combined for 33 points on 11-for-14 shooting, and made six of the nine threes they attempted. The duo combined to make sure the Jays got off to a roaring start, and then Zegarowski made sure they ended the night roaring by coming up clutch in overtime.
Alexander had his first career double-double, ending the night with 18 points and 12 rebounds in 41 minutes. Zegarowski ended with a career-high 32 points on 12-of-18 shooting, with five assists and two steals in 43 minutes.
“Marcus and Ty-Shon were the engines tonight,” Greg McDermott said in his postgame radio interview. “That’s what leaders need to do.”
Zegarowski’s huge game — and his clutch plays in the overtime period — didn’t go unnoticed by his teammates:
Or by some guy named Doug McDermott:
https://twitter.com/dougmcdermott/status/1200655911456518145?s=20
Recap:
Creighton began turning the page from the most lopsided defeat in Greg McDermott’s time at Creighton before the game with San Diego State was even over. During a timeout late in the game, McDermott focused less on X’s and O’s and more on the psychology of his team with another tough game less than 24 hours away.
“We huddled everybody up and just started talking, because we were starting to point fingers at each other after defensive mistakes,” McDermott said in his postgame radio interview on 1620AM. “The message was, ‘During the game, you can’t argue about that stuff. During the game, you have to figure it out.’ When we get to the film room, we can look at it and discuss it. But when we’re on the run, we gotta trust each other, we gotta look each other in the eye and say ‘This is what we’re going to do next time, don’t let it happen again’ or say ‘Talk to me louder’, or ‘talk to me sooner’, or ‘I’ll get through the screen next time.’ Constructive talk. And I couldn’t be more proud of my team.”
Marcus Zegarowski agreed. The sophomore scored a career-high 32 points, and said in a postgame radio interview, “After that moment, guys were really motivated and really locked in. We wanted to make a statement coming into today. We didn’t want to give in to the thought some people had that just because they’re a Top 15 team who went to the national championship game a year ago that they’re going to roll over us. We’re some dogs too and we came out to play.”
Creighton did come out to play, and from the moment the ball was tipped it was evident this was going to be a different night. Their energy was higher, their defensive communication was stronger, and they seemed determined to make every 50/50 loose ball theirs.
“Anytime you play one of Coach Beard’s teams, it’s important that you let them know ‘We’re here, and we’re in the fight.’ I thought our guys did that from the jump,” McDermott said. It’s a bit of a chicken and the egg thing — was Creighton’s energy and fight improved because they were making shots? Or were they making shots because they were playing with more energy defensively, creating better shots for themselves in the process?
Whichever theory you subscribe to, the Jays made their first four 3-pointers, and the players who struggled the most Thursday night were the ones making them. Mitch Ballock started it:
Ty-Shon Alexander (3-of-11 overall on Thursday and 1-of-4 from the perimeter) continued it with a three. Then Zegarowski (3-of-16 on Thursday, and 1-of-10 from behind the arc) hit two straight 3’s, with the second giving Creighton the lead 15-13. At that early stage of the game, they’d already equaled the number of three’s they made the night before, and though Tech would tie it on three occasions in the second half, the Red Raiders never led again.
With the lid off the basket, Zegarowski began filling it up, and did it on more than just three-pointers:
When he stuck a floater in the paint with 4:59 to go in the half to make the score 33-17 Creighton, Zegarowski had as many points (17) as Texas Tech’s entire team. The look in his eyes was the look of a fighter using what happened against San Diego State as fuel. And maybe the look of a player seizing control of the leadership mantle. One night after being on the wrong side of a 18-0 first half run that turned the tide of the game, Creighton used an 18-5 to do the same to Texas Tech with Zegarowski leading the way.
The hot shooting was contagious. In the first half, Creighton made 8-of-14 from three-point range, and everyone got in on the act including walk-on Jett Canfield. He nailed a three from the corner late in the half:
And then Alexander hit a long three in transition:
Another three from Alexander, followed by a driving layup, pushed the lead to its biggest at 19 points, 44-25. Against a Tech team playing without their leading scorer, Jahmi’us Ramsey, who was injured Thursday in their loss to Iowa, it seemed like Creighton was close to putting the game out of reach.
To their credit, Texas Tech scratched and clawed their way back into the game. In the first four minutes out of halftime, Chris Clarke punked them twice with offensive rebounds in between two or three Bluejays each time; both rebounds resulted in points. A little-used freshman named Andrei Savrasov, who McDermott noted was not even in the scouting report because he hadn’t made a three in his young career (and only attempted three shots in 27 minutes, all in mop-up duty), hit back-to-back threes after airballing his first attempt.
“That was six points off our lead,” McDermott said. “But we were going to make him hit a couple before we went out and respected his jump shot.”
Creighton’s once-19 point lead was down to 10 by the first media timeout. Red Raider coach Chris Beard had made a halftime adjustment to their defense — a scheme Zegarowski called “funky” in his postgame radio interview — starting possessions in a 2-3 zone and then switching into man-to-man when CU passed or dribbled inside the arc.
To further ratchet up their defensive intensity, Tech began subbing defense-for-offense at every dead ball, putting in players better suited to defense while getting shooters back in the lineup when they could. That’s something you rarely see with 14 minutes left in a game, and combined with the zone/man hybrid defense, the Red Raiders continued chipping away at the lead.
“Offensively we were still getting what we wanted,” McDermott said of that stretch, “but as I told the guys, we can’t trade baskets with these dudes. Sooner or later their athleticism and their strength is going to overpower us — we have to get stops.”
The Jays’ shots stopped falling, and then their inability to get stops allowed Tech to tie the game. To their credit, they had an answer every time. With the score tied 61-apiece, Clarke missed a pair of free throws that could have given the Red Raiders the lead. Instead it remained tied, and then Ballock sank a clutch three:
Two minutes later, Tech tied it again. This time, freshman Shereef Mitchell hit the biggest shot of his young Bluejay career, dribbling inside the arc and spinning off a defender to create space, then calmly sinking a 15-footer.
And when Ballock floated a lob to Christian Bishop for an alley-oop and a four-point lead, it looked like the Jays were going to survive. Especially when they took an eight-point lead, 74-66, with 2:45 left. They should have been able to close it out from there.
Instead, Creighton didn’t even get a shot off on their last four possessions. Zegarowski missed a three. They turned it over on a shot-clock violation. Alexander was called for a charge. And then they dribbled out the final 30 seconds to wait for a potential game-winner, only to have Alexander fumble a pass and not even get off a shot. McDermott said they had matchups they liked on the last possession, so they decided not to take the timeout and allow Tech to make substitutions to change those matchups. In a neutral court gym with a couple thousand people in it, where you can literally yell out a play call from the bench and have it heard, it’s hard to quibble with that decision too much. Having Zegarowski give up the ball, when he’d had the hot hand all night, to get it to Alexander who had moments later returned from an injury scare and wasn’t getting his normal lift on his shot? That’s worth questioning.
In overtime, Zegarowski didn’t give up the ball. He drove to the rim for the first points of OT to seize momentum:
And then hit the shot of the night, a jumper off the dribble to give CU a 80-74 lead that essentially sealed the win.
“Everytime I drove tonight,” Zegarowski said, “I thought ‘the weak side defender is going to come take a charge on me.’ So when I got in there, I slowed down, and took a lot of those flip-up shots. That’s just reading the defense and not playing along with their gameplan of taking charges.”
While Zegarowski came up with huge shots in OT, Christian Bishop came up with huge rebounds. Four of them, to be exact. It was Bishop who cleared the glass after Tech missed the first shot of OT, allowing Zegarowski to drive for his first bucket in transition. He rebounded Tech’s next miss, too, although it didn’t lead to points when Alexander missed a jumper — so Bishop fought for the offensive board and put it back for points. Then he even stole the ball, ripping it away from Chris Clarke and starting the possession that ended with Zegarowski hitting his shot of the night.
“We’re a tough-knit group. We’re some fighters,” Zegarowski said. “We don’t let outside noise effect us. We’re playing with the attitude of ‘I’m playing for you tonight. I’m going to make all the hustle plays, not for myself, but for you.’ That’s the vibe I got from tonight. And if we keep doing that, the sky’s the limit.”
It’s a huge win, not just because if Texas Tech winds up as good as predicted this will be a marquee non-conference ‘W’, but because it came 24 hours after a humiliating defeat. This weekend could have been a crossroads in the season that sent things in a bad direction. Instead, the Jays return home having fought off a really good, tough opponent to notch a win, and head into the second half of non-conference action with confidence.
