Inside the Box Score:
In the first half, Creighton had 14 assists on 20 made baskets. They were 7-of-10 from three point range and 13-of-20 everywhere else. In the second? Look away; it’s hideous.
Two assists on just nine (!!) made baskets. 2-of-12 from three-point range.
Certainly the 1-3-1 zone that Cal Poly employed after halftime bothered them, but their spacing was not as good, either, and they took too many rushed shots. Mostly, they looked like they’d hit a wall. They did get to the line a ton, and made 15-of-19 from the charity stripe, but with this just the first of a four-games-in-eight-days stretch, looking gassed halfway through the first game is not promising.
“We’ve got to take things one game at a time: figure out a way to win this one, move on to the next one, and figure out how to win that one,” Greg McDermott said. “We don’t have a lot of options right now coming off the bench.”
Individually, Damien Jefferson had his best overall game in nearly a year, with 17 points, 8 rebounds (three offensive), 2 assists and a steal. It was the rebounds he wanted to talk about afterward.
“Rebounding for me is really important, especially this year with the size we don’t have on this team,” Jefferson said in a postgame radio interview. “We have Kelvin at 6’11” and CB at 6’8″, and I’m probably the next tallest guy. So it’s key for me to do my job which is getting as many offensive and defensive rebounds as I can.”
His explosiveness off the floor was better than it’s been at any point since his injury last January. This was the Jefferson we saw in November and December of last year, skying well above the rim to secure rebounds with two hands in traffic. He’s closer to 100% than he’s been in a long time. His jump shot is not quite back, though. He was 0-for-4 from long range Friday night, and 0-for the season.
“When I see the first (three-pointer) go in, I’ll feel really good, and that’s the only thing going through my mind,” Jefferson said. “I know when it does go in, you’ll see the reaction on my face — it’ll be a sigh of relief. I’ll keep shooting it. I was bad tonight but my teammates kept finding me, kept trusting me to make the three, and I appreciate that so much.”
For his part, Greg McDermott remains confident.
“They sat off of him tonight, plugged up the paint when he had the ball. He was leading the Big East in three-point shooting on January 1 of last year. Everybody forgets that. Then he gets hurt and he’s never gotten that rhythm back. He just needs his confidence back. We told him tonight, ‘Nobody over on this bench is telling you not to shoot it. So why you’re not shooting it, I don’t understand.'”
Recap:
For the first 15 minutes of Friday night’s game, Creighton looked the best they’ve looked so far this season. They made their first seven shots to take an 18-5 lead, and recorded an assist on all seven baskets. Christian Bishop and Damien Jefferson scored the first 10 points, including this play where Jefferson drove downhill into the defense and created a dunk for Bishop.
“We talked about this in practice,” Jefferson said in a postgame radio interview. “Coach wants me and Christian to be more involved in ball screens. It has to be hard for the opposing big man to try to stop both me and prevent the lob to CB; he has to choose. On both of those early plays he came out on me and I found CB underneath.”
Then Marcus Zegarowski hit back-to-back threes, skipped a bounce pass through traffic to Ty-Shon Alexander for a dunk, and the Jays were rolling.
Moments later, Bishop stole the ball and drove the length of the court for what looked to be a fastbreak dunk. It missed and sailed out of bounds, but the energy Creighton was playing with at that point of the game was unmistakeable. They made three-pointers on each of the next three possessions, two by Ballock — the last one coming from the Bluejay logo at center court — to surge to a 27-12 lead. My goodness, this was an old-fashioned Wragge Bomb.
Freshman Shereef Mitchell poked the ball away on the next defensive possession and took it down the floor to extend the lead further.
And with just under five minutes to go in the half, Bishop hit his first career three-pointer to push the CU lead past 20 for the first time. It was 41-19 at that point, but Cal Poly wasn’t going away.
Against a five-guard lineup from the Bluejays — necessitated because of Kelvin Jones being in foul trouble and Bishop needing a breather — the Mustangs made their last seven shots of the half, and put together a 19-10 run that carved that lead down to 51-38. Lanky forward Kyle Colvin was the spark; he scored eight points during the run, including a pair of threes in the final 40 seconds over the top of shorter Bluejay defenders.
“It wasn’t the end of the half that I wanted, for sure,” Greg McDermott said after the game in his postgame radio interview. “We’re just running on empty. We’re asking so much of our guys that we’re unable to sustain. The start we had defensively was outstanding for the first 25 possessions or so. Then the fatigue manifests itself with a lack of communication, or a missed blockout, or not doing what we’re supposed to on a ball screen coverage. There was a lot of those mistakes at the end of the first half. That gave Cal Poly a little momentum; they went into the locker room feeling they were still in it.”
CU turned the tables by starting the second half on a 21-10 run that erased what Cal Poly had trimmed from their lead at the end of the first half, building a game-high 24 point lead. As he had been in the first half, Jefferson again played a key role, scoring five points in the run including this nifty little teardrop in the lane:
Shortly thereafter, he did his best Marcus Foster impression, taking off like a rocketship down the baseline, rising up well above the rim for a hammer dunk…and missing the dunk. But after going through nearly a full calendar year where that explosiveness and aggressiveness was not part of Jefferson’s game as he fought through injuries, even a missed dunk was a highlight reel moment.
“The next step is getting my feel for the game back, and my explosiveness. This game was huge for that,” Jefferson said. “That missed dunk especially and seeing how I got off the floor…obviously I’m going to make the next one, but I’m still happy I got up that high.”
“It’s gradually coming back for Damien,” McDermott noted. “There was a couple of plays tonight where he was well above the rim to snatch two-handed rebounds. He went down the baseline for that dunk. Those are plays he’s been hesitant to make because he doesn’t totally trust his foot. Every day and every game he can make those plays he’ll feel more and more comfortable.”
Getting the 6’5″ Jefferson back at somewhere close to 100% is an important development for the Jays; his verticality lets him play above the rim in a way no one else on the roster does, and his rebounding ability takes some of the pressure off of Bishop and Kelvin Jones.
Unfortunately, there was off-the-court news Friday night as well. Assistant Coach Preston Murphy, on administrative leave for nearly eight months after he was linked to college basketball’s bribery scandal, resigned from his position in a statement released before the game. The timing had “news dump” written all over it: it came out during the biggest Volleyball match of the season when a packed house was cheering the Jays to victory against Marquette, and many Jays fans inside the CHI Health Center for the hoops game weren’t even aware of it until after the game.
Asked about the news after the game by John Bishop on 1620AM, McDermott said “I love Preston. He’s a dear friend of mine. He always will be. He’s made the decision to move on, and I respect that. It allows us to move on. It’s a very unselfish act on his part…I’ve remained in constant contact with Preston throughout this process. He’s meant a great deal to this program. A lot of the guys you’re watching out here who are playing at a high level are here because of Preston Murphy. So he’ll always be near and dear to my heart.”
McDermott then asked fans not to make assumptions, and to let the process play out before judging what did or did not happen. That’s a tough ask in this day and age, and no doubt many people have already made up their minds regarding Murphy (and Creighton). None of us know what really happened, or what comes next. So we’ll stick to what we do know: Murphy resigning allows Creighton to hire a replacement instead of continuing to run their program down a coach.
“He’s a team guy, and he’s doing this for the betterment of our team,” McDermott said. “It allows him to move on to something else in basketball and allows us to add another person to our staff and move on.”
“If I could find the right person, I’d hire them even in the middle of the season. It’s been almost nine months. You’re talking about one or two recruiting cycles already and starting your third. So it’s important to get someone in here, if we can find the right person. We’ll attempt to do that. I had some conversations with people this summer because of the situation, but nobody knew how this was going to end. I’ll reach back out to some of those people and see if the timing is awful. If it’s awful, we’ll wait until the spring. But if we can find a quality candidate now, we’ll move forward with that.”