Bluejay Beat Podcast:
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After 15 steals in Sunday’s win at Marquette, Creighton had 13 more in the win over Providence — the first time they’ve had 13+ steals in consecutive games since November of 2007. They forced 40 combined turnovers in those two games.
“Coach Lusk has been drilling the importance of activity on defense and digging in for steals since the beginning of the season,” Kaleb Joseph said on the postgame radio show. “He’s a great defensive-minded coach. Over the last month, we’ve begun to realize how important those things are for us to win games. We’ve done a good job of focusing our attention on the defensive end.”
Ty-Shon Alexander said that the team’s entire defensive mentality has changed with Coach Lusk as the de-facto “defensive coordinator.”
“We focus a lot on the things that we need to control, and the things that we need to watch on the defensive side,” he noted on the postgame show. “We’re really focused on helping each other, too. That’s the mindset — to turn defensive stops into offense.”
The defense is carrying them right now, which comes at an opportune time — they’re struggling to make shots. 38 of their 64 shot attempts in this game were threes, and they made only nine of them. But Providence was just 4-for-20 on threes.
“The guys have really bought into some of the defensive changes we’ve made,” Greg McDermott said in his postgame radio interview. “And I do still believe that if good shooters can shoot good shots, good things are going to happen. We’re struggling to make shots right now. Hopefully we have one good streak left in us.”
Recap:
“Wow. We do some crazy stuff.”
Greg McDermott opened up his postgame radio interview with that kind of half-joking, half-serious line, and it’s true. For 28 minutes, Creighton looked like a young team that was trying to make a statement — they were not just blowing out Providence, they were dominating the Friars on both ends of the floor. CU forced eight turnovers in the first half, and seven more in the first eight minutes of the second half to build a 16-point lead.
Epitomizing the intensity with which they defended, Kaleb Joseph absolutely dominated this first-half play before ripping away a steal:
But after building that big lead, they got careless with the ball, struggled to find an answer against Providence’s zone, and nearly gave the game away.
During the under-12 timeout, Providence coach Ed Cooley challenged his team in an impassioned speech that more or less told them they were playing too emotionally and too selfishly. It’s something else. I’m not sure what’s more impressive — Cooley’s speech, or that every single player looked him in the eyes the entire time.
His players responded by attacking the basket repeatedly, barreling into the paint and daring Creighton to slow them down. Combined with a switch to a zone defense that ground the pace of the game to a halt, the Friars began whittling away at the lead.
From the 12:02 mark to the 9:59 mark, CU committed six — SIX! — fouls in a two-minute span. The Friars cut the lead in half quickly, and then chipped away at the rest. Creighton would score just seven points over nine minutes, turning what was a 48-32 lead with 12:02 to play into a perilous 55-52 lead with 2:34 left. The Jays went 1-of-9 from the field and committed six turnovers during that long drought, and when the Friars’ Isaiah Jackson drilled a three to make the score 55-52, there was a palpable sense of deja vu in the air.
Krampelj threw down the hammer on the next possession to push the lead back out to five and temporarily stop the bleeding:
And after Providence scored to cut the lead back to three, Alexander drove into the zone, pulled up from 15 feet, and sank a jumper — drawing a foul in the process.
But Alexander missed the free throw, leaving the lead at five. On the next trip down the floor, PC’s Alpha Diallo missed a three, his teammate Drew Edwards corralled the offensive rebound, and was fouled by Alexander on the putback. He made both free throws, and it was a three-point difference on the scoreboard. With 31 seconds to go, Providence would have to foul to extend the game — and all Creighton would need to do to win is make their free throws.
That turned out to be easier said than done.
The Jays inbounded the ball to one of their best free throw shooters, Marcus Zegarowski, but he missed the front end of the one-and-one to keep it a one-possession game. And then Jackson drove into traffic, finished through the contact, and went to the line with a chance to tie the game. He did, and when Davion Mintz’ shot misfired at the buzzer, the game was headed to OT.
Providence had all the momentum in the world, having erased a 16-point deficit on the road and stopped the home team from walking off with a buzzer-beater on the final possession of regulation. But the Bluejays had seen this before, and were sick of it. One Bluejay in particular.
“Before overtime, I huddled my guys up and told them, Providence feels like they’re going to punk us. I’m not going to let them,” Ty-Shon Alexander said in a postgame radio interview. “They’re not going to come out here and beat us like that on our home court. We’re done losing at home.”
He drilled the three-pointer that gave Creighton the lead for good, 66-63, the beneficiary of a really nice dribble-drive from Connor Cashaw — the senior split a double-team, got the defense scrambling, and kicked it out to a wide-open Alexander on the right wing.
Seconds later, he poked the way away from Providence’s Maliek White, raced down court, and threw down a thunderous dunk — then stood still for a second with a steely glare in his eyes that the Jays aren’t used to seeing from their normally mild-mannered sophomore guard.
“My dad was telling me, he said, remember where you were raised,” Alexander said in the press conference afterward. “You have to be mean to play this game. They were kind of trying to push us and shove us around — doing all those things to punk us. I wasn’t about to let that happen.”
It was the decisive moment of the game, 100% and without a shadow of a doubt.
“That five-point stretch won the game for them,” Cooley told the media afterward. “The 3. The steal and dunk. Game, set, match.”
With a second chance to close out a win, Creighton delivered. They made 6-of-8 from the line over the final 40 seconds of overtime, sealing a 76-70 win that keeps their NCAA Tournament hopes alive for another day.
In the end, Creighton did wind up making a statement after all: a statement that they’ve grown from the brutal gut-punch losses earlier in Big East play, and are ready to take the next step. This is a game they do not win two weeks ago. Hell, they lost this game — three of them, to be exact — earlier this season. Kaleb Joseph summed it up in a postgame interview:
“The biggest thing we’ve learned is to be disciplined in meaningful minutes,” he said. “In the past, we’ve made careless mistakes in those portions of games. Tonight, we did that too, but we didn’t allow it to snowball. We were disciplined when we needed to be, and we got stops when we had to. To win a game like this is huge. It validates all of the things our coaches have been telling us. It confirms that we can win tough games. In games that are close, it comes down to your mental approach — who’s going to step up, who’s going to fold. Across the board, we stepped up tonight. That’s a testament to our mentality and maturity.”
