Bluejay Beat Podcast:
Key Stats:
Butler scored on 21 of 35 possessions in the first half to build a 19-point halftime lead, CU’s largest halftime deficit of the season. The Bulldogs turned 10 Creighton turnovers in the first half alone into 20 points — TWENTY! That’s a point per minute just off of turnovers!
Creighton made 3-of-13 from three-point range in that first half and 7-of-27 for the game, their worst-shooting game of the season from the perimeter. Defensively, they allowed Butler to shoot 50.8% from the floor, and surrendered 28 points to Kamar Baldwin (11-of-18 shooting) — which, while frustrating, is understandable — and 13 to Joey Brunk, which was equally frustrating and much less understandable.
Also concerning is the continued poor shooting on the road by Ty-Shon Alexander. As pointed out on Twitter by WBR’s Patrick Marshall, in CU’s four true road games this season (at Nebraska, Oklahoma, Providence and Butler), Alexander is:
- 13-of-46 from the field (28%)
- 7-of-21 from three (33%)
- Averaging 11.5 points per game
- Bluejays record: 1-3
Meanwhile at home and on neutral floors, Alexander is:
- 69-of-129 from the field (53%)
- 39-of-83 from three (46%)
- Averaging 18.6 points per game
- Bluejays record: 9-3
Saturday at Butler was particularly bad. He was 3-of-13 from the field and 1-of-10 from three-point range, scoring nine points in 33 minutes of action. Here’s hoping the home-court version of Alexander comes out firing this week; huge home games against #16 Marquette and defending national champion Villanova await.
Recap:
CU ran head-first into a pissed off Butler Bulldog team that played with desperation and urgency, and that got big-time performances from their stars. Creighton was none of those things, especially in the first half, and by the time that changed the outcome was all but decided. The Jays fell behind by 19 points, and — it sounds like a broken record at this point — despite a furious series of second-half runs, the deficit was too severe, the hole they’d dug was too deep, and they couldn’t come back. Just like at Nebraska. And at Oklahoma. Road games where the Jays allow the home team to go on a huge first-half run and build an insurmountable lead seem to be this team’s calling card so far.
In a sign of things to come, Butler’s Sean McDermott ripped away a steal on the very first possession of the game, one of nine steals the Bulldogs would have in the first half alone. They did an outstanding job of pushing Creighton out beyond the perimeter and denying passing lanes. When Creighton did try to drive, it seemed like a second Butler defender was there every time to knock the ball away.
“Most of our drives in the first half came out of a stand-still, rather than out of ball movement where you get the defense moving and then try to drive on them,” Greg McDermott explained on his postgame radio interview on 1620AM. And that lack of movement without the ball let Butler keep their defensive structure — the type of crisp ball movement CU has when they’re clicking on all cylinders frequently gets defenders out of position, and eventually allows them to exploit an opening. When they’re standing around like they did in the first half? Well, that’s why it seemed like a second Butler defender was on the ball all the time — they frequently were.
Desperation and urgency typically manifests itself in the first ten minutes of a game, before the flow of the game takes over. Butler harnessed it. Creighton couldn’t match it. This possession, when the game was barely three minutes old, sums up the first half pretty well:
“I thought the start of the game would be really critical,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “Had we been able to start the game like we started the second half, I think maybe some doubt starts to creep into their mind about what they’ve been dealing with. But instead the opposite happened.”
Just how bad was the start of the game? CU scored seven points over the game’s first nine minutes. At that moment, they had more turnovers (4) and fouls (4) than field goals (3). By the time the game was 12 minutes old, they had seven fouls, seven turnovers, and just six field goals — and trailed 27-13.
“I think some of the mistakes we made allowed them to get some easy baskets,” McDermott said. “And now they get their mojo back and swagger back a little bit, and they’re playing the way they usually play in this building.”
Davion Mintz agreed, saying on the postgame radio show that “they had a lot of fast-break points off of our turnovers, and that hurt us at the beginning. If we clean some of that up and try to cut that in half, it could have been a much closer game.”
And once Butler got momentum from all the Bluejay turnovers that became Bulldog points, things started to snowball. Kamar Baldwin started steamrolling his way to the basket, where CU could do little to stop him:
Joey Brunk started making ridiculous passes like this:
And Nate Fowler, who had made ZERO three-pointers all season long, made three of them in this game alone:
Creighton’s worst half of basketball in a season filled with bad first halves on the road left them behind 48-29, the outcome basically already decided. But they didn’t go down without a fight. CU opened the second half on an 11-0 run to cut the lead to 48-40, and make the Hinkle Fieldhouse crowd uneasy. Mitch Ballock was the catalyst, scoring seven of the 11 points including back-to-back threes:
Just when it looked like Creighton was going to make things interesting, Brunk did his best Dirk Nowitzki impression on this fadeaway jumper to push the lead back out to 10 and Paul Jorgensen hit a corner three:
Brunk’s shot was the pivotal moment in the game, because it stopped the Jays’ 11-0 run. CU was never closer than 12 points after that shot, eventually falling behind by the same 19 points they trailed by at halftime and falling by 15, 84-69.
Disappointing as the loss is, in the bigger picture Creighton is returning home with a split of their two-game road trip to begin Big East play, which is what they had to have. And it sets up a gigantic week in which they play a pair of home games against Marquette and Villanova. Split those, and they’ll have survived the toughest four-game stretch of the season (on paper) intact. Sweep them, and they’ll be poised to make a run in a wide-open league race.