Bluejay Beat:
Inside the Box Score:
Creighton got 56 of their 82 points from their top three guards (Mitch Ballock, Ty-Shon Alexander, Marcus Zegarowski). They’re riding them extraordinarily hard — Ballock and Alexander played 38 minutes apiece, and Zegarowski played 35 — but they’re carrying the load for the Jays.
Alexander had 11 of his 17 points in the first half, scoring when others were struggling to find their rhythm, including on drives like this one.
He took just four shots after halftime, though he hit two clutch buckets in the closing minutes. Meanwhile, Ballock had 17 of his 22 points in the second half, making 5-of-8 overall and 4-of-7 from three-point range with three rebounds and a pair of steals, all while never leaving the floor for even a second. At one moment late in the game, Fox’s cameras showed a closeup of an obviously gassed Ballock gasping for air, clutching at his jersey in exhaustion as he headed into a timeout huddle.
“There were long stretches without whistles tonight,” Greg McDermott said. “Mitch asked to come out at one point in the second half, but thankfully there was a media timeout shortly afterward. He cramped up at Michigan and had to come out. I can’t ever remember Mitch asking to come out of a game before. That’s what we’re asking right now.”
The box also gives us an indication of how Louisiana Tech hung around in this game: second chance points. The Bulldogs grabbed 14 offensive rebounds, and converted them into 26 points. In other words, they grabbed a lot of offensive boards (14 of their 38 missed shots, or 36%) and turned almost all of them into points.
Recap:
Creighton got off to a slow start on Saturday night, falling behind 8-2 in the game’s first two minutes. And though they answered with an 11-0 surge fueled by three consecutive three-pointers from Marcus Zegarowski to give the Jays a lead they’d hold on to for the rest of the game, it took them much longer to land the knockout punch against Louisiana Tech.
With 8:38 to play in the game, they were clinging to a 58-55 lead. LaTech was on an 11-2 run, as Creighton was in the midst of a seven-minute stretch where they scored only three points. They desperately needed something to change the momentum — something to get the crowd engaged, something to breathe life into a shorthanded team running on fumes.
Enter Marcus Zegarowski and Kelvin Jones.
LaTech’s Mubarak Muhammed was dribbling down the lane and got tangled up with Ty-Shon Alexander. The ball rolled backwards, away from the basket, away from the action. Zegarowski could have tried to pick up the ball and start a fastbreak, but instead dove for it. He couldn’t come up with the ball, and it continued rolling. So he dove a second time from his knees, and in one motion secured the ball and passed it to a teammate.
That teammate? Jones, who started a 2-on-1 fastbreak and ended it with a cathartic dunk.
“I felt like if someone made a play like that, the momentum would shift,” Zegarowski said afterward. “It really lifted the crowd and lifted the team.”
It was a gratifying moment for Greg McDermott and his staff, who were frustrated after this week’s loss at Michigan because of a couple of instances where players reached over to try (unsuccessfully) to pick up a loose ball instead of diving on it. They ran a drill in practice two times this week to reinforce the importance of diving on the floor when the ball is loose.
“The last thing I want to do is run you guys into the ground after loose balls in practice,” McDermott said, “but if I know it’s going to happen in games, I don’t have to do it in practice. I told the guys, if you need a reminder, I’ll be happy to give you a reminder.”
That play gave CU a 60-55 lead, re-engaged the crowd, and provided the second wind the Bluejays needed to put the game away. Mitch Ballock drilled three-pointers on each of the next two possessions to push the lead out to 66-60. Ty-Shon Alexander hit two straight buckets, the first on a fadeaway jumper in the lane:
And the second a step-back three where he juked a defender out of his shoes to create space:
Ballock followed it up with a three of his own to make it 75-68 Jays, capping off a stretch of possessions where CU’s junior guards scored 14 of their 15 points:
Alexander and Ballock heating up came at an opportune time, because LaTech’s DaQuan Bracey matched them nearly shot-for-shot. He scored eight straight points of his own during the same span, keeping the Bulldogs in the game.
Creighton’s first highlight-reel hustle play jumpstarted the game-changing surge. The second proved to be the knockout blow.
With 1:41 to go, Alexander missed a three from the corner, and in the battle for the rebound, the ball was tipped out towards the center of the floor. A mad scramble ensued. And as two LaTech players converged toward the loose ball, Kelvin Jones — running on a bum ankle he had turned on the dunk that capped off the first highlight-reel hustle play — went horizontal. He threw his body at the ball, with a singular purpose.
The ball was loose. It belonged to him. And he was going to take it.
“Marcus and Kelvin changed the game, and it had nothing to do with basketball,” McDermott said. “It had nothing to do with dribbling the ball or shooting it. They said, that ball’s on the floor, and it’s going to be mine.”
The sight of a 6’11” post player sacrificing his body to dive horizontal to the floor and wrestle it away is something that never fails to energize a team. McDermott said in his postgame interview on 1620AM it was one of the best hustle plays he’s ever seen from a guy that size in three decades of coaching. His reaction after the timeout — not shown in the video clip below, unfortunately — was classic. Grinning ear to ear, the coach gave his big man a congratulatory two-handed shove as teammates swarmed around him.
“Kelvin’s a hard worker,” McDermott told the media in his press conference, gushing about the grad transfer from Idaho State. “His dad is a carpenter and fixes things with his hands. If you gave Kelvin his choice, that’s what he’d like to do, too. He’s just a guy that’s a grinder. And he wants to please me, he wants to please the fans, he wants to please his family. He’s just a wonderful, wonderful person. And there’s still a million things going through his head right now, which is understandable because of how new he is to this system. But he’s gotten better every game.”
The 82-72 win moves Creighton to 2-1 with nearly a full week off before they play two games next weekend — the home portion of the Las Vegas Classic, with Cal Poly and North Florida shuffling back and forth between Omaha and Iowa City.
“We will realize in February what a good win that is. That’s a good basketball team,” McDermott said. “They’re hard to guard, they’re hard to keep off the glass, they don’t turn it over and they play smart. That’s why we scheduled them — we wanted a team who we felt was going to challenge for their conference championship, to give us a good RPI/NET game.”
