With Creighton leading #13 Xavier 42-28, Greg McDermott said his halftime message was simple.
“Just step on them.”
A year ago, a 17-point halftime lead against Xavier in this same building was gone in the blink of an eye. The Jays did their best to do what Mac asked — step on them and prevent any comeback hopes — this time around, ballooning their lead out to 55-40 with 14 minutes left on a long three from Baylor Scheierman. But over the next 90 seconds, Xavier went on a 9-0 run and just like last year, the lead was slipping away quickly.
There was an uneasiness in the air. But Arthur Kaluma was determined that history was not going to repeat itself.
“Honestly, I was thinking about that the entire game once we started building a lead,” Kaluma said on the postgame radio show. “The main idea that we had at halftime was that we’ve been in this position before. We gotta maintain the pressure, maintain how hard we’re playing, and finish it out. Don’t let your foot off the gas.”
Arthur Kaluma drives for two of his 20 points Saturday. (Brad Williams/WBR)
Nursing that six-point lead, Kaluma put his head down, drove to the rim, and scored on a tough contested layup. Eight point lead. Seconds later, Fredrick King stuffed a shot by Jerome Hunter so completely that many — yours truly included — were left slack-jawed. Ryan Kalkbrenner followed with a layup to push the lead back into double-digits, and after back-to-back threes from Baylor Scheierman and Kaluma they led by 19 points. Though Xavier tried to make it competitive, for all intents and purposes that was the game.
Scheierman put the exclamation point on the win a couple of minutes later, driving the baseline to score on this up-and-under layup off the glass as the shot clock expired. It was a ridiculous shot. It was that kind of day.
The huge second half was made possible by a first half where their defense, which had been shredded in Cincinnati, locked down the Musketeers.
Certainly it helped that the Xavier frontline of Zach Freemantle and Jack Nunge picked up their second fouls 10 seconds apart midway through the half, which changed the complexion of how the game was contested in the paint for the rest of the afternoon with both players trying not to get in further foul trouble. But Souley Boum, their leading scorer and one of the most electric offensive weapons in the league, was rendered invisible. He scored 26 in Cincinnati. He had two points on five shots on Saturday.
“It happened kind of by mistake,” McDermott recalled. “We started with Trey on him, and he got an early foul…we flipped the matchup, and R2 was terrific so we just left him there. He was really good.”
Ryan Nembhard’s fingerprints were all over Saturday’s win. (Brad Williams/WBR)
Kaluma said that before the game, he and Nembhard talked specifically about the defensive matchup with Boum.
“(Ryan) said, ‘Man, if I ever get switched onto him, I’m going to show the coaches that I can guard him.’ And I told him, I know you can guard him! Show it! And today he came out and did it. He was just sitting on him.”
“He took it personal,” McDermott added. “He was there on every catch. And that’s what you have to do.”
With Boum rendered a non-factor thanks to Nembhard’s suffocating defense, his teammates took care of the rest. A Xavier team who came in shooting 39% from three-point range, fifth best in all of college basketball, made just 4-of-14. Creighton’s ball screen coverages were sharper, their recognition of shooters was more decisive, and with Kalkbrenner erasing damn near everything at the rim, it left Xavier with precious few ways to score.
“The good news is we executed our defensive plan in Cincinnati so bad that Xavier didn’t know what we were trying to do!,” McDermott joked on his postgame radio show. “That worked in our favor. I’m really proud of the guys for the way they executed our plan today.”
Xavier briefly led for the first four minutes of the game, but when Nembhard flipped it up to Kalkbrenner for this dunk off of a pick-and-roll, it gave CU a 12-11 lead — and they never trailed again.
The 17-point Bluejay win left Xavier coach Sean Miller singing their praises. “You can’t underestimate the value of Ryan Kalkbrenner,” he said. “I think they’re one of college baskeball’s best teams. They may be the best team in our conference overall, which is saying a lot. We didn’t just like not play well today. We lost to a team that was better today, and there’s a big difference.”
McDermott, as you’d expect, downplayed that sort of talk.
“We’re getting better,” he said on his postgame radio show. “Somebody asked me if we’re playing as well as we were in Maui, and I said that I think we’re playing better now. We’ve grown defensively. Baylor has a better understanding of what we’re doing and what his role is. Kalk is healthy, and he wasn’t then. And we had three sophomores playing their first five games of their sophomore seasons. To their credit, during the six-game losing streak when everybody else thought the sky was falling, we decided not to point fingers but to get better. We fought through it and came out better on the other side.”
Inside the Box Score:
What can you say about Arthur Kaluma? He had 20 points on 7-of-16 shooting, with nine rebounds — four offensive — three assists and two blocks in 35 minutes while guarding Xavier’s excellent frontline. But beyond the numbers, it was his sense of timing and determination to create his own shots when his team needed them most that was the biggest factor.
McDermott said after the game that Kaluma has changed the team with his play since the Christmas break, with his controlled aggression rubbing off on teammates. He said someone told him earlier this week that his recent play reminds them of Draymond Green, and you can understand why after game like this.
“With that said, I did have to talk to him today after the first couple of minutes because I didn’t like the way that he was going about his finishes,” McDermott said. “But when he got back to that, good things happened. 20 points and nine boards against that front line is a heckuva performance. He had a really timely basket when they cut it to six, he got in deep and made a strong finish. When he puts his chin to the rim and tries to score, he’s a hard guy to stop.”
Ryan Nembhard finished two assists shy of a triple-double, with 11 points, 10 rebounds and eight assists — while never leaving the floor until garbage time. In those 38 minutes his fingerprints were all over the game, on both ends of the floor. Holding Souley Boum, who came into the game averaging nearly 17 points per game (and who’d scored 26 in the first meeting) to just two points and five shots might have been the single-biggest key to victory.
In the first game, Creighton scored 87 points on 53.7% shooting, for 1.14 points per possession. Xavier scored 90 on 53.1% shooting, for 1.18 points per possession.
On Saturday, Creighton managed to improve on that offensive performance. They scored 84 on 66.7% shooting (!), for a gaudy 1.24 points per possession. But their defense held Xavier to just 67 and 0.99 points per possession.
They’re up to #10 in KenPom’s rankings after the game, which is a kind of funny situation. Back in November, they were in the top ten of the polls but barely in the top 25 of the computer rankings; after this game they’re in the top ten of almost all of the computer rankings but nowhere near the top 25 of the polls.
But at 13-8 and 7-3 in the Big East, they’re right in the thick of the race for the regular season title that they were predicted to win. The second half of the conference race should be a fun one, with Xavier, Marquette, Providence and Creighton all separated by just one game.
Those four teams are 21-0 at home in conference play so far. Whoever blinks first on their home court might be the odd team out.
As for the 13th Annual Pink-Out, it was (as always) one of the highlights of the home schedule and a gigantic success in raising money and awareness for the fight against Cancer. Former associate AD Kevin Sarver was in a reminiscing mood after this one, tweeting out a memory about the doubt surrounding CU’s move to the arena 20 years ago this summer. Like he said, it’s worked out. Though I’m sure not even Sarver and Bruce Rasmussen could have envisioned what CU hoops has become now.