With 5:25 left in the first half of Saturday’s 15th annual Pink Out, Creighton trailed last-place Seton Hall 28-20. Favored by 14.5, CU instead found themselves in a mud fight against the undermanned Pirates who were without leading scorer Isaiah Coleman. Against a Seton Hall team determined to slow the pace and limit the number of possessions, CU got knocked out of rhythm and started 1-of-9 from three-point range.
If the start was a surprise, the spark that fueled a 18-6 run to end the half was even moreso: Fedor Zugic. Checking in after Jamiya Neal picked up two quick fouls, Zugic immediately started putting his stamp on the game. He assisted Steven Ashworth on a three-pointer. He drew two fouls on Seton Hall’s Dylan Addae-Wusu in the span of 20 seconds, sending the Pirates’ best ball-handler to the bench for the rest of the half. A minute later he drew another foul and hit a free throw. And then, with the Jays ahead 33-32, he came off a ball screen and hit a step-back three.
“My confidence has been going up every game a little bit more. What gave me confidence in the last two games was, honestly, on the defensive part, just trying to do whatever coach wants me to do in defense and box out,” Zugic said on the postgame radio show. “Offense, I was never really worried about it. I just let the game come to me. There is still some (schemes) that I have to learn about our offense and I’m getting way better recognizing where I have to be, but I’m pretty happy with how everything is going right now.”
Ashworth gave them a 38-34 lead at the half with this buzzer-beater, a high-arching shot off the glass that impressed Seton Hall coach Shaheen Holloway — at the end of this clip, watch him quietly congratulate Ashworth on his way to the locker room as a sign of respect for the difficulty of that shot, from one smallish-point guard to another.
Despite a four-point lead, Greg McDermott was displeased with his team to say the least. What did he tell the team at halftime?
“Wake up. ‘Wake up’ was the message,” McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “That was not the team that played at UConn and DePaul in terms of how locked in we were and how we corrected each other’s mistakes and flew around.”
Zugic noted that with their winning streak has come a wave of confidence, but that can be a double-edged sword. “When you are not playing at teams like UConn and the contenders, you get too relaxed. I think that’s what happened in the first half,” Zugic said. “But, you know, coach checked us real good.”
Ryan Kalkbrenner sanitized the message a bit. “We weren’t really playing up to our standard in the first half. It was okay at best,” Kalkbrenner said. “Mac challenged us. ‘Don’t get complacent no matter who we’re playing; play to our standard no matter what going else is going on in the game.’ So I think that was his big message. We were able to flip the switch. Obviously, you don’t want to have to rely on that moving forward, but it was good that we were able do that for this one.”
After the 18-6 run that ended the first half, the Jays began the second on a 9-0 run that featured a three from Jasen Green — just his sixth of the season, but the second game in a row where he’s hit one.
Creighton led 47-34 before Addae-Wusu hit a three for Seton Hall’s first points of the second half; CU then made 11 of their next 12 shots, and 4-of-5 from the line, over the next 11 minutes to build a 26-point lead. The Pirates had led 28-20 after 15 minutes. Creighton outscored them 59-26 over the final 25.
“Obviously, their team’s had to deal a lot of adversity this year, and they’re dealing with more now with a couple guys out,” McDermott said of the struggling Pirates. “But you know they’re going to compete, they’re going to fight, and that’s what happened the first half. In the second half, we were a little bit more like the team that’s been playing recently on both ends of the floor, but especially defensively. To hold them to 20 in the second half is what we needed to do to from the jump to start with. It’s a good win, and we had a lot of guys step up and make some big plays.”
The overflow crowd of 18,430 stood up to cancer at the under-8 timeout, a moment whose emotional gravity is hard to describe. Everyone’s been touched by the disease in some way, shape or form — and looking around the arena during that moment is a lot.
“Awesome crowd; that was fun to see so many people here for the Pink Out,” McDermott said. “It continues to amaze me how our fan base has just embraced this event. We have former players who come back. A lot of former players’ moms make this a can’t-miss event, which is really, really cool. A lot of us have dealt with cancer in our family, including me. Right now, one of my best friends from high schools was diagnosed with stage four cancer in August, so I’m going through that journey with him right now. So it doesn’t end. It doesn’t stop.”
Money raised during the Pink Out goes to the American Cancer Society Hope Lodge, the free housing facility for families with loved ones going through cancer treatment in Omaha. The jersey auction raised $43,995.92 — the second-highest total, trailing only the 2013-14 edition which raised $48,247.11 thanks to a guy named Doug McDermott. Combined with additional fundraising on gameday, underwriting, matching donations and volleyball/women’s basketball jersey auctions, Creighton broke the million-dollar mark this year with a total of $1,000,074.65 raised.
“For this game to celebrate that person in your life — and it’s not just the people that buy the jerseys, and people that come to the games,” McDermott said. “There are a lot of cancer survivors and a lot of people that are dealing with it right now, and then some families that have unfortunately lost loved ones to cancer. The message that it sends about the need for money for research is really important. I was at the Hope Lodge yesterday; it’s a wonderful facility. I get notes and emails all the time from families that have benefited from that facility, either in state or out of state, but understand that the impact that the Pink Out and the auction around it has had on that building.”
Inside the Box:
Seton Hall’s leading scorer, Isaiah Coleman, missed the game due to injury. With Chaunce Jenkins still out, that left them without a lot of firepower — and in the case of Coleman, left the Bluejays to rebuild their scouting report and gameplan on the fly.
“I think (Coleman’s late scratch) probably impacted our focus a little,” McDermott said. “Everything we did in our preparation was designed to slow him down. They move him around so much in their offense, so I just don’t know if we took a deep breath when that happened and we weren’t quite ready to compete the way we needed to compete. And then you know, Seton Hall — like they always do — they punch you in the mouth. They’re gonna come out, they’re gonna be physical, they’re gonna work. And they picked us apart with some mid-range shots, which they had not been shooting at a very high level this year.”
Overall, it was Creighton’s fifth-best defensive performance of the season statistically, as they held Seton Hall to 0.86 points per possession for the game. That’s even more impressive when you consider that SHU was at 1.2 points per possession in the first half — in a second half where the Jays held them to 20 points and 28.6% shooting, they also held them to .645ppp.
Ryan Kalkbrenner scored 23 points on 9-of-10 shooting, and was perfect inside the arc. He added nine rebounds, three assists, three blocks and two steals. Seton Hall’s depleted lineup didn’t have anyone within 40 pounds or three inches of Kalkbrenner; they tried to double and sometimes triple-team him, but weren’t successful Until their jump-shots got rolling late in the first half, he more or less was their offense.
But the big picture is that he surpassed the 1,000 rebound mark for his career in this game, and ended it two points shy of Bob Harstad for third on the all-time scoring list. Kalkbrenner is the fifth player in CU history to grab 1,000 rebounds in a Bluejay uniform, and the third player in Creighton history and 132nd player in Division I men’s basketball history to have at least 2,000 points and 1,000 career rebounds.
“That’s amazing. Just amazing,” McDermott said. “And he’s so unassuming, you know, like he joked around with me the other day when I presented him the 2,000-point ball. He leaned over and whispered, ‘Did you see this coming when you recruited me?’ I’m like, ‘Did you?’ And he said, ‘Heck no.’ I’m like, ‘Well, that makes two of us.’”
Kalkbrenner said, “It’s crazy, especially walking in as a freshman, I was like, ‘Man, I’d be lucky if I ever become a starter on this team.’ I had no idea the journey I’d be on, and it’s honestly been such a blessing. All the people that have been around this program to help me get to where I am, I couldn’t have done it without any of them. It’s crazy looking back on it, because I never would have thought I’d be able to do this going into my career.”
Ashworth scored 17 points with nine assists, and made 6-of-7 from the floor — including five 3-pointers — after missing his first two shots.
“It was obviously an efficient night, and that’s just more of the same from Ryan Kalkbrenner,” Ashworth said. “I was glad to join that club of becoming a little more efficient tonight. You throw Isaac Traudt in there as well, 4-for-4, that’s 50 points on 23 shots.
Eight of Traudt’s 10 points came during the decisive 26-7 run spanning the first and second halves; he went 4-of-4 from the field with two 3-pointers. Traudt has now scored in double-figures in three of the last four games, and going back to the UNLV game in early December, he’s 18-of-34 (52.9%) from three-point range.
And in his last three home games, Traudt has gone 3-of-4 from three against St. John’s, 4-of-4 from three against Providence, and 2-of-2 from three (and 4-of-4 overall) against Seton Hall.
Courtesy of Rob Anderson, here’s all 12 shots from the floor. His only miss led to a Steven Ashworth 3-pointer.
Meanwhile, Jackson McAndrew made a three in his 9th straight Big East game, extending his Creighton freshman record.
“Yeah, I mean, you don’t really get to rest with Jackson or Isaac out there. You have to account for them at all times, because at 6’10”, you have to be there on the catch,” McDermott said. “They both shoot it relatively quick and Jackson’s improving defensively every single game, too. There’s some games that the matchups are better than others for one of them or the other. Jackson got hit pretty hard in the back, so Isaac went in there a little earlier than normal but they’re both doing really good things for us and they really support each other. If you watch their reactions on the bench, nobody jumps up quicker when Jackson makes a three than Isaac, and nobody’s up quicker than when Isaac makes a three than Jackson. They’ve become really good friends, and even though they’re competing for the same minutes they’re about the team.”
And in 16 minutes, Fedor Zugic scored nine points with two rebounds and two assists, while drawing four fouls. He made 3-of-5 from the floor, and looked both more confident and comfortable. He said he feels like his conditioning is finally game-ready.
“The main part was just getting like mentally ready, because I was still worried about where am I supposed to be, what I’m supposed to do,” he said on the postgame radio show. “Everything just looked so fast, which led to me getting tired really quick. But like today, I didn’t feel any fatigue at all, and I think that’s past me now. What I have left is just to, you know, get more adjusted every day.”