Seven minutes into the second half, Creighton and Butler were tied at 54 in a game that had gone through nine ties and 15 lead changes. Neither team could manage to pull away, though moments earlier it looked like Butler might be the one to do it — with CU ahead 49-47, the Bulldogs scored five straight. But that would be the wakeup call CU needed. Down 52-49, Ryan Kalkbrenner brought the Jays to within a point on a one-handed bank shot in the paint, and then Jackson McAndrew gave them the lead on a three.
Butler would tie it at 54, and then Kalkbrenner and Jamiya Neal took over.
Kalkbrenner used a spin move to get around Butler’s Boden Kapke and slammed a two-handed dunk for the lead. Seconds later, he rejected a shot in the paint and directed it to Neal, who took the ball 94 feet for a fastbreak layup.
Neal would score on each of the next three possessions, too, each of them over the top of an overmatched Finley Bizjack. It forced Butler into a timeout so they could get someone else to defend Neal, but the damage was done — CU had an eight-point lead in the blink of an eye.
“We liked the matchup of Bizjack on Jamiya coming out of that timeout,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “So we ran a couple plays to get him in space and Jamiya made a couple of outstanding plays, and you know, scored those six points in a row to create separation.”
And when Kalkbrenner drained a three on the next trip down the floor, they had their first double-digit lead of the day at 68-58 with 7:47 to go. Isaac Tradut followed with a long jumper to complete a 16-4 run, and the Jays had seemingly taken control of the game.
Not so fast. The Neal roller coaster went the other direction, with an ugly turnover from the Bluejay guard sandwiched in between three-pointers from Kapke and Patrick McCaffery. And when Neal took (and missed) a three early in the shot clock on the next possession, Butler had an opportunity to make it a one-score game. But he atoned for the turnover by intercepting a pass, starting a fastbreak, and hitting Steven Ashworth in stride for a three-pointer to push the lead back out to nine.
“Unbelievable, especially when you consider he was 1-of-13 at Marquette, and misses his first seven (in this game), so he was one of his last 20. But he hits the back breaker at a critical time,” McDermott said. “He does so much for us, and he was sick before the game. He wasn’t in the huddle while they were doing their lineups, because he was over the garbage can. But he’s one tough dude and does a great job leading us. He had his fingerprints all over this game today.”
“That was a blessing from heaven, it felt like, honestly,” Ashworth added on the postgame radio show. “We needed that one to go down. All of them felt really good, my feet felt good, and I’ll just have to go watch the film on why I couldn’t get them to go down. But shooters keep shooting, and that’s what we’re going to do, and that’s what I did, and got one to finally drop when we needed it.”
He’d make 3-of-4 free throws in the final minute to hold off one last Butler surge, with the miss snapping his streak of 38 made free throws in a row. Ashworth remains the country’s best free-throw shooter, making 61-of-63 (96.8%) on the season, however. He was one assist shy of a triple-double with 22 points, a career-high 12 rebounds and nine assists while playing the full 40 minutes, and despite finishing 1-of-8 from three-point range, the one was enormous. And he was really good in the paint, making 7-of-12 on two-pointers. That he couldn’t manage one more assist to become the second Bluejay ever to record a traditional points/rebounds/assists triple-double (and second in as many years, joining Baylor Scheierman) is such a shame — Ashworth is seemingly everywhere, every game.
12 rebounds for a player who is often the smallest on the court says everything you need to know about Ashworth. Asked when the last time he had double-digit rebounds, he told John Bishop on the postgame show that “I can tell you this much, it wasn’t in college!”
Creighton’s NET ranking rose to a season-best 54 after picking up a Q2 road win, with their resume also picking up a boost from St. John’s — the Red Storm moved into the top 30, making CU’s home win over them a Q1 victory.
And they’ve now won three straight against Butler at Hinkle Fieldhouse, a venue that used to be a haunted house for the Bluejays.
“It’s hard to believe,” McDermott said. “We’ve had a hard time winning here. Obviously, the fans are great, they understand the game. It wasn’t perfect, and we have to get closer to perfect, but it’s a great victory on the road in this league.”
Inside the Box:
Ryan Kalkbrenner scored 26 points on 11-of-17 shooting, including making 3-of-5 from three-point range. Those three made 3’s were tied for his second most in a game, ironically at Butler last year. He also had nine rebounds, six blocks and three steals, scoring in transition by beating Butler’s bigs down the floor, in the post by beating Butler’s bigs for position, and from the perimeter when they dared him to beat them from somewhere else. He also showed off something new from his arsenal, taking the ball at the top of the circle and dribbling four times on his way to the rim for a dunk.
Before this game, the nation’s last player with 26 points, 9 rebounds and 6 blocked shots in a game was also Ryan Kalkbrenner — he had 28/9/7 in the triple-overtime win at Seton Hall last year. And the last time anyone did all of that while not committing a foul in a conference game? 13 years ago, when Kentucky’s Anthony Davis had 27/14/7 vs. Arkansas on Jan. 17, 2012.
His second half was spectacular, with 14 points on 6-of-8 shooting, seven rebounds, five blocks and a steal while playing the entire 20 minutes. And while his defense the entire half was great, it was a pair of huge plays in the final minute that helped seal the win — blocking a layup by Pierre Brooks, and closing out hard on a Patrick McCaffery corner three to force a miss.
“Six blocked shots in a game where (Boden) Kapke plays 20 minutes and pulls him away from the basket,” McDermott said on his post-game radio show. “He got them at critical times. He executed a few switches down low and some switches on ball screens, and those shots all of a sudden become really difficult for the opponent when they have to meet him at the rim.”
There were also several plays like this, where no block got recorded in the stat sheet but the shot attempt was embarrassingly bad because of his presence. Look at how ridiculous this sequence is — Bizjack dribbles into the lane, senses Kalkbrenner looming, and keeps on going rather than take a shot that would almost certainly be blocked. By that time the shot clock is almost eclipsed, and he can still sense Kalkbrenner in his pocket, so all he can do is throw up a turnaround-slash-fadeaway jumper that nearly airmails the basket.
Creighton’s defense, overall, was a mixed bag. Butler shot 53% from the floor in the first half and scored 43 points; the Bulldogs made a shot on eight of 10 possessions at one point and might have built a big lead if the Jays’ offense hadn’t kept pace.
“A lot of it came down to just a little more physicality off the ball,” Ashworth said on the postage radio show. “They were making cuts, Kalk’s man was setting pin downs, and it was just really hard to get them out of the rhythm, because we were chasing all of those and we weren’t physical enough at the point of the screens.”
You can imagine what went down in the locker room at halftime, given the Jays’ response. Butler missed 14 of its first 19 shots in the second half, with both their physicality and focus ramping up in a big way. Four of the 14 missed shots were blocked by Kalkbrenner.
“We were more physical,” Ashworth said of their second half adjustment. “I felt like we were able to be in front of them as opposed to behind them on those mid-range jumpers, and able to force a few more misses on the defensive end in the second half.”
“The first seven to 10 minutes of the game, I thought we defended great, and I thought we defended great the first 12 to 15 minutes of the second half, too,” McDermott said. “We talked about it at halftime — there wasn’t enough teeth to what we were doing. We blew some assignments, miscommunicated a few switches, and they made us pay when it happened.”
As has too often been the case this year, CU couldn’t sustain it, and Butler made 4-of-5 from three point range in the final minutes to cut a 12-point deficit to just three. But the Jays tightened up when they had to, and escaped with the win.
In the Primer, we noted that the Bulldogs had gotten 24.8% of their points at the free throw line through 16 games, the 14th highest rate in the country, averaging just under 18 made free throws per game (26th most nationally) and attempting 24.0 free throws per game (32nd). CU’s defense did what they do best — defend without fouling — committing just nine fouls. That meant Butler attempted only 12 free throws, half of their average. They made eight. It left them with 10 points to make up for from somewhere else, and they didn’t get it.
Patrick McCaffery scored 21, and Pierre Brooks added 14. The duo of Finley Bizjack and Boden Kapke combined for 24 points on 9-of-15 shooting off the bench, which made the Jays’ ability to keep the Bulldogs off the line that much more important. They also held leading scorer Jahmyl Telfort to nine points on 4-of-11 shooting.
“I thought Jasen (Green) did a great job on Telfort to start the game,” McDermott said. “Mason (Miller) spent a little time on him, and Isaac (Traudt) was on him down the stretch, too. I thought those guys did a really good job of making his shots difficult, and then we got him in some switches with Kalk where he tried to beat the bear at the rim a little bit and it’s hard to do that. Fortunately, we did a good job on him, because if you told me Bizjack and Kapke were going to get 24 between them, I thought we’d have been in trouble.”