Bluejay Beat Podcast:
Recap:
Sunday’s game had 17 lead changes and 16 ties, with neither team building a lead of more than seven points. It was a vintage February battle between two teams fighting for position as March looms around the corner, played in front of a boisterous, packed arena — a game with this sort of drama and stakes was unimaginable for the 2021-22 Bluejays back in November.
Yet there they were, going toe-to-toe with one of the Big East’s top dogs, eliciting the kind of noise that the CHI Health Center hadn’t witnessed since March of 2020. And there they were, earning a hard-fought 18th victory that puts them in third place in the league at 10-5 — and with just four games to go, guarantees them a winning record in the league.
“This was a heckuva basketball game if you didn’t care who won,” Greg McDermott said. “Watching from the bench, I just couldn’t believe how both teams just kept making play after play after play.”
Every time one team put together a run, the other team answered with a run of their own. The momentum flipped as often as the lead. And it was the type of free-flowing game we haven’t seen much of the last two months, as one Big East team after another schemed to beat the Jays by beating them up.
But with 5:02 to go, Marquette led 78-73 after a turnover led to a transition bucket for Darryl Morsell. It looked like the Golden Eagles were seizing control after an afternoon of going back-and-forth. So Creighton called timeout to regroup. Ryan Hawkins said of the team’s mindset exiting that huddle, “You’ve got five minutes to keep playing for your season, essentially.”
On the very first play out of that timeout, starter Alex O’Connell landed awkwardly after a missed three-pointer and exited. No matter. Rati Andronikishvili was the next man up, and he wound up making perhaps the defensive play of the season.
Before that could happen, they had to rally. And it began, as it so often has this season, with a bucket by Ryan Hawkins. That jumper made it 78-75; after a defensive stop, a floater by Ryan Nembhard made it a one-point game, 78-77. And then Nembhard and Hawkins teamed up to deliver what would wind up being the winning basket — Hawkins knocked the ball loose on the defensive end, then hustled down the floor behind a streaking Nembhard on the fastbreak. When the defense converged on Nembhard near the rim, he threw a behind-the-back pass in midair to Hawkins, who laid it in before Marquette’s defense knew what hit them. 80-79 Creighton.
The Jays’ defense forced four turnovers and five straight missed shots in the final five minutes, including two stops on consecutive possessions after Hawkins’ layup had given them the lead.
And then Andronikishvili made not one, but two defensive gems to seal the win.
With eight seconds left, Darryl Morsell turned the ball over after being heated up by Andronikishvili — working along the sideline, Morsell dribbled the ball behind his back to try and create space, with Rati aggressively defending him knowing he had a foul to give. As he made his move, Andronikishvili correctly anticipated where he would try to go, deflected the ball away, and forced a turnover.
Just an enormous play. It elicited the loudest roar the CHI Health Center has heard since March of 2020, as Andronikishvili celebrated by jumping in the air, his screams audible on the radio broadcast from center court, mere steps away.
Leading 81-79 moments later, another bizarre play in the final seconds of this series — particularly in games played in Omaha — unfolded. The Golden Eagles’ Greg Elliott stepped on the out-of-bounds line while attempting to throw an inbounds pass, turning the ball over. Andronikishvili deserves the credit for this one, too, as he denied Elliott’s first option — Justin Lewis — and as Elliott looked for a secondary option he stepped on the line.
“With about three minutes left, I pulled Rati aside and told him, ‘You are going to make a play that wins us this game.’ And he made two plays that won us this game,” McDermott said. “The first one, knowing he had a foul to give knocking the ball out of bounds to create a steal, and the second one on the inbounds play to take away their number one option without fouling. That’s next level stuff.”
Still, games against Marquette are never truly over until the horn sounds, and after a banked-in three cut the lead to 83-82, CU was faced with a familiar situation — maybe not to this group of players, but certainly to the fans in attendance who are still scarred from three years ago.
A one-point lead with less than a second left at home against Marquette. What could possibly go wrong?
As shades of Connor Cashaw throwing an inbounds pass the length of the floor that sailed out of bounds without being touched to open the door for Marquette to steal a win flashed through the heads of Bluejay fans everywhere, the Jays did what they didn’t do in that 2019 game — throw a short inbounds pass, catch it, and end the game with a win.
And what a gutsy win it was. They dressed just nine scholarship players, then lost one of their starters with five minutes left. Running on tired legs, the crowd seemed to energize them as the game wound down — more than one Bluejay credited the home crowd as a huge factor in the victory.
“Unbelievable game. Unbelievable crowd. And a level of resolve by our team that we haven’t experienced in awhile,” McDermott said. “After AO went down, we gave up just one made free throw and the banked in three in the final seconds.”
“This is what you come to Creighton for,” Nembhard said. “This is what you want to play college basketball for. Games like this. Having the crowd like that and it being such a close, tight game, going back and forth the whole game, that’s what you live for.”
Inside the Box Score:
Creighton entered the game sixth in the nation in two-point field goal defense, and then Marquette shot 29-of-48 from two-point range on Sunday. They started the second half 9-of-12 on such shots. But according to Greg McDermott, some of that was by design.
“Once Kalkbrenner got in foul trouble, we couldn’t switch to aggressive ball screen coverages that might have helped stop those jump shots they were making. And we couldn’t switch him onto a guard on the ball screens, either, because then you’re risking him fouling out,” he explained. “So we stayed with our drop coverage. I know it’s frustrating for our fans to watch those 15-footers go in over and over again, but the reality of it is Marquette, in their wins in conference play, averages 17 assists a game. In their losses, they’re averaging nine. We wanted to turn them into one-on-one players. When the ball zips around and they get you caught in rotations…that’s how you beat Villanova twice. We were not going to allow that to happen. This is what you give up instead.”
In crunch time, the Bluejay defense stiffened. Marquette went 0-for inside the arc in the final five minutes.
Through two games against the Bluejays, potential Big East Player of the Year Justin Lewis had 20 total points after making 5-of-13 from the floor Sunday. He averages nearly 17 a game against everyone else.
The Jays’ bench logged 12 total minutes, as their depleted roster got even thinner after Alex O’Connell left with a sprained ankle. McDermott confirmed it is not broken, though it is sprained pretty severely.
“We’re going to have to go to an NBA schedule here,” McDermott joked, “where we just play games and occasionally practice every once in awhile until we get some bodies back.”
And then there’s this: Creighton is now 6-1 against Marquette since the “Sam Houser Incident”, as WBR’s Matt DeMarinis called it on Twitter. Call it coincidence, call it karma, call it whatever you want but the Jays have made all the huge plays in this series since it happened — and they’ve dominated the scoreboard.
2020-21 Seniors Return
https://twitter.com/denzel_mahoney/status/1495498907765420038?s=20&t=eJRVL7KCI5bsePnOCu96RQ
With the NBA and NBA G-League on All-Star Break, Mitch Ballock, Marcus Zegarowski, Damien Jefferson, and Denzel Mahoney returned to campus for a few days prior to the game. Former walk-on Jett Canfield did, too. Ballock returned home prior to Sunday’s game, but the rest were in attendance — and this year’s players appreciated it.
“It’s great to have those guys back,” McDermott said. “And it speaks to number one how they feel about the program, and number two, how our fans make them feel. When you’re here as a player, you probably don’t appreciate how much the fans appreciate you. When you leave and you don’t have that anymore, it’s a heckuva void. To come back to a place where you’re loved and respected makes you feel pretty good. And they did the victory dance for us in the locker room after the game.”
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