Bluejay Beat Podcast Feat. Marcus Zegarowski:
Inside the Box:
Quick, someone alert FOX that Creighton’s defense ranked as the best in the Big East in advanced defensive efficiency, and that Ryan Kalkbrenner was the league’s Defensive Player of the Year. For the second straight day at the Big East Tournament, the network’s announcers failed to mention either of those things, and went out of their way not to credit the Bluejays for what was happening on the floor to their opponents offensively.
While CU was blowing the doors off of the regular season champ with defense, FS1 was showing a graphic of Providence’s shooting stats under the headline “Off Night.”
Hmm. I wonder why that is?
In the first half, Creighton held the Friars to 0.84 points per possession, 8-of-24 shooting inside the arc and 2-of-12 outside of it. A 35-5 run saw them hold Providence to two field goals in 13 minutes. But to hear FOX describe it, that was because Providence was struggling to shoot the ball, not because CU was making it so.
As he has been all year, Ryan Kalkbrenner was the catalyst on the league’s top defensive attack. He had 15 points, nine rebounds, four blocks and an assist — and the numbers would have been even bigger if he’d played more than 25 minutes. But with a 30-point lead he didn’t need to.
“Ryan Kalkbrenner took it to us today. He was good,” Cooley said. “He impacted the game in every way in front of the rim. I think we went two days without a basket. And I think he was a big reason why.”
The Friars shot just 11-of-24 on shots inside of five feet, largely because Kalkbrenner blocked or altered nearly every shot they attempted. On shots he directly contested, they were 1-of-11 (9.1%). Providence’s star center Nate Watson had five points and one lonely rebound in 25 invisible minutes.
Offensively, four players scored in double figures and none of them were named Ryan Hawkins. Alex O’Connell led the way with 18, making 4-of-6 behind the arc and finding his shooting stroke after a mini slump. Trey Alexander finished with 15 on 5-of-6 shooting. And Arthur Kaluma once again had a stretch of the game where he was unstoppable, hanging 17 points on the Friars with 13 coming in the final six minutes of the first half.
As for Hawkins, he had just eight points but as he’s done all year, he made an impact elsewhere. He had 12 rebounds, played 36 minutes, and made sure the team stayed focused as their lead ballooned.
“The leadership from Alex and Hawk and Keyshawn has been terrific,” Greg McDermott said. “And these young guys just haven’t wavered. Maybe it’s because they don’t know any better. They don’t know the stage that they’re on. But they don’t really care. This is a connected group. They don’t really care who gets the credit. They get along extremely well. They have each other’s back. And I’ll go to battle with a team like that any day.”
Early foul trouble for Trey Alexander may turn out to be a blessing in disguise; he played just six first-half minutes and 24 for the game. A day after CU rode their starters hard (Alex O’Connell played 37 minutes, Trey Alexander played 39, Ryan Kalkbrenner played 34, and Ryan Hawkins played all 40) they were able to lighten their load a bit. It also opened the door for Rati Andronikashvili, who played 29 minutes and logged seven points, three assists and four rebounds. He even hit his second three in as many days — he hadn’t made one since December against Villanova prior to the Big East Tourney.
But it was his pregame salute to Ukraine, draped in their flag during the national anthem, that is one of the most memorable images of the night. A native of the Republic of Georgia, roughly as close to Ukraine as Omaha is to Denver, the invasion by Russia hits him a little closer to home.
Andronikashvili also had a message on his shoes.
Finally, this was the largest margin of defeat for a top seed in the Big East Tournament in it’s four-decade history, and the first time a top seed has lost by more than seven points since 2010 when Georgetown beat Syracuse by 10. It’s also the largest margin of victory for any team in the Big East semifinals since 2001 when Boston College beat Seton Hall by 27.
Recap:
Creighton’s found themselves on the business end of several large, game-altering runs this season — Xavier’s 29-2 run in January in Omaha the biggest. Friday night in the Big East semifinals, they unleashed one of their own: a 31-2 haymaker on regular season champ Providence that turned a 25-25 tie into a 56-27 lead.
Up until that point, it had gone exactly as most figured it would (other than Trey Alexander picking up two fouls in two possessions and heading to the bench 90 seconds into the game). Seven ties, four lead changes, a back-and-forth semifinal between two NCAA Tourney teams in front of a sold-out Madison Square Garden. And then Arthur Kaluma got hot.
He scored 13 of Creighton’s 15 points during a late first half stretch in a variety of ways, from using a pump fake to get clear of one defender and then splitting two more off the dribble on the way to the rim:
To stealing the ball and immediately shooting a three:
“(Kaluma) is a very, very good player,” Providence coach Ed Cooley said. “How about the confidence of that young man to shoot that (three)? It goes to tell you the job and the confidence that Greg instills in his players. So it’s a credit to him.”
“Our young team doesn’t play like a young team anymore. They’ve really grown up,” Greg McDermott added. “I told Arthur this a couple of weeks ago, he’s made the most progress of anybody in our program from the first practice until today. His everyday work ethic in practice, outside of practice, and then gradually learning how we play and how he can be effective and efficient within that system, he’s really slowed down. And the fruits of his labor are paying off now for him and for us.”
That 17-2 run to end the half knocked the champ to the mat, and then the Jays pinned them with a 14-0 blitz to start the second. While Thursday’s repeated answers to Marquette’s comeback attempts was impressive, this was next level — they built a big lead, and rather than easing off the pedal as young teams tend to do, they stepped on the gas even harder to put the game out of reach.
Trey Alexander started the scoring with a pair of jumpers, and then assisted on a dunk by Kalkbrenner. They made four of their first five shots, they forced two consecutive shot clock violations defensively, they held the Friars to 0-4 shooting with four turnovers, and Cooley burned all three of his timeouts in three minutes and 57 seconds trying to find an answer. He had none.
“You feel it. You feel it. You feel it,” Cooley said. “You’re trying to get them dialed in. Probably the first time I’ve ever done that. I was just trying to change their rhythm, trying to get our attention. Obviously that didn’t work too well. If anything it probably helped them because it gave them energy when I called timeout.”
Cooley was so desperate to change the flow of the game that he even took his star big man, Nate Watson, out of the game to go with a small lineup.
“Wow. We beat a really good team. Championship team. And we did it our way. We did it with defense,” McDermott said. “They really hurt us from the 3-point line at their place. We knew we had to clean that up. And we’re blessed with the ability — not a lot of teams in our conference, let alone in the country — can play Nate Watson one-on-one. Because we have Ryan Kalkbrenner we can. That allows us to take some other stuff away.”
With Kalkbrenner locking down Watson one-on-one, the Jays could focus on the perimeter. Providence was 3-of-24 from three-point range, 11-of-24 inside of five feet, and 6-of-17 on mid range jumpers. They took tough shots all night long because that’s all Creighton gave them, and as the frustration mounted, the pressure grew — and instead of the young Bluejays crumbling, it was the veteran Friars.
A memorable night was capped off with the first points of the season for walk-on Devin Davis — a three-pointer at the Garden. Oddly, his only other career points came last year in the Big East Tourney against Butler.
And with Villanova’s thrilling 63-60 win over UConn in the nightcap, it sets up the Big East Championship on Saturday night. The two teams split their games earlier this year — CU won 79-59 in Omaha, and ‘Nova won 75-41 in Philadelphia. Now they’ll meet on a neutral floor with a title on the line.
“This is our fourth time in the championship game in the eight or nine years we’ve been in the league,” McDermott said. “And we haven’t been able to quite kick that door down. Hopefully tomorrow that’s the time to do that.”
As for Providence, they’ll move on to next week’s NCAA Tournament hoping to shake off a blowout loss in NYC much as Creighton did a year ago.
“I still think we’re at 25 points,” Cooley said near the end of his press conference, “and it’s an hour after the game.“