The first road test for this young group of Bluejays went about as well as planned — better than planned, actually. Creighton staggered the homestanding Huskers with a gigantic early run, withstood multiple comeback attempts while never surrendering the lead, and then put them away late with clutch plays on both ends of the floor.
They used two separate 13-0 runs to build a 29-10 lead at the 9:20 mark, silencing a huge Pinnacle Bank Arena crowd who seemed to be witnessing yet another of the Jays’ patented “death runs” that they’ve utilized time after time in this series to blow the Huskers out. Alex O’Connell, no stranger to this type of game or atmosphere having played in several rivalry games against North Carolina while he was at Duke, hit the biggest early shots to settle his teammates in. First he broke free for this three-pointer that made it 11-5 Bluejays:
And then the Jays used spacing and ball movement to free him up for another three moments later. That one forced Nebraska coach Fred Hoiberg to call timeout, as both his team and the crowd were stunned.
“I think I told you guys once I see that first one go in the nerves kind of just fade away,” O’Connell said. “From there it’s just click, click and then it’s just playing basketball. The first few shots for me went down so it was a good start. It was fun. The crowd was great and like I said, I love having the crowd against us … we showed some toughness.”
From there, freshman point guard Ryan Nembhard took over. He converted this three-point play in transition, fueled by a defensive board from O’Connell:
And then he buried a pair of three-pointers 21 seconds apart, giving CU a 25-10 lead. Of those first 25 points for the Jays, Nembhard had 12.
“They have a ton of shooters,” Nebraska guard Kobe Webster said after the game. “And their guards are really looking to find those guys.”
CU fans are used to seeing that. It must have been particularly stomach-turning to Hoiberg, though, because his team is very much not that. We talked in the Primer about how their point guard, Alonzo Verge, has a tendency to be a black hole and hunt his own shot far too often. That was problematic at Arizona State when he was a wing, but they could live with it because of his upside when his shot was falling. At Nebraska, where he’s shifted to point guard and asked to be a distributor, it’s fatal.
While the Jays were building that 29-10 lead, Nebraska missed 16 of their first 18 shots. Five of those were from Verge, who made a series of poor decisions that drew the ire of his coach.
“We lost the game in the first five minutes,” Hoiberg said. “They got anything they wanted in transition. That’s disappointing. And we had some bad offense lead to those possessions, too.”
Hoiberg benched Verge for the rest of the half at that point after watching the guard take five ill-advised shots, all pull-up jumpers, where he didn’t even look to see who else might have a better look at a shot.
“He’s got to start understanding when you get in the paint, kick it and spray it,” Hoiberg said. “That’s where you get open shots.”
Webster checked in and things changed almost immediately. With the ball moving around the court instead of stuck to one player, they poured in five 3-pointers in a span of seven possessions. Webster hit three of them, feeding off the crowd in a 21-4 run that brought the Huskers back into the game. All six of Bryce McGowens’ points came in that stretch, too, and what had once been an 18-point lead was down to a single point at 37-36 with a minute to go.
Nembhard silenced a wild crowd by driving to the rim and drawing a foul, then sinking two free throws. The Jays went to the locker room up 40-36, but their giant lead was gone.
“We should have never let that happen,” Ryan Hawkins said after the game. “But they hit tough shots, and that happens sometimes.”
Teammate Trey Alexander elaborated. “When you get the crowd into it you start hitting shots that aren’t the best shots to take,” he said after the game. “Mac came to us and said, ‘Let’s just calm down. These guys are going to make shots because they’re at home, but if we keep getting them to shoot those type of shots then we will definitely win this game.’ I felt like we kept getting them to take those shots, we locked in on personnel, and everyone played their role.”
McDermott said he told the team not to hang their heads because the shots Nebraska was taking during that big run were tough, contested shots, and because he had a feeling they would fall in love with those shots — which would pay dividends later in the game once they stopped falling.
“Our guys showed a lot of poise,” McDermott said. “We found out tonight that there’s some grit there. They didn’t crumble when things got tough.”
The second half saw Nebraska make several pushes to try and take the lead, but each one was answered by a Bluejay team growing up in real-time. NU cut the lead to one point again at 44-43, and Shereef Mitchell answered with a jumper. Alexander buried a corner three in transition, and it was 49-43 Bluejays.
Then after a bucket by Webster chipped into the lead, Nembhard and Hawkins hit threes on consecutive possessions to push the CU lead out to eight.
The next push came around the nine-minute mark, when a Bluejay turnover led to a transition layup for Nebraska that cut the lead to 58-55. This time it was O’Connell and Arthur Kaluma who answered, both hitting tough contested jump shots in the lane.
Kalkbrenner rebounded an air-balled three by Nembhard on the next possession, fought through a triple-team of Husker defenders to score a layup and draw a foul.
Their final push came after the final media timeout, pulling to within six at 68-62. Hawkins hit back-to-back threes to make it 74-62, and sent Husker fans pouring for the exits as chants of “C-U! C-U! C-U” rained down from the Jays fans in attendance.
“I never lost confidence in my shooting,” Hawkins said on the postgame radio show. “A lot of the struggles have just been getting used to playing at a different pace and getting used to taking different shots. Every shot I’ve missed has seemingly been in-and-out, so close to going in, even though I’m sure every Creighton fan thought I couldn’t shoot and was just chucking up bad shots.”
Laughing with John Bishop and Brody Deren on the broadcast, Hawkins then said, “It’s good to give them a little reassurance.”
But back to the crowd for a moment. WBR’s Darin Boudreau shared a photo on Twitter that went viral of an entire row of Creighton students dressed in blue, seated in the front row behind one of the baskets.
Their blue in a sea of red was a welcome sight, and didn’t go unnoticed by Greg McDermott, who shared the photo with the caption “To the Creighton students that found your way into the front row of the Nebraska student section…God bless you!”
The question remained, though: how in the heck did that happen?
WBR heard from a couple of the students who were in that group in direct messages on Twitter. One of them is a student at Nebraska, and bought student tickets for the game back in July. He arrived at 3:45pm to make sure he was at the front of the line, and then rushed inside to get seats as close to the floor as possible.
“Someone from NU Athletics told us we couldn’t sit in the student section on the sideline if we (were wearing) blue, but we could sit in the other one behind the basket. So we saved the whole front row for Jays fans — and when more came, we ended up with the entire row.
We were pretty loud the entire game. We had a few nice people around us, a few that were not so nice. But it was an absolute blast the whole game.”
Well done, guys.
Key Stats:
Creighton’s three Ryan’s — Nembhard, Hawkins, and Kalkbrenner — were huge in this game.
Nembhard, the freshman point guard playing in just his third game, was sensational, scoring 22 points on 6-of-11 shooting with five assists, five rebounds and two steals in 34 minutes. He hit clutch shot after clutch shot to answer Nebraska runs. He set up teammates for success. Mostly, he controlled the tempo — and the game.
“We should be surprised by what R2 is doing. Not many freshmen can do what he did tonight,” McDermott said. “It’s not like he’s 6’4” and he’s overpowering guys with his height and strength. He does a lot of what he does with his head and his savvy. He’s one heckuva point guard. Forget about his age. He’s a really, really good college point guard.”
Kalkbrenner had perhaps his best game as a Bluejay, scoring 12 points with nine rebounds and (officially) three blocks. He also was a key part of their defensive success. His rim protection not only forced missed shots, it turned those missed shots into easy rebounds for himself and others, which in turn fueled the Jays’ transition game. Nebraska missed 44 shots, and Creighton rebounded 37 of them (84%). That’s a crazy stat. Even crazier? The Huskers were 16-of-44 shooting inside the arc (36.4%) and only 14-of-26 (53.8%) on layups and dunks. Those are high percentage shots, normally, but they weren’t for Nebraska because of CU’s defense — specifically Kalkbrenner at the rim.
“You have to run shooters like theirs off the line, and sometimes when you do that you’re going to get beat off the dribble,” McDermott explained. “You have to have somebody behind you to clean things up. He was credited with three blocks, but I would say he had six or seven more than that. And he changed a ton of shots beyond those, too.”
And then there’s Hawkins, who’s fast becoming the Jays’ most important player. He’s 162-8 in his college career, and it’s easy to see why his teams have been so successful — he hits tough shots, yes, but he also just has a knack for impacting the game in a dozen other ways, some obvious and some not. He’s seemingly always in the right spot to grab rebounds. His defensive fundamentals are rock solid. He’s a vocal leader on the floor with a pedigree and work ethic that demands teammates listen to him. But to hear him describe it, it’s not that big of a deal.
“I just try to do my job defensively and crash the glass,” Hawkins said in a postgame radio interview. “You can always control your effort in those two areas regardless of whether your shot is falling or not. And as far as offensive rebounding, it’s not hard. You can kind of read the ball off the rim, and tell which way it’s going to go based on where the shot came from. It’s just positioning from there.”
Sounds simple enough when you put it like that.
His box score line is impressive on its own, with 15 points, 10 rebounds (six of them offensive), and five assists in 36 minutes with zero turnovers. But how about this: he’s the first Bluejay since Benoit Benjamin nearly 40 years ago to have 10+ rebounds in each of the first three games of a season. And he’s just the fourth Bluejay during Greg McDermott’s 12 seasons at CU with a line of 15/10/5, joining Doug McDermott, Khyri Thomas and Austin Chatman.
And then there’s Alex O’Connell. The senior transfer locked up Nebraska’s much-hyped superstar Bryce McGowens and made him a non-factor. McGowens wanted no part of O’Connell’s physicality, and made just 3-of-10 shots en route to six points.
“I just thought that Alex did an awesome job defending him,” McDermott said. “Alex has really embraced the role of defensive stopper. It’s fun to see.”
The downside is that as the game wears on, it robs him of energy on the offensive end of the floor later in games. We saw it with Khyri Thomas, and we saw it with Ty-Shon Alexander; both players eventually found ways to leave enough in the tank. When O’Connell gets there, look out.