Nine minutes into the game, San Diego State led 16-14 thanks in large part to the Jays being sloppy with the ball: they’d turned it over on 35% of their possessions to that point. It disguised a hot start from the perimeter, with Jackson McAndrew and Pop Isaacs both connecting on a pair of threes in those early minutes. The freshman McAndrew, making his first career start, got the scoring started with a three off an assist from freshman Ty Davis, who was also making his first career start. Davis dribbled into the lane, collapsed the defense, and kicked it out to a wide-open McAndrew. It’s a connection Jays fans are likely to see a ton in coming years.
Then Isaacs created a shot off the dribble, getting into the paint and hitting this bucket in traffic to tie the game at 16.
They were in the game because their threes were falling, but there were a lot of bad signs — their ball security was poor, their offensive balance was still heavily slanted in favor of shots from the perimeter. In fact, even after Isaacs’ jumper in the lane had tied the game at 16, six of Creighton’s first 10 shots had been threes. They made four.
And then they went 2-of-25 the rest of the day.
As one 3-pointer after another clanked off the rim, the game started to get away from them. A three-minute scoring drought saw them miss three straight 3’s, plus a missed layup at the rim from Ryan Kalkbrenner. A 9-0 Aztec run gave them the lead for good, capped off by a long three from BJ Davis, and it forced Greg McDermott to call timeout.
Fred King had been sitting at the scorers table waiting to check in during that run, and with CU now trailing 25-16 it left McDermott with a difficult decision to make. He opted to stick with the substitution and give Kalkbrenner a break, and it paid off — King scored on a cutback off a missed free throw, threw down a dunk on the next possession, and then drew a foul and made a free throw. That personal 5-0 run was almost bigger; on the next defensive possession, he disrupted a shot attempt and forced a miss, and then sprinted down the court. When Isaacs driving layup missed, King cleaned up the offensive board. His putback missed, but he grabbed his own rebound, tried again, and missed again.
And after McAndrew drained another three, the Jays had cut the lead to one at 27-26.
But after a heat check three from McAndrew missed, they lost Davis in transition and he buried a three to push the lead back out to four.
“Unfortunately, we left Davis a couple times in transition,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “(Kalkbrenner and McAndrew) ran to the same guy, and we didn’t get our transition defense put together. We’ve been pretty good at transition defense because we spend a lot of time of that in practice. So that is something that really should not happen.”
Trailing 32-28 at the half, the Jays probably felt pretty decent about how they’d played without Steven Ashworth. After turning it over five times in the first 10 minutes, they had just one turnover the last 10 minutes. Their defense had tightened and held SDSU scoreless for 3:21, and they’d hit just enough shots to muscle back into it.
But an 8-1 SDSU run over the first 90 seconds of the second half gave the Aztecs an 11-point lead, 40-29. The Jays tried to claw back, with this impressive shot from Kalkbrenner where he was basically 1-on-3 briefly making it a two-possession game again.
But then Miles Byrd hit two 3-pointers in 31 seconds. Those shots came in the midst of an eight-possession stretch where San Diego State scored every trip down the court, and that was the game more or less — the game was never closer than 13 points the rest of the day.
“They don’t necessarily beat themselves and there’s a toughness about them. I thought for a decent portion of the game we matched that,” McDermott said. “But we had a stretch in the second half, I think they scored eight possessions in a row. Defensively we were out of sorts and allowed them to create that separation that was too much for us to overcome. We made some mistakes a few times going under some screens when we weren’t supposed to. And when we got a little bit aggressive, our rotations weren’t where they needed to be.”
There isn’t much time to figure things out, because next up is #21 Texas A&M at 5:30pm Omaha time. The Aggies are also coming off a loss, dropping their opening game of the tourney to Oregon 80-70. They led by 10 in the second half before a 16-0 Oregon run gave the Ducks the lead; then Oregon ended the game on an 11-0 run after A&M had retaken the lead. The Aggies missed their final 11 shots and 17 of their final 19 — while defensively, they allowed Oregon to make 12 straight shot attempts with nine of them coming on layups or dunks.
Zhuric Phelps led the Aggies with 20 points, and Wade Taylor IV finished with 15. Forward Solomon Washington, who entered averaging 4.8 points and 7.2 rebounds per game, went down hard nearly midway through the first half and did not return. He’s questionable for tonight.
Inside the Box:
Creighton’s perimeter shooting was once again the storyline, and it’s going to continue to be the story until they either start making more of them — or start taking fewer of them. Given Greg McDermott’s comments after the game, it’s clear that the former is going to have to be the hope, at least in the immediate future.
“I hope we shoot our way out of it,” McDermott said on the postgame radio show. “That’s what this team was built on. You know, some teams are built with athleticism, and we’ve built this team on shooting. That’s what we’ve done most of my time at Creighton. I still believe in some of the guys that aren’t shooting it really well. We’ve just got to continue to instill confidence in them, and remind them that the next shot is the only one they should worry about — not what happened in the past. If we can do that I think we can turn the corner.”
Still, there’s no ignoring how ugly the numbers are. Creighton has shot 4-of-22 (18.2%) on unguarded 3’s in their last two games, per Synergy. They were 3-of-12 against Nebraska and 1-of-10 against San Diego State. Again, those are not contested threes — those are open threes generated because of double-and-triple teams in the post. The first four games weren’t much better.
UTRGV: 3-7
FDU: 6-12
HCU: 3-14
KC: 2-11
Until that turns around, teams will continue to focus their defensive strategy on shutting down Ryan Kalkbrenner — and daring Creighton to beat them from the perimeter. And why not? Through six games, they’ve yet to show that they can make opponents pay for that gamble, which doesn’t make it much of a gamble at all — it’s just smart strategy.
“The reality of it is you can take a big out of the game. It’s hard to take a great guard out of the game. But if you want to commit enough people to the paint, you can keep it from getting in there,” McDermott told John Bishop on the pregame radio show before Tuesday’s game. “After watching the Nebraska film, I mean, 5 to 7 times, maybe we missed him. But it was only going to be if we if we made the pass as soon as we caught it. They did a great job not only fronting him but bringing help from both corners, which is why we shot so many open three-point shots.”
They showed improvement in forcing the issue against San Diego State, but their passes were not always on target.
“We really had some crazy turnovers,” McDermott said. “There was four or five times where all we had to do was lob it over Kalk’s man, and he had a layup. But we short-armed it, and then somebody that’s smaller than him is able to pick it off. You gotta err on the side of being long on those passes because he’s gonna go get it. That was probably half of our turnovers.”
On the positive side, freshman Jackson McAndrew led CU with 12 points and 14 rebounds, though most of those came in the first half (nine points and eight boards). He became the first Bluejay with a double-double in his first career start since Baylor Scheierman (11 points, 10 rebounds) on Nov. 7, 2022 and the first Bluejay freshman with a double-double in his first career start since Ryan Nembhard (15 points, 10 assists) on Nov. 9, 2021. There’s been a logjam at the ‘4’ with Isaac Traudt, Jasen Green and Mason Miller battling McAndrew for minutes, but it’s becoming more and more apparent that McAndrew might well be the one who emerges. He’s a good shooter, but his ability to fight for rebounds and defend are what stand out for a freshman with only six games under his belt.
“It was definitely exciting, the fact that they’re trusting me to go out there and start me,” McAndrew said. “I’m just going out there playing the same I have been, trying to work as hard as I can to do the right things, make sure I’m locked in defensively, offensively.”
“Jackson missed more shots than probably normally will, but I really liked what he did on the backboards,” McDermott added. “I thought he stuck his nose in there and got some tough rebounds, and that’s something that’s going to be important to us moving forward.”
Likewise, freshman Ty Davis acquitted himself well in his first start, even if his stat line wasn’t impressive on the surface (zero points, two assists in 24 minutes). But he also had zero turnovers as the primary ball handler against SDSU’s defense, and might very well have had six or seven assists had teammates knocked down shots.
“I thought Ty moved the basketball. I thought he made some really nice passes,” McDermott said. “And sometimes assists are really — I think it’s the worst stat in basketball because if you make the right play you get somebody an open shot, and they miss it, you get no credit for that. So that’s something that we evaluate. And I think Ty created a lot of opportunities for his teammates today.”