Inside the Box Score:
Georgetown made 51.7% of their shots, including 56.3% in the second half. It’s the first time since the San Diego State debacle that an opponent has made more than half of their shots against the Jays — a span of 10 games and six weeks. The Hoyas did it primarily inside the arc, scoring 52 (!) points on 45 two-point attempts despite attempting only 14 layups.
“This is a grind of a league and you have to have your ‘A’ game on both ends of the floor to win,” Greg McDermott said. “We were good enough offensively to win tonight even though we missed some shots we normally make. But we weren’t close to where we needed to be on the defensive end. We scored 80 points on 75 possessions. That should be good enough to win if your defense shows up.”
Recap:
Stopping or slowing down Georgetown’s 7’0″, 260-pound center Omer Yurtseven is a tall task, no pun intended, for this Creighton roster on the best of nights defensively. On a night where they were several notches below their best, it proved to be the decisive matchup in a 83-80 loss. Yurtseven scored six early points, created space for teammates because of the attention Creighton’s defense paid to him, and drew two fouls on Christian Bishop after just six minutes of action.
Kelvin Jones didn’t fare much better, and the problems were compounded late in the half when Jones sprained his ankle. The Jays subbed Bishop back in, and he picked up his third foul just 90 seconds after getting back on the floor.
“Yurtseven is a load in there,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio interview. “But some of our rotations to Yurtseven out of our ball screens were late. We were there, but at his size we talked in practice about how we had to be there at the catch. We were only there to challenge tonight, not to provide enough of a challenge by being there when he caught it. Those are things we have to look at. Why weren’t those executed better? I just felt all night that the game had a feeling, to me, of ‘we think we can outscore these guys.’ That’s a bad recipe for us.”
For most of the night, the game played out exactly that way, as both teams struggled to stop one another. The first half featured seven ties and eight lead changes, with neither side leading by more than five points. Marcus Zegarowski scored eight of the Jays’ first 11, carrying the offensive load while his teammates struggled to find openings. Denzel Mahoney scored 10 off the bench in the half. They led 37-36 at the half, though it probably should have been a one-point deficit as Yurtseven missed a dunk as time expired.
It could also have been a much bigger lead, even with the defensive indifference. The Jays had seven turnovers and missed 10 three-pointers in the first half. They took a 31-27 lead with 4:55 left thanks to a three from Ty-Shon Alexander and back-to-back drives from Damien Jefferson. Then they missed eight of their final 10 shots in the half.
Offensively, Creighton struggled to get open shots — and didn’t hit the ones they got, which sounds absurd for a team that scored 80 points on the road. But it’s true. Ty-Shon Alexander was 2-of-10 from three-point range. Mitch Ballock took just two shots in the first half, and six for the game; he appeared to pass up several decent looks as he opted to try and create offense for his teammates. Marcus Zegarowski had the best night of the Jays’ big three, relatively speaking. He was 6-of-15 overall and 6-of-11 from three-point land — meaning he drew a blank on everything else, shooting zero-for-5 on layups and shots at the rim.
“Mitch had some clean looks that he turned down, and we need him to shoot those. And I thought Ty-Shon’s looks were really clean,” McDermott commented. “We put a lot on those guys, and we were fortunate to win at Xavier when both Marcus and Ty-Shon struggled. They’re going to draw a really good defender every time.”
One bright spot was Denzel Mahoney, who scored 19 points and showed flashes of settling into a role offensively. It was his best jump-shooting night as a Bluejay, making 3-of-4 from three-point range, and that opened up space for him to drive as defenders pushed out onto the perimeter to take away (or challenge) his shot.
“I thought Denzel played closer to what I’d like to see from him tonight,” McDermott said. “He made some plays for others, he made some plays for himself around the rim, he didn’t turn it over.”
Scoring wasn’t the problem, though. Stopping Georgetown — specifically Omer Yurtseven — was. He engineered both decisive stretches of the second half. Creighton’s final lead of the night, 45-44, was erased during a quick spurt that featured an offensive rebound by Yurtseven that created a jumper for Mac McClung, two defensive boards by the seven-footer, and a jumper with 13:02 to go that put the Hoyas ahead 53-47.
CU rallied over the next five minutes to cut it to 63-61, and were poised to re-take the lead when Mitch Ballock took his first three of the night with 7:17 to play. But the shot rattled out, and Yurtseven spent the next 90 seconds as a one-man wrecking crew. He passed out of the post to Jagan Mosely for a three-pointer, and it was 66-61. Then he posted up Bishop and scored at the rim, grabbed an offensive rebound and laid it in, and just like that it was suddenly 70-61.
“We were doing more reacting tonight instead of anticipating,” Marcus Zegarowski said in a postgame radio interview. “If we get the scouting report stamped in our minds, then we should know and anticipate what’s coming so we can be a second early instead of a second late. That hurt us tonight.”
The Jays had one more run in them, as miraculously Alexander and Ballock got hot at the same time. An 8-0 run — back-to-back jumpers from Alexander and a three from Ballock — made it 70-69 in a hurry. Another three from Ballock kept it a one-possession game. And then with a chance to take the lead, Zegarowski missed a wide-open Ballock in the corner and opted for a contested three. It missed, and the Hoyas closed out the game from the free throw line.
“We fought. We gave ourselves a chance. I’m proud of them for that,” McDermott said. “But we’ve got to get better, got to learn and got to move on to the next one.”
Creighton was a 3.5 point underdog, and Vegas was pretty much right on as they lost by three. But this is a loss that feels like a missed chance at a rare road win. Two of the Jays’ big three had off nights, their defense was a half-step slow all night, and yet they were right there. There’s two ways to look at that — you can either be encouraged that it was competitive in spite of those things, or be frustrated that they couldn’t find a way to be victorious in a league where road wins are at a premium. The Jays are a team with NCAA Tourney aspirations, and this has the feel of a loss the team will regret in March. That’s frustrating, and the reaction from Creighton’s fanbase in the aftermath is completely understandable. If you want to get to 10-8 or 11-7 in the Big East in 2020, this is one you needed to have. Ugh.
With that said, all five of Creighton’s losses, including this one, are categorized as Q1 by the NCAA’s NET ranking. They remain inside top 30 of the NET. And their next three games — while tough matchups — are all games the Jays should win.