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Morning After: Creighton’s Defense Struggles, But Offense Overpowers South Dakota in 92-76 Win

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[Box Score]

With a young rotation of players trying to find roles — and a coaching staff unsure at this early stage where those players best fit — Creighton looked disjointed, lacked confidence, and appeared to be a team in search of a floor leader. After sputtering for the better part of 10 minutes, they were tied.

That could easily have been written about Wednesday’s 92-76 season opening win over South Dakota. But it’s actually taken verbatim from my recap of the opener of the 2018-19 season, which coincidentally was also against a middle-of-the-pack Summit League team — a 78-67 win over Western Illinois.

Season openers can be, and often are, ugly. Last year they needed 49 points from Ryan Kalkbrenner to escape UTRGV, giving up an unacceptable 86 points in a victory that wasn’t assured until after the final media timeout. The 2016-17 team that started the year 13-0 struggled to put away a mediocre UMKC team in the first game, winning 89-82; the following year they beat Yale in an identical score to last night, winning 92-76.

With that said, two things can be true at once. Opening night of the college hoops season is often ugly, yes. Also yes: Creighton’s defensive performance was nowhere near good enough to get them where they expect to be.

“I didn’t like it. I just thought our physicality wasn’t great,” Greg McDermott said in the opening statement on his postgame radio show. “Our intellect in terms of understanding when you’re guarding a shooter versus a non-shooter, and the help you need to provide when you’re guarding a non-shooter was not good enough. We were way too hugged up to guys that can’t shoot it.”

He said that they’ve stressed throughout the summer and fall that they no longer have the elite rim protection that Ryan Kalkbrenner provided. “So guess what? We can’t let it get to the rim. We have to get better at that, and there’s a lot of things that we can work at. I wish we’d have played a little better, but also if we win by 35 points, I’m not sure I would have their attention as much as I do right now.”

If that sounds like a coach who was exasperated with his team’s defensive play, it is.

“I have to make some decisions defensively,” he continued. “Do we need to be a team that changes defense every two times down the floor just to hide some of our weaknesses? That’s not what I like to do, but I also like to win, so I’ve got to figure out a way to give this team the best chance to win defensively. Because we have a lot of offensive talent.”

That offense was certainly on display early and often in this one. CU blasted out to a 10-4 lead after four minutes, with Nik Graves scoring four. But then the defense gave up a 10-0 run, including four baskets in the paint, compounded by the fact that they fouled on two of them and created three-point play opportunities.

They started Jackson McAndrew and Isaac Traudt together at the ‘4’ and ‘5’, respectively, a combo that doesn’t often play together in those spots. But with Jasen Green (concussion protocol) and Karem Konan (NCAA-mandated one-game suspension, for lack of a better term) out, and Owen Freeman not ready to play heavy minutes, they didn’t have a lot of options.

“I mean it was a trainwreck,” McDermott said of that early stretch of repeated defensive miscues. “Those guys haven’t been in those situations much, and it looked like they hadn’t been in those situations much.”

Fedor Zugic checked in and sparked a 7-0 response with this offensive rebound in traffic, followed by a contested layup.

And when Jackson McAndrew splashed in a three, CU had a 17-14 lead. But it was short-lived, as once again the Jays allowed South Dakota to drive into the paint and score at the rim at will, giving up a pair of relatively easy buckets on consecutive possessions. Trailing 21-19 with 9:31 to go in the half, Creighton finally took the lead for good when Josh Dix and Isaac Traudt hit short jumpers.

Then Graves hit a three in front of the South Dakota bench to put them up 26-21, a shot made possible by Austin Swartz simply outworking everyone else for an offensive rebound — then quickly passing the ball out to the perimeter and causing the Coyote defense to scramble.

A 15-6 run a few possessions later would prove the decisive stretch of the game, as the Jays pushed their lead from 29-25 to 44-31. Owen Freeman scored six in the run, including this dunk in transition where the big man was rewarded for running the floor, and a dunk where Swartz drove into the paint, drew a defender, and dumped it off to Freeman under the rim.

Graves followed by splitting the defense in the half-court and exploding to the rim for a dunk.

Then Dix hit his first three as a Bluejay, giving them their first double-digit lead of the night.

In the final minute, USD scored twice in the paint over Freeman, and McDermott frustratingly called a timeout where he lit into his new center. Peacock’s Nick Bahe mentioned on the TV broadcast that you don’t often see McDermott get that publicly angry with one of his players, but the repeated inability of the Jays to stop South Dakota from getting to the rim had drove him to his breaking point.

“He’s got to hold himself a little bit more accountable on some things,” McDermott said afterward. “He’s fighting for his life in terms of trying to get in shape, so sometimes your brain doesn’t function like it needs to, but he knows he’s got to get better, he knows he’s got to work himself into shape. The problem is that the procedure he had… The recovery was four to six months. We’re at four and a half months. So it’s not like we can push that knee outside of practice time with a bunch of extra conditioning to get him there quicker. We have to make sure that knee is healed. So it’s a Catch-22 there. We’d like to get him in better shape, but we also wanna make sure he’s healthy.”

Over the first three minutes of the second half, Creighton used a 14-6 run to put the game away. And while Freeman’s defense isn’t where the Jays need it to be, he showed that the knee injury — and his conditioning — isn’t hampering his offense much. He ran the floor and scored this bucket in transition in the first minute:

He added another dunk on the next possession, and then sprinted down the floor a couple of minutes later, catching a pass in full stride and throwing down a dunk. After scoring on a layup with 16:50 to go, he’d scored eight of Creighton’s first 14 points in the half, and checked out to a standing ovation from an appreciative crowd.

The Jays’ bigs weren’t done, though. Josh Townley-Thomas scored six quick points, including a pair of dunks in traffic.

And when Zugic exploded past the defense, weaving in and out of traffic to get himself to the rim for a hammer slam, CU had a 21-point lead.

“I thought the aggressiveness in the ball screens the second half was better for us,” McDermott said, crediting Townley-Thomas for setting that tone. “When JTT was out there, it was terrific. He’s better at it than everybody else because he’s been here longer. Because of him we were able to look at some different coverages and there’ll be a lot to learn from this film.”

They’ll need it. Next up: #21 Gonzaga at The Kennel in Spokane.

Inside the Box:

Creighton scored 1.24 points per possession, and had an assist on 20 of their 37 made baskets. Of their 37 missed baskets, they grabbed an offensive rebound on 19 of them (50.4%) and had 29 second-chance points. That’s 12 more than any game last season and its most since also getting 29 second-chance points in its 2023-24 season-opener vs. Florida A&M. It was truly a team effort — Jackson McAndrew, Owen Freeman and Ty Davis all had three offensive boards, while Josh Dix had two and five others had one (three of the boards were credited to “team”).

Defensively, they allowed South Dakota to score 1.04 points per possession, with much of the damage coming in the paint. The Coyotes shot 16-of-26 (62%) inside the restricted area; 53 of their 74 shot attempts came in the paint. Those numbers are not going to cut it against Big East opponents.

Jasen Green’s return next week will help.

“As a coach and I think as a teammate, you want to know you’re going to get. Like, I know what’s going to happen when Jasen Green’s on the floor. The four guys that are with him know what Jasen Green’s going to do,” McDermott said. “There isn’t going to be a lot of peaks and valleys to his game because he’s going to play a certain way. He’s going to understand when he’s guarding a non-shooter to be in the gap and plug things up. He’s going to be more physical on the glass than what we had out there tonight.”

Beyond missing the rim protection Ryan Kalkbrenner gave them, there’s an experience gap in Creighton’s system that is just going to take time to overcome.

“In a normal year, you have nine or ten guys back and you bring in three to five new guys. So those ten guys coach up the five new guys as much as the coaching staff does,” McDermott said. “Well, now we have five guys back and nine new guys. So it’s flipped on its head. Those nine guys are looking for direction and we don’t have enough guys to give it right now. Fedor wasn’t eligible until Christmas, Ty and Jackson are just in their second year, and then you’ve got Isaac and Jasen, and Jasen didn’t play tonight. Those are the guys that everybody’s looking to for advice and counsel and to talk them off the ledge, and we don’t have enough of them, and the ones that we do have aren’t that experienced. We have to fast track, we have to watch more film, we have to go probably a little slower in practice than we’d like to go, but the reality of it is we have to because we have to get better. Physicality, defensively, on the back boards…it just wasn’t where it needed to be.”

Freeman led the Jays in scoring with 19 on 9-of-11 shooting, which is even more impressive considering he missed his first two attempts — he made each of his last nine. That he did it in just 18:44 of game time is also worth noting. He has a lot of work to do to get back to 100%, certainly, but there’s encouraging signs.

Nik Graves continued to cement his hold on the point guard spot, scoring 15 points with five assists and three steals while going a perfect 4-of-4 from the line. Josh Dix had 11, including his first three as a Bluejay. Jackson McAndrew had 13 points and seven rebounds, including three offensive. And then there was Josh Townley-Thomas. He had scored four points in his entire career entering Wednesday night, and proceeded to score six in this game.

“I’m not so sure you won’t see JTT (crack the rotation) some nights, just because of what he brings us,” McDermott said. “He may not have as much ability as some of the guys, but when he goes on the floor I know what’s going to happen. Like when I put him in ball screen coverage and I want him to be aggressive, I know he’s going to be there, I know he’s going to execute it perfectly. I know he’s going to sprint back, I know he’s going to get in and out of ball screens defensively and slip to the rim and understand that. He got a couple baskets because he did what he was supposed to do and he did it with pace. The other guys haven’t learned that pace yet. So he’s earned this right. I think he can give us a spark at times and I think he’s unselfish enough to understand how to prepare himself to be ready.”

And lastly, although the last thing any media member wants is to become part of the story — especially one who takes that role as seriously as WBR’s Matt DeMarinis does — this qualifies as an exception, even though he’ll dislike that editorial decision. Greg McDermott opened his press conference last night by pointing out his absence from the media contingent, and I will admit to getting choked up when he said he didn’t like seeing Matt’s usual chair sitting empty. He’s been in the hospital since the weekend, and though he’s improving, he’s not yet out of the woods. I can’t wait for the day when he’s back courtside live-tweeting the games and podcasting afterward, and hope that happens as soon as he feels up to it. In the meantime: prayers, positive vibes, good thoughts, whatever you can manifest — send it Matt D.’s way. No one covers Creighton Athletics — all of it, every sport — the way Matt does.

“First of all, my guy Matt DeMarinis is not here tonight because he’s fighting some health issues,” McDermott said at the top of his press conference. “He needs to know that we’re all thinking about him and that we all appreciate his passion for covering the Bluejays. Not just our program, but every program. I don’t like seeing that chair empty. So I hope he gets well soon and we get him back with us.”

Press Conference:

Highlights:

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