Inside the Box:
You’re not imagining it — this really was as bad as it seemed. Creighton’s offensive performance Friday night was their third-worst of the season, with only the Nebraska game and the game at Marquette having a worse adjusted offensive efficiency ranking. At 87.6, it was also just the third game where they’ve been under 90 — and they’d been 100 or higher in 24 of their 32 games before Friday.
That’s potentially survivable. Potentially.
But not on a night when they also had their second-worst defensive performance, with Xavier charting a 119.8 adjusted offensive efficiency. The only game worse than this one was at Villanova, where the Wildcats had a 126.4 adjOE (though at 118.0, the Xavier game in Cincinnati was close). Those two, plus the win over Arkansas in Maui where the Razorbacks were 111.7, are the only three games all season where a Jays’ opponent had an adjOE higher than 110 before Friday.
Throw in 13 turnovers that led to 17 Xavier points and 16 offensive rebounds that led to 16 more points, and you’ve got a 33-point hole to dig out of. That they somehow only lost by 22 is kind of miraculous.
The rebounds can somewhat be explained by their defensive strategy of changing Arthur Kaluma and Ryan Kalkbrenner’s defensive assignments. They stuck Kaluma on Xavier’s center, Jack Nunge, because of his ability to stretch the floor and roam the perimeter, and Kalkbrenner on forward Jerome Hunter.
“It allows us to keep Ryan a little closer to the basket,” Greg McDermott said. “It worked pretty well in Omaha with the combination of (Zach) Freemantle and Hunter. So we went back to it tonight.”
But that meant Nunge was battling the shorter Kaluma for offensive boards, and with Hunter effective at boxing out Kalkbrenner, it left the Jays at a disadvantage. Again, that’s potentially survivable — but not when that plan also backfires defensively. Xavier flipped screening assignments they use to get shots for Souley Boum, using Hunter to do it instead of Nunge. That kept Kalkbrenner on the move, and negated some of what McDermott hoped to achieve.
“I think we’ve learned that,” Xavier coach Sean Miller said, “using Jerome as a screen for Souley, Kalkbrenner is on Jerome so we kind of flipped some of the things we normally do with Jack. It all sounds good, but the player has to come off the screen and make the shot.
“And we’ve got one of the best in Souley.”
The 40-26 halftime deficit matched their biggest of the year; the 22-point margin of loss was the biggest. Before Friday, the worst loss had been the 12-point defeat at Villanova. They only had two other losses by 10 or more. It was payback, in a way, as CU had handed Xavier their biggest loss of the season in Omaha — that 84-67 loss is the only time all year a team beat Xavier by more than seven points.
Individually, Ryan Nembhard’s had worse games this year, but not many; his five points are tied for the third-lowest of the season behind the home game with Providence where he was scoreless, the Arizona State game where he had three, and the game at Villanova where he scored two. Those were the result, mostly, of not getting shots off — he was 1-of-10 inside the arc and 1-of-12 outside of it in those three games combined. Friday night, he had plenty of chances. He was 1-of-9 on two-pointers and 1-of-3 on threes. He missed four layups. And defensively, he was a mess, with his primary assignment Souley Boum scoring 23 points on 7-of-17 shooting (including 5-of-8 from the perimeter), with six assists.
But there was plenty of blame to go around. Trey Alexander scored 12 on 11 shot attempts, and had four turnovers. Baylor Scheierman had 15, largely because of going 6-of-6 from the line; he was just 4-of-10 from the floor and 1-of-5 on threes, and had three turnovers. Arthur Kaluma had seven points, with five of his eight shot attempts coming from three-point range — he made one. Kalkbrenner had 18 on 7-of-7 shooting, but his defensive assignment — Nunge — scored 17 himself.
Recap:
With 12:19 left in the first half, Arthur Kaluma’s jumper cut Xavier’s lead to 17-14. It would be five minutes and five seconds before their next basket, and in the interim the Jays committed six turnovers — two by Trey Alexander, two by Ryan Nembhard, one each by Francisco Farabello and Baylor Scheierman. Some were unforced errors. Some were the result of Xavier’s pressure leading to indecision. All of them were costly.
That 12-1 run, featuring eight points from Souley Boum, was the decisive stretch of the game. At the end of it, CU trailed 29-15. They were never closer than nine points the rest of the way, and were behind by double-digits for the final 24 minutes.
It was reminiscent of a similar stretch against Marquette in Omaha. That night, they had seven turnovers in 5-1/2 minutes at the start of the second half, turning an eight-point Bluejay lead into a 10-point deficit. This time it was six turnovers in five minutes, with similar results.
“We talked about it in the locker room,” McDermott said. “I thought there was some self-doubt on our faces and with some of the body language in the first half. I haven’t seen that from this team hardly ever.”
It was demoralizing to perform like that on this big of a stage, for sure, and to see another one of their stated goals slipping away. The chances for a regular season title disappeared with that ugly stretch against Marquette. Their chances to go to a third straight Big East title game, and to win their first, disappeared with this ugly stretch against Xavier. Kalkbrenner dismissed the idea that it puts more pressure on them to make a run in the NCAA Tournament — the third prong of their preseason goals.
“I think this team from the beginning of the year had expectations to hold ourselves to a high standard to go on a deep tournament run,” he said. “No matter what happened in this tournament, no matter what happened in the season, we had the goal of going on a deep run. There wasn’t any more pressure. We wanted it as bad as before, probably a little more now. I wouldn’t say there’s more pressure on us. I want to go play and win some games now.”
About that. The loss — and more specifically, the size of the loss — has potentially made that a little tougher. CU dropped one full seed line on BracketMatrix this morning, with a ‘7’ now the most likely spot among the 108 bracketologists they track.
ESPN’s Joe Lunardi still had Creighton as a ‘6’ seed, headed to Denver for first and second round games and matched up with the winner of the Mississippi State/NC State first four game, with that winner likely facing Gonzaga. CBS’ Jerry Palm has them in Denver, too, but as a ‘7’ seed against Illinois — with Texas, the 2 seed, likely awaiting the winner. Wherever they end up, they’ll need to flush this loss quickly and move on.
“When you go through a stretch like our six-game losing streak, it’s really easy to point the finger at somebody else,” McDermott said. “Sometimes it’s really easy to point the finger at yourself and lose confidence in yourself. To their credit, they didn’t do that. They really tried to uplift one another. They were very process oriented in practice in terms of what do we have to do to try to get better so we get out of this slide that we’re in and at the same time continue to move forward as a basketball team and a program.
I think something like that serves us well when something like this happens, because it isn’t — everyone thought the sky was falling at that time on the outside. We never felt that in the locker room. That allows us to get over one like this. You have some games where you don’t recognize your team. It’s happened to almost every team in the country this year. Unfortunately, it happened to us on this stage tonight.”
