Bluejay Beat:
Inside the Box:
Marcus Zegarowski scored a team-high 23 points with six rebounds, five assists and a steal in 39 minutes. He made 3-of-5 shots inside the arc, and all five shots he took from behind it. And he did all of it while playing with an edge, a chip on his shoulder, that has rubbed off on everyone on the team and turned them into the bruisers of the Big East. Unafraid of any battle. Ready for whatever an opponent throws at them. Prepared to counter-punch time after time.
In the last three home games, Zegarowski’s individual numbers are off the charts. He averaged 22.6 points, 4.7 assists, 4.3 rebounds with just over 1 turnover per game — while making 78% of his shots overall (!) and 89% of his threes (!!!).
Zegarowski has been outstanding. So much so, another Bluejay point guard great took to Twitter to declare him the best ever.
And Ty-Shon Alexander once again locked down an elite scorer on the opposing team, in what should lock down the Big East Defensive Player of the Year award for him. After holding Myles Powell to 12 points in the first meeting, he held him to 15 in the second.
“Ty-Shon was there on the catch with Myles Powell most of the night,” Greg McDermott said. “But the defense around him today, and their communication, was at an elite level.”
“My plan was to get him off of the three-point line, because he likes to shoot threes, and to always stay down on his shot-fakes,” Alexander said. “And my goal was to get a stop. Every single possession.”
McKinney had a lot of praise for Alexander, too.
It’s been quite a transformation for the guard, who has gone from streaky shooter to all-around star in three months time.
“We challenged Ty with being our defensive stopper, and he takes a lot of pride with it. He studies it, he asks questions, he has suggestions,” McDermott gushed after the game, holding back a prideful smile. “Going from a part of the game that he never used to think about to where he thinks about it a lot now, and ways that we can be better, is a real credit to him. We did go with a shorter bench today mostly because of the pace of the game. I really felt like we were able to buy some rest while they dribbled it up the court slowly and took 10 seconds to initiate their offense. They run Myles off of 100 screens, and Ty probably only had to defend that one time instead of three times on a possession. Myles is a hard guy to guard. The job that Ty has done is — you’ve got two guys that are legitimate contenders for player of the year not only in our league but in the country in Markus Howard and Myles Powell. The job that he’s done on them is incredible. Why he’s not in that conversation too is beyond me.”
And then there’s this fun little stat.
Recap:
Seven years after joining the Big East, in a year where they were picked seventh in the league, on the seventh day of March, the Creighton Bluejays earned the biggest win in at least a generation, if not the history of the program.
Think of the touchstone markers along the way — Coach Red and the Travelin’ Jays; Eddie Sutton and Tom Apke’s clubs giving CU their first taste of NCAA success in the ’70s; taking down Larry Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores in 1978 to win the MVC title at the Civic; Tony Barone’s fiery teams with Bob Harstad and Chad Gallagher upsetting #15 New Mexico State in the ’91 NCAA Tourney; Dana Altman’s teams beating first Louisville in ’99 and then Florida in ’02 in double OT on a buzzer-beater by Terrell Taylor, followed by the 29-win club who rewrote the record books the next year; Greg and Doug McDermott rewriting them again a decade later. It was all leading to this moment.
March 7, 2020. The day the Creighton Bluejays became regular season champions of the best league in the country after 10 weeks of thrilling their fans with one huge win after another. And there was none bigger than this one — a rollicking 77-60 win over Seton Hall in front of a standing-room-only crowd, some of whom have been waiting for a moment like this for decades. To the doubters who said the Bluejays could never succeed in the big time, CU has now emphatically answered them by finishing in the top half of the Big East in five of seven seasons culminating in this championship. To their fans who wondered if a program that made cutting down nets and raising up banners a March routine in the MVC could reach that pinnacle again at college hoops’ highest level, CU proved it could by literally raising a banner right after the game that said “Big East Champions.” To the east coast sportswriters upset or offended by Creighton’s celebration after the game, while no apology is necessary, none is offered either. This day was a long time — for some, a lifetime — coming. And if that isn’t worth celebrating and having some fun, then what are we doing here?
So hoist the trophy. Raise the banner. Drop the confetti. And offer up a toast to the 2019-20 Bluejays, champs of the nation’s best conference.
A footnote on this topic: Seton Hall coach Kevin Willard, whose comments during his postgame radio interview sparked the outrage from sportswriters, was in fact very upset. Sitting courtside with the Pirates’ radio crew watching the Bluejay celebration, he went on a tangent.
โIโm really pissed off that people are cutting down the nets and my guys are down there (in the locker room),โ Willard said on his radio show, according toย NJ.com. โI shouldโve brought them out, but theyโre not in a very good mood right now.โ
Then he told reporters in the hallway, jokingly this time, that he should pay students to storm the floor at their practice arena while they raised their own banner when they got back to New Jersey. While the musings of east coast sportswriters who are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill are more amusing than anything else, Willard’s comments are a bit different, so Greg McDermott addressed them head on.
***
Prior to tip, WBR’s Matt DeMarinis mentioned to me how locked in Creighton’s players looked. How determined, and focused, they were as they went through shootaround. I asked him if that was a good thing or a bad thing — would they come out tight, overcome by the enormity of the moment? When Matt told me that Mitch Ballock spent several minutes mock-interviewing him with his podcast microphone at courtside, the question no longer needed to be asked.
The Jays were locked in, but also loose. And it was evident almost from the word “go” on Saturday. On Seton Hall’s very first possession, Ty-Shon Alexander hounded and harassed Myles Powell into making a bad pass, tipped it, and raced down the court for a layup.
“That steal was huge, because the first thing I wanted to do was get the crowd into the game early,” Alexander said. “With this many people in the building, you knew it was going to be very loud and they were.”
A few possessions later, Alexander blocked Powell at the rim to start a fastbreak, and Damien Jefferson finished it by posterizing Sandro Mamukelashvili at the other rim with a one-handed slam. The game was not even three minutes old, and already the Jays were using their defense to create offense. That’s a deadly combo for any Bluejay opponent.
Seton Hall was undeterred. They shook off the Jays’ energetic start, and the crowd noise, to build a 17-12 lead with 12:08 left in the half. While Alexander was locking down Myles Powell, Quincy McKnight was heating up and scored two straight buckets. The Pirates were taking the crowd out of the game by taking the air out of the ball, and it was working: they had scored 1.21 points per possession at that moment, with just two turnovers in their first 14 possessions.
But Powell picked up two quick fouls, the second on a charge drawn by Alexander, and sat out for an extended period. Alexander shifted his defensive prowess elsewhere, and the Jays went to work. The Jays hit four 3-pointers in a span of five possessions, three of them by Marcus Zegarowski and one by Alexander.
Zegarowski’s first was created by Mitch Ballock driving towards the rim to collapse the defense, leaving him open behind the arc. He promptly drained the three.
His second one came in transition, started by a Kelvin Jones block at the other end. Zegarowski rebounded the block, brought the ball up the floor, and pulled up from 30 feet. Swish.
โAs soon as the game started, when he was hitting all those shots, I already knew,โ Ty-Shon Alexander said. โHe was going to go crazy this whole game.โ
โTo be honest with you, Zegarowski played unbelievable,โ Seton Hall coach Kevin Willard said. โIf he plays like that, I donโt know if anybody can beat them. He’s a top-five point guard in the country.โ
Zegarowski left his mark on the game in more than just the scoring column, as usual. A couple of possessions later, Alexander drove baseline and made a one-handed pass to Zegarowski in the corner. In a display of what makes this team so hard to defend, he turned down a decent shot to create an even better one — he took two dribbles to draw his defender away, then kicked it back to Alexander in the corner for a wide-open three.
Zegarowski’s third triple was set up by a pump-fake from Ballock, getting the defense to close out on him and leave Zegarowski alone in the corner.
All totaled, the Jays outscored the Pirates 15-4 with Powell on the bench, doing exactly what they needed to with Seton Hall’s star out of the game — go on a run and build a lead. Everyone in the building knew Powell was going to put his fingerprints on the game once he checked back in, and he did. After checking back in late in the half, he scored a pair of buckets to tie the game at 32. But because the Jays had created separation with him on the bench, instead of the Pirates taking a lead into the locker room, he was merely able to tie it.
The second half began much as the first had, with the Jays using defense to create offense. Their first bucket came courtesy of Alexander, who knocked the ball loose from Powell. Christian Bishop dove to the floor, and while he couldn’t secure it, he got the ball rolling towards CU’s basket — a perfect assist to Alexander who scooped it up, took one dribble, and laid in an easy layup.
Then Zegarowski corralled a wild pass on the sideline, composed himself, and calmly drained another three.
And Ballock began heating up, first sinking this one from the corner…
Followed by this one on the next possession where he was falling away from the defender as he released it, giving CU a 44-41 lead.
Seton Hall used a 9-3 run that included a three from McKnight, a steak and dunk in transition by Romaro Gill, and a three by Jared Rhoden to silence the crowd and take a 50-47 lead as the game clock ticked under 10 minutes. Was this the turning point in the game?
It was. Just not in the way it seemed.
From that moment on, Creighton outscored Seton Hall 30-10, ending the game with a relentless display of pure offensive firepower and defensive prowess. Think about that: in a game with these type of stakes, against a team as great and as accomplished as Seton Hall is, the Bluejays ended the game on a 30 to 10 run that spanned the final 9:21.
They made 11 of their last 12 shots, overwhelming the Pirates with one huge shot after another and getting one big defensive stop after another.
The Run began with Bishop converting a three-point play.
Then Zegarowski took the ball coast to coast, weaving in and out of defenders all the way to the rim.
Next, Zegarowski (who else) got a rebound in between two taller Seton Hall players, started a fastbreak, and Ballock finished it on a nifty layup. 54-50 Creighton, timeout Seton Hall, home crowd in a frenzy — and we hadn’t even begun to hear them at their loudest yet.
Jefferson continued the surge with this drive into the paint, taking advantage of a defense now worried about the Jays’ three-point shooting.
With the Pirates’ defense now scrambling,ย Zegarowski buried his fifth three of the game, without a miss, to push the Jays lead to 59-54.
As the clock ticked under six minutes, Alexander secured a rebound and took it coast-to-coast for a layup. 61-54, another Seton Hall timeout, and a crowd even louder than it had been minutes earlier as Zegarowski barked at them to up their game. “Oh yeah!” he could be seen yelling on FOX’s cameras, pointing first to the front of his jersey and then to the crowd.
Denzel Mahoney added a three to make it 64-57.
Alexander hit a three to make it 67-59, then casually stood and watched it like a baseball slugger admiring a long home run.
With two-and-a-half minutes to a title, Mahoney pulled up for a midrange jumper, giving Creighton an improbable double digit lead 71-60.
And then with deafening chants of “C-U! C-U! C-U!” raining down from the over-capacity crowd, Alexander drained ANOTHER three, leading to ANOTHER Seton Hall timeout. 74-60 Bluejays as they began celebrating.
Mahoney splashed home a three on the next possession — the Jays 11th basket in 12 trips down the floor — and it was all over but the celebration.
And oh, what a celebration.
With the students storming the court, confetti streaming from the rafters, and Queen’s “We Are The Champions” blaring from the speakers, Creighton celebrated a championship. Players took turns cutting down the net, and then Ballock addressed the crowd.
โI got a better plan. Letโs do it in the Garden. Letโs do it at the Final Four.โ
What a moment. What a team. Did Greg McDermott think this was possible?
“We knew it was going to be hard,” he said in his press conference after the last of the confetti had dropped. “Did we know the league was going to be this good? Probably not. So to be sitting here in this situation is incredible. It’s really a sign of when a group of people come together, and believe in each other, and they have each other’s backs, and they don’t care who gets the credit. When that happens, there’s a lot of things that are possible.”
Of course, this wouldn’t be Creighton Basketball without an injury scare to deflate the air out of the room, and Saturday was no different. Late in the game, Zegarowski landed awkwardly on his knee, suffering a non-contact injury. He needed help from Davion Mintz to walk through the handshake line afterward and congratulate the Pirates on their season and shared championship. He watched most of the postgame celebration from a seat on the bench, his knee wrapped in ice. He climbed up the ladder gingerly to cut down his much-deserved piece of the net, and needed help to get back down. And now Bluejays everywhere hope and pray for good news.
“We’ll have it checked out on Monday,” McDermott said. “The early thoughts are that it’s nothing terribly serious. But any injury to your lower leg or knee this time of year is cause for concern because you don’t have a lot of time to get back on your feet. We’ll evaluate it early in the week and see where we go from there.”
Zegarowski was not available to the media afterward, but did talk to WBR’s Matt DeMarinis briefly during the celebration. For whatever it’s worth, the Jays’ bulldog-tough point guard assured him he’ll be OK.
If the Jays are to turn this title into even greater March successes — perhaps checking off the next box on the program’s wish list by advancing to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament — they’ll need Zegarowski. Here’s hoping he will in fact be OK.