The final 56 seconds of Creighton’s 72-71 loss to DePaul on Wednesday were a pretty good summation of what’s gotten them to a 14-15 record after 29 games.
A blown defensive set against a double hand-off where two guys went with the ball and no one followed the roll man. DePaul made an easy, barely-contested shot at the rim for the lead. Then they had two great looks to win it, and two shots that tried to be too cute when a basic, solid, fundamental layup would have likely got the job done. Game over.
In other words: defensive miscues caused by miscommunication, and missed high-percentage shots in a key spot by a secondary option.
“It’s obviously disappointing after leading virtually the whole game to have that transpire at the end. It’s tough to swallow,” Greg McDermott said. “We had a coverage mistake on one end, and then we executed our out of bounds play late to perfection and got it almost to the rim and unfortunately missed the shot.”
After leading by as many as 11 in the second half, Creighton’s lead had dwindled to one with 3:06 to play. Jasen Green made a layup to extend the lead to 66-63, but 15 seconds later leading scorer CJ Gunn made a tough, contested three from in front of his own bench to tie the game. After Josh Dix drew a foul and missed the front end of a one-and-one, Brandon Maclin drew a foul on the other end and made his free throws. The 68-66 lead was DePaul’s first since early in the first half; it would be short lived because Dix redeemed himself by burying a three in transition to put CU back ahead 69-68.
Then Maclin gave his team the lead right back. Driving to the rim, his initial shot missed but the rebound caromed right back to him, and the second chance went in for a 70-69 lead. Nik Graves answered with two free throws, giving Creighton a 71-70 lead to protect.
DePaul’s initial action was designed to get a shot for Maclin, who’d made the game-winner in the first meeting two weeks ago. Catching the ball near the free throw line, he tried to back down Dix but as he fought for position, Fedor Zugic reached for the ball and forced a tie-up. The possession arrow was with the Blue Demons, however, and with 10 on the shot clock and 36.3 on the game clock they got a second opportunity.
This time, Maclin inbounded the ball to NJ Benson under the basket, then took a handoff with the idea that he’d be able to get off a shot near the rim. Instead, Creighton botched the coverage. Green chased Maclin after the handoff instead of sticking with Benson, and Dix stuck with Maclin, too, leaving Benson all alone. To his credit, Maclin immediately recognized it and zipped a pass to Benson, who made the go-ahead layup.
“We can’t have a blown coverage in that situation,” McDermott said. “It just can’t happen. I don’t know what the heck we were doing. That (type of) double-handoff coverage is something we hadn’t done all game, and out of nowhere we tried to do it. It was something that we hadn’t planned on doing, and when that happens, then nobody else knows what to do either.”
“We knew that probably a handoff was coming,” Dix elaborated. “We were trying to not jump out and give their big a roll, and we ended up trapping on accident, and then he got a free lane to roll to the rim. We didn’t rotate over.”
To make matters worse, Zugic fouled Benson as he scrambled to cover the mistake. Luckily Benson missed the free throw, and with 30 seconds left, any shot would be a winner. Attacking in transition, the Jays tried to force DePaul to switch defenders on a screen and create a better matchup for Graves. It worked: Benson did indeed switch onto Graves, and the Jays’ point guard was able to speed past him to the rim. Worried about his shot being blocked, Graves drove to his left and attempted a scoop shot instead of a straight-ahead layup. It missed.
“I thought I got a decent look at it, just couldn’t get it done, couldn’t finish it,” Graves said. “Honestly in that situation I wasn’t even trying to get a foul call. I know a lot of the refs aren’t gonna decide a game like that at the end of the game by calling a foul so I was going to try to get a bucket.”
Green tipped the ball out to keep it alive, and Blake Harper came up with the ball. With nothing developing, McDermott called timeout with 3.3 seconds left to regroup. The play they drew up got the ball to Harper at the elbow; he spun to his right and attacked the rim. He tried to muscle it through the defender, but didn’t get the call or the finish.
“I’m proud that we executed a play that we hadn’t used much,” McDermott said. “Blake’s really disappointed that he missed the shot. But we executed the play, we got a good look, and unfortunately, it didn’t roll in.”
“I mean, like we did a lot of good things on the floor, but like also, we did bullshit things,” Kerem Konan said in a postgame radio interview that the FCC probably wasn’t crazy about. “We have to, like, decrease the turnovers and other things. The last shot was a good one, but the ball didn’t go in. So I mean, yeah. Terrible.”
The reality is that it never should have been close enough for DePaul to steal a second win in as many weeks. The Blue Demons went without a made basket for over eight minutes in the first half, scoring only two points on free throws between the 17:05 and 8:44 marks. But while Creighton had a 14-2 run over that span to take a 19-8 lead, there was a nagging suspicion that they hadn’t buried DePaul when they had the chance.
And sure enough, after missing eight straight shots, DePaul quickly scored six quick points in a minute fueled by a pair of bad turnovers from Graves. 20 seconds apart, he tried to throw a bounce pass inside to Green and both times, the ball was intercepted and taken the other way for points. The Blue Demons made 6-of-8 to end the half, and then shot 57% in the second half (16-of-28).
Zugic made a three early in the second half to push Creighton’s lead back to 11, only for DePaul to respond with an 10-2 run. Dix drove to the rim to stop the bleeding, and then Zugic hit another three to force DePaul into a timeout. Shortly after that came one of the most chaotic sequences of the season.
With 14:21 left and CU ahead 48-45, Dix turned the ball over, and Maclin took the ball the other way. His layup missed, and Green cleared the board. But Dix’s pass was intercepted, only for Maclin to promptly throw the ball away too. This time it was Creighton’s turn to miss a layup, with Green doing the honors. He got his own rebound, though, and scored on a second chance bucket.
45 seconds later, an even wilder sequence. Benson had his shot blocked at the rim, and in the fight for the rebound, Green dove to the floor to knock it loose. Hudson Greer chased after it and flew out of bounds, crashing into the scorers table and saving it behind his back. Dix missed a wide-open three, and Greer again chased the rebound, this time crashing into the table on the other side of the court and saving it behind his back a second time. Dix collided with DePaul’s Layden Blocker as they tried to secure the loose ball, and Dix was called for a foul.
If that had ended in points for the Bluejays, it would be a legendary sequence that people would talk about a decade from now, like Ricky Kreklow’s “Superman dive” in 2015 against Marquette. Even without points, I’m not so sure it doesn’t belong in that conversation anyway.
Eventually, DePaul tied it at 56 at the under-8 timeout. Graves responded with six straight points on four free throws and a bucket at the rim to make it 62-56; he answered a three from CJ Gunn with two more free throws to make it 64-59. Back-to-back layups from the Blue Demons sent the game into the final three minutes with the Jays clinging to a 64-63 lead, with a second one-point loss to DePaul waiting around the corner.
“The second half I don’t know what happened, but like I already said, we did bullshit things,” Konan said just in case anyone misheard him the first time. “I mean, I think we lost our focus. They are a good team. Like, if you lose your focus and concentration, they’ll beat you.”
With the loss, Creighton drops to 14-15 overall and 8-10 in the Big East. DePaul sits just a half-game back at 7-10 in the league, and they own the head-to-head tiebreaker with the season sweep. Providence is just one game back — and they’re in Omaha on Saturday, where a win would give them the tiebreaker, too. The top five teams receive a bye; the bottom six have to play on Wednesday at the Big East Tournament.
Ahead of them? Seton Hall, who finishes with games at UConn and Xavier, and a home game with St. John’s. DePaul finishes with a road game at Marquette, and home games against Villanova and Butler.
“I just told them, I want them to be as hungry as they’ve been all season at practice tomorrow,” McDermott said. “We’ve got one more home game, and it’s a really important game for us, because we’re fighting for our lives to try to stay in that four-five game, and we’ve got some people really on our heels right now.”
Inside the Box:
Creighton fell to 3-3 in games decided by one possession this season. Especially given how those games were decided, their record could just as easily be 17-12 or 11-18. But ultimately, they’ve played like a .500 team, and that’s basically what their record says they are.
The Jays mostly fixed the problems that cost them the first game in Chicago. They scored more points in the paint in the first half of this one than they did the entire game in the first meeting, and for the game DePaul only had a four-point edge there, 32-28. But with the Jays scoring five more points at the free throw line than DePaul, that basically canceled out the gap. Either way, it was a stark difference from the 46-12 thrashing DePaul gave them in the paint the first time.
In that game, Creighton made one layup the entire night; they had 11 in this one. They had three more offensive boards than DePaul, outscored them 16-10 in second-chance points, and outscored them 19-12 in points off turnovers. They shot well from three (10-of-25, 40%) and led for almost 35 minutes. And it still wasn’t enough.
“We got dominated in a lot of areas at DePaul,” McDermott said. “But tonight, points off turnovers, we won that battle. We won the second chance points. Points in the paint was lopsided at their place, we are able to even that up. They shot the three better than they’d been shooting it, and they made one more play than we did.”
That’s really what it comes down to, isn’t it? DePaul made one more play than the Jays did. And when your margin for error is as thin as it is for the 2025-26 Bluejays, one more play has the difference between a win and a loss in eight of their 29 games. No, really: in over a quarter of the games they’ve played this year, the margin of victory has been four points or less. Six of them have been by one possession. And four have been by a single point.
Creighton’s four games this season decided by exactly one point tie a program record, done eight times previously. It’s the fourth time ever that Creighton has played multiple one-point games against the same team in the same season, and the first time since doing it vs. Seton Hall in 2014-15. CU also did it in 1946-47 vs. Drake and in 2004-05 vs. Greg McDermott’s Northern Iowa team.
Incidentally, this is the first time Creighton and its opponent have had the exact same score twice in one season since 1964-65, when they lost to Drake 76-67 twice.
Highlights:
Press Conference: