18 seconds into Creighton’s season opener, Ryan Kalkbrenner scored at the rim after controlling the tip to get his team the ball first. He’d take three more shots before the first timeout, making all of them — and yet the Jays trailed 12-8 because UTRGV hit 4-of-7 from three-point range over that same span. It’s not often that the first four minutes of a game are that indicative of how the rest of a game will play out, but if you’d only watched those four minutes, you’d have a pretty good sense of the two big storylines to emerge from CU’s 99-86 win.
One, Kalkbrenner was an unstoppable offensive force to a historic degree. And two, the Bluejay defense — particularly on the perimeter — is very much a work in progress.
Kalkbrenner scored 49 points on 20-of-22 shooting, including a perfect 11-of-11 in the second half. He added 11 rebounds, five of them offensive — and all of them leading to points. When I wrote in the Primer that Kalkbrenner was likely to have a big night against UTRGV’s undersized roster, I wasn’t envisioning him beating Doug McDermott’s Senior Night 2014 arena record of 45 points en route to the second-highest scoring game in CU history. No one could have predicted THAT.
But that’s exactly what happened.
“It was incredible,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “His angles, his seals…you know, it wasn’t just like he got 15 dunks. It was right hand, left hand spin moves. A couple threes. And he made his free throws. So just an incredible performance. And you know, he deserves it. He’s sacrificed a lot for this program and made the decision to come back and work, and you saw that work on display tonight.”
Playing without starting guard Pop Isaacs, who’s expected to be one of their primary creators and ball handlers, the Jays were likely to give extra attention to feeding Kalkbrenner regardless of opponent. Against UTRGV’s small ball lineup, they’d have been crazy not to even if Isaacs had played.
Trailing 12-8, the Jays ripped off a 10-4 run highlighted by a three from Isaac Traudt and the first career bucket for redshirt freshman Shane Thomas. But after UTRGV ‘s Marshall Destremau hit back-to-back threes to tie it at 23 with just over ten minutes gone in the half, Kalkbrenner had seen enough. He scored 10 straight points to put CU ahead for good, scoring on a variety of moves from just about everywhere. He buried a three:
He dunked off a lob pass from Jamiya Neal:
And he made both a layup and a short hook-shot. He’d end the first half with 20 points, and it was natural to wonder how many points he might score if 30-point underdog UTRGV managed to hang around in the second half. The answer, of course, was 29 more in a second frame somehow more explosive than the first.
“We knew they don’t have a very big team, so we were gonna make an effort to get me the ball. I would have thought they’d come with a double or something to slow it down, but as long as they were letting me play one-on-one, we were just gonna keep throwing me the ball,” Kalkbrenner said in a postgame radio interview. “I didn’t feel like my shots were extraordinarily tough. I felt like I was able to get a bunch of good looks. Obviously the coaches over there have a game plan, and whatever their game plan was they stuck to it. So we just kept going with our game plan, too.”
The flip side of UTRGV’s small ball, five-out lineup was that it presented defensive challenges CU could not stop. 35 of their 77 shots were threes; too many went up without a hand in the face to contest. The Jays were late on closeouts, out of position on rotations, and simply played poor fundamental defense on the perimeter. It was ugly, and it meant they needed all of Kalkbrenner’s 49 points just to win a game they were favored in by 30.
“When we were building our schedule, we knew we were gonna lose some people so you want to have the right game scheduled for the opener. But as I watched Coach Fennel construct this roster, I knew this wasn’t the right game,” McDermott joked on his postgame radio show. “You know, he brought in a ton of shooting, and he’s doing what they did at BYU in terms of spacing — their bigs both shoot it. So it nullifies Kalk’s rim protection because they pulled him away from the basket. We tried to invert a matchup early, and he made a couple and made us pay for that, too.”
Kalkbrenner spent a lot of the night chasing shooters on the perimeter or defending players off the dribble instead of camping out in the paint to defend the rim. They had to abandon a lot of their usual drop-coverage packages. And it was a struggle.
“It’s definitely different than what we try to do, but I think in the long run it’s going to be good for us especially when we play another team like this as a pick and pop five or small ball five,” Kalkbrenner said. “We didn’t do a great job of it tonight. There’s a lot of stuff to learn from, but as long as we’re mature about it and look at the film like we’re supposed to and take notes, I think we’re gonna be better off for it in the long run.”
Leading 46-38 at the half, Kalkbrenner scored their first four points of the second — and after making three straight shots in a 73-second span, the Jays had started to create separation at 64-52. The last of those three straight buckets gave him 30 points for the night, but he was far from done.
After a three from Traudt, he scored six straight again on four free throws and a dunk — with a 14-point lead at the 9:19 mark and CU starting to pull away, he checked out with a career-high 36 points to a standing ovation from a crowd certain his night was done.
UTRGV immediately took advantage of his absence, though, and after an 8-0 run lasting just over a minute that came exclusively on points in the paint, McDermott had to burn a timeout to get his star back in. Fred King’s poor defense was partly to blame, but three turnovers on three straight possessions — one each from Steven Ashworth, Jamiya Neal and King — certainly didn’t help.
Kalkbrenner kept the Vaqueros at arm’s length by scoring nine points in four minutes, giving him 45 for the night to tie Doug McDermott’s arena record for most points by a Bluejay. Then he broke it by hitting jumpers on back-to-back possessions.
Ahead by nine with 1:11 to go, the Jays normally would have worked the clock. But knowing that his big man had 49 points — and that nights like this don’t come along very often — McDermott signaled from the bench to get the ball to Kalkbrenner. UTRGV was likely to foul to extend the game, and two made free throws would equal the CU record.
Kalkbrenner was not aware, and was just concerned about winning the game.
“I assumed I was close to something — I heard the crowd yell when I passed the ball off. There was a little bit of an “ohhh,” Kalkbrenner said. “At that point in the game I thought we were just gonna dribble it out, so I was like ‘let me just get it to a guard.’”
And so it was Ashworth tasked with hitting the game-clinching free throws — six of them, in fact, by drawing three separate fouls in the final minute — as the Bluejay fans mockingly booed UTRGV for fouling a player not named Ryan Kalkbrenner.
Told by John Bishop on the postgame show that he’d beaten Doug McDermott’s record, Kalkbrenner had a typically nonchalant answer.
“That doesn’t feel right,” he said. “That does not feel right. That shouldn’t be a thing.”
Inside the Box:
Bob Portman’s 51 points against UW-Milwaukee in 1967 have been the school record for almost six decades. Before then, Eddie Cole held the record with 47 in a game against Morningside in 1954. Only four players have come within a single basket of challenging Cole’s mark — Portman himself, who had 46 in 1968 against Weber State; Tim Powers in 1966 (45 points vs Idaho State), Benoit Benjamin nearly 20 years later in 1985 (45 vs Indiana State), and Doug McDermott nearly 30 years after that in 2014 (45 vs Providence).
No one had come within a basket of Portman’s 51, though, until Wednesday night. To think that record might have fallen after 57 years had Kalkbrenner been the one taking free throws in the final minute? Absolutely crazy.
He may not have set the scoring record, but he did set the record for most made field goals in a game — Portman made 19 in a game twice (the 1968 game vs Weber State referenced above, and once the year before against LaSalle). Eddie Cole made 18 shots in his 47-point game. Benjamin made 18 twice (in the 1985 vs Indiana State, plus a game two days earlier against Southern Illinois). Doug McDermott did it once (against Bradley in 2012, when he scored 44). Kalkbrenner’s 20 made baskets are now the standard in Creighton’s record book.
By shooting 20-of-22 from the floor (90.9%), he tied Bob Harstad for the fourth-best shooting game in CU history (minimum nine attempts) — Harstad made 10-of-11 in a game against Siena in 1990. But of the 13 times a Creighton player has made 90% or more of their shots in a game (on at least nine shots), no one made or attempted more than 13.
(Incidentally, you may be wondering why the cutoff is nine attempts, since that seems arbitrary. It’s not — Vernon Moore was a perfect 9-of-9 in a 1984 game against Nebraska-Kearney, so having the cutoff be 10 shot attempts would exclude that performance.)
According to OptaStats, he’s the first Division I or NBA player to score 45+ points while missing no more than 3 shots (FG or FT) since Dirk Nowitzki did it in the 2011 playoffs — the year Dallas won the NBA title. In Game 1 of the 2011 Western Conference Finals against the Thunder, Nowitzki scored 48 points while going 12-for-15 from the field and 24-for-24 from the line.
According to ESPN Stats & Info, his 49 points are the 4th-most in a season opener for a ranked team in AP Poll history. The only three players with more? Hall of Famers Bob Pettit, Lew Alcindor and Artis Gilmore.
And according to Jared Berson, the last time a college player made 20 or more shots while shooting 90% or better was Bill Walton in the 1973 title game. Further, no high major player has scored as many points with as many rebounds in the last 30 years. At 49 points, it’s the most points in a double-double by any Big East player ever.
Lost in Kalkbrenner’s historic night was Steven Ashworth scoring 25 and setting a record of his own — he was a perfect 17-of-17 from the free throw line. It ties Bob Harstad for the second-most made free throws in a game (he had 17 against Morgan State in 1989). But it’s the most ever without a miss — Doug Brookins previously held the record by making 16-of-16 in a 1974 game vs Southern Illinois. Ashworth now holds that record.
But lastly, a word about the defense. UTRGV took 35 threes, making 14 (40.0%). The last time an opponent made 14 or more threes in a game was Colorado State in 2022 (20-of-34, 58.8%). If there’s a silver lining, last year, opponents made 10 or more threes while shooting 40% or better four times — and the Jays lost all four. They found a way to win this one, even if that way was getting a historic 49 points from their big man.
Press Conference:
Highlights: