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Men's Basketball

Morning After: North Texas 62, Creighton 58

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[Box Score]

Key Stats:

39 of Creighton’s 64 shot attempts come from three-point range, and they only make 10 of them. CU has zero second-chance points despite nine offensive rebounds. North Texas goes 18-23 at the free throw line, Creighton just 4-6.

Favorite Moment:

There weren’t a lot of bright spots on an ugly afternoon like this, but one thing I really liked was the fight that the guys who will be the future of Creighton hoops showed after the veteran players dug a 27-point hole. Toby Hegner, Isaiah Zierden, Geoff Groselle, and Zach Hanson (along with walk-on Tyler Clement) — with the three seniors Austin Chatman, Devin Brooks, and Will Artino on the bench — went on a 15-2 run with good fundamental defense, good shot selection, and good rebounding. Nothing they did was spectacular, but it was well-executed, it was under-control, and it worked. That run set them up to nearly pull off a stunning comeback, and seemed to calm down the vets when they eventually came back in. It makes the loss all the more infuriating, but I really liked it that given a choice between accepting a blowout or fighting back, the young players on this team fought back.

Tom’s Take:

Creighton went on a 31-7 run that encompassed nearly 14 minutes of the second half, where they played good defense, hit outside shots, fed the post, and rebounded well. You’d think with such a dominating stretch that they’d have won going away. You’d be wrong. Outscoring their opponent by 24 points for the majority of a half wasn’t enough to win. Hell, it wasn’t even enough to take the lead. Ridiculous as that sounds, it’s true. And it’s true because they played so extraordinarily bad for so long prior to that run.

For the first 24 minutes of Sunday afternoon’s game, Creighton had no energy, no passion, and once again allowed cold shooting to torpedo the rest of their game. Instead of playing with fire and beating a team they were supposed to beat, they looked mentally unfocused and fell behind by 27 points. That’s harsh, but there’s no sugarcoating this to make it easier to swallow. How else do you explain what happened at the Super Pit? North Texas — a team picked to finish 9th out of 14 teams in CUSA, a team ranked by advanced metric gurus such as KenPom in the lower-third of D1, a team that drew a season-high 4,200 fans because half of them were there to support the visiting team — this was the team poised to deliver the worst blowout of the Coach Mac Era, and leave the team heading into a 10-day break at the lowest point of his five-year tenure? Give credit to North Texas, because they played well enough to take advantage of CU’s mistakes, but those first 20 minutes had less to do with the Mean Green and more to do with them being the beneficiary of the most uninspired half of basketball Creighton has played in a very, very long time.

They committed 10 turnovers in the first half alone, most of them on sloppy and/or lazy passes that were simply not intelligent decisions. They took 24 first-half shots, 14 of them behind the arc, and made just seven total shots — two from three-point range. While the majority of the three-pointers were good, open looks, one after another clanged hard off the rim. With each miss, North Texas tightened their zone, making the paint even more impenetrable. Then as the Jays’ guards tried to drive inside to create higher-percentage shots as an alternative to the threes that weren’t falling, that tightened zone made it difficult to maneuver and forced them into bad decisions with the basketball — or led to more wide-open threes, which they continued to miss. It was a vicious circle. And that was just on offense. Defensively, they were a mess, too, giving up wide-open threes and uncontested driving lanes, and failing to box out to prevent offensive boards and second chances.

Down by 17 points at the break, they somehow managed to come out and play even worse in the first four minutes of the second half. With 15:56 to play, Austin Chatman picked up his third foul — and second in 90 seconds — and went to the bench. Devin Brooks came in for him and immediately turned it over, and then North Texas’ DeAndre Harris hit a three to give them a 51-24 lead. The game was officially in “boat-race” territory, and with Coach Mac struggling for answers, he subbed in walk-on Tyler Clement to take over point guard duties.

And then a funny thing happened. A lineup of Clement, Geoff Groselle, Rick Kreklow, Toby Hegner, and Isaiah Zierden fought back. They unleashed a 17-4 run over the next eight minutes, taking a 51-24 deficit and slicing it in half to 55-41. Groselle had eight points during that span, Clement had a three pointer and two assists, and suddenly the game was a little more interesting. They scratched and clawed over the next three minutes to get the deficit under 10, and with 1:37 to play they trailed 57-49. Then Hegner drilled a three pointer, stole the ball off the inbounds pass, and got it to Zierden who nailed a three. Seemingly out of nowhere, and quite unbelievably, it was 57-55, and this wasn’t just a plucky team fighting to make a blowout look respectable — they had a legitimate chance to win it.

UNT’s T.J. Taylor split two free throws on the other end, and with the Jays down three, they had an opportunity to tie it. First, Zierden missed a three, but the rebound was corralled by Chatman, whose three-pointer also missed. He got his own rebound, kicked it out to Zierden, and he took a wide-open three that missed. Three opportunities to tie in the span of 12 seconds, all of them offline. North Texas rebounded the third miss, and called timeout. And then an inexplicable thing happened  — Maurice Aniefiok, their player inbounding the ball, moved along the baseline to get a better chance to make a pass, and he was whistled for a turnover.

Two timeouts and a rather lengthy argument about substitutions later, the Jays inbounded the ball under their own hoop with 24 seconds left and a chance to tie. Hegner caught the ball in the corner, drew three defenders, and thought he could draw a foul so he threw up a wild shot. There was no foul, and no whistle, and the Jays’ bid for a come-from-behind win was over.

What an infuriating game from one of the most inconsistent Bluejay teams in recent memory. This is now a team that:

  • fell behind by 18 to Oklahoma and rallied to win
  • fell behind by 10 to Nebraska and rallied to win
  • fell behind South Dakota by 10 only to rally, build a 9-point lead of their own, blow that lead, and ultimately need two overtimes to win
  • fell behind North Texas by 27, rallied to cut it to a two-point deficit, but lost

Most figured on this being a team that would be inconsistent from game-to-game, winning games they shouldn’t and losing games they shouldn’t. This team has been that, for sure, but they’ve also managed to be inconsistent from one minute to the next. No lead is safe, for either team, when Creighton is playing. That makes every game exciting, but it’s giving me gray hairs before my time.

With those four games, and particularly Sunday’s loss, there’s ample evidence that the Jays are talented enough to win games against good teams, but that they’re not good enough themselves to overcome lapses in preparation, execution, or energy. In other words, their margin for error is razor-thin. And as they move into Big East play, if they have halves of basketball like the first half on Sunday they will get — let’s be honest — embarrassed. Against teams like Villanova and Providence and St. John’s and the rest of the Big East, efforts like they had on Sunday will lead to getting blown out on a frequent basis. It’s efforts like this that make that ninth place prediction that so many of us scoffed at seem pretty reasonable, because the team that showed up on Sunday isn’t going to beat very many Big East squads, home or away.

Quotables:

“We got down in too big of a hole. We didn’t come out with the necessary energy, and it was too much to overcome. (When we came back) we all just started competing harder, all five of us picked it up on the defensive end, and started playing harder.” -Tyler Clement on 1620AM Postgame

“The message I got when I came in was to work the ball inside (via the pass) and break down the zone. What I could see from the bench is that we weren’t moving the ball as well as we needed to. So I wanted to get the ball moving, keep it moving quickly, and especially get it into the middle. And once we got the ball there, we started having success.” -Tyler Clement on 1620AM Postgame

“Tyler and I have gotten a lot of reps together on the scout team, so we’ve built a little chemistry. I really have to commend Tyler for the way he came out and played. He doesn’t get many reps with the first team, but he still has to know our plays as well as our opponent’s plays. He did such a good job today.” -Geoff Groselle on 1620AM Postgame

“I really like playing against a zone as a big man, because I feel like it’s easier to score. A lot of people see a zone as being a good thing for shooters, or to drive against, but I really see it as a good thing for big men. If you can get it into the middle, you can get some easy baskets.” -Geoff Groselle on 1620AM Postgame

“Well, we had ample opportunities in the first half. We attacked the zone the way we wanted to, we got open shots, and with every shot we missed, the zone became more and more compacted as they dared us to shoot it. Then we got a little tentative at times. We talked to the team at halftime about trying to take it one possession at a time defensively, and to rebound, and to keep attacking offensively to get into the teeth of the defense. I wasn’t pleased with the first five or six minutes. But I was very pleased with that group of Tyler, Isaiah, Ricky, Toby, Zach, and Geoff. I thought they played with some passion. They played with a chip on their shoulder. We had a lot of our seniors sitting over on the bench. Hopefully they learned a lesson from the way those guys played.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“Tyler had open shots, and missed them. But defensively, he got into the ball, he fought through ball-screens instead of melting when the ball-screen came, and he ran the basketball team. Austin had four fouls and you reach a point with our short bench of where do you turn? He kind of went in by default, and I just thought he did a tremendous job. He played with composure and his passion for the game and the way he approached the game rubbed off on the other players. He got our bench into the game. I’m proud that we made a run, I’m proud that we didn’t quit.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“Obviously, I didn’t like our execution late. I have to look in the mirror there. I shouldn’t have put Toby in that situation, but I thought maybe we could steal one in the corner when they made the switch to man-to-man. He just panicked and took a shot he probably shouldn’t have taken, and he’s in tears in the locker room. He’ll learn from it. He cares a lot about this team. He’s going to be a really good player for us. And as I told him, there’s a reason I ran that play for him. I thought he could knock it down.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“If we’re not focused, we’re asking for it. We weren’t as focused as we needed to be today. You can’t lose your focus because shots don’t go in. You still have to understand how you’re attacking their defense. One of the things I said to Isaiah walking off the court at halftime was, ‘Ethan Wragge didn’t stop shooting when he missed a couple. Was he going to turn down a rhythm three because he missed his first couple? The answer is absolutely not.’ As they continued to pack in the zone, we needed to bust them out of that. Hopefully this can be a learning experience for us.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“Obviously, we’ve got a couple of really good wins in the non-conference portion of our schedule, and we avoided a bad loss before today. Today could potentially be a bad loss depending on how North Texas finishes its season. As it stands right now, I’m very disappointed. This is a team that I felt we should have beat, and should have beat handily. Aside from the one day prep and all that, we’ve got to be better than that. We’ve got to rise to the occasion above that and play better basketball than we played today.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

And Now, Here’s What You Had to Say:

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