With four minutes left to play on Monday, Southern Illinois had built an eight-point lead and was pulling away from Creighton in the third place game of the Paradise Jam. The Jays had led by as many as nine in the second half, but SIU ripped off a 25-11 run where they made all nine field goals they attempted, and all five free throws, too, to take control of the game.
Or so it seemed.
In the huddle during that final media timeout, Alex O’Connell spoke up and implored his teammates to raise their focus defensively. For much of the second half, the Jays seemed a half-step slow on that end of the floor, with the deliberate Saluki offense waiting — often for much of the shot clock — for them to make a mistake, and then pouncing.
“Relax and play. That was my message in that last media timeout,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “But Alex’s message really resonated. He said in the huddle, ‘If we can’t get stops, we can’t get back in it.’”
A little over two minutes later, Creighton had strung together four consecutive stops, and scored 10 straight points to take a stunning 64-62 lead. It began with Ryan Nembhard making the first of two free throws; after missing the second, Ryan Hawkins secured the rebound and O’Connell hit a three from the corner.
Two missed SIU shots, and two dunks from Ryan Kalkbrenner later, the Jays had tied the game at 62. The first one was a classic post move where he worked for position, ultimately spinning away and slamming the ball with authority.
The second one saw Kalkbrenner slip a screen and slide to the basket, where Hawkins fed him a lob near the rim.
Kalkbrenner then gave the Jays the lead, tipping in a pass from Nembhard for a 64-62 edge.
After SIU’s Marcus Domask tied the game on a jumper with five seconds left, CU called timeout and put the ball in the hands of their freshman point guard. Nembhard used a screen from Kalkbrenner near the SIU free throw line to free up space to drive the length of the court in time, and when he got to the paint on the other end, he pulled up for a right-handed running jumper. The ball bounced around the rim, hit the backboard, and fell through the net. Jays win.
“You practice those situations, and sometimes you go the whole season and never use it,” Greg McDermott said. “That play is called our ‘four-seconds-or-less’ play, and one that (former assistant) Paul Lusk brought to us several years ago.”
Nembhard said the idea was to give him the ball on the run, giving him a head start to sprint towards the opposite rim. His instructions: see what opens up, and make a play, whatever it was. It briefly looked like that decision was going to be a flip-up to Kalkbrenner, who was running to the rim and in position for a potential game-winning dunk. But SIU center J.D. Muila and his long reach were between him and a pass to Kalkbrenner. Rather than risk a deflection, Nembhard made split-second the decision to pull up for a short floater instead. And the rest is history.
Nembhard’s game-winner coming against a bitter old rival like SIU instantly makes it a classic play in the annals of CU’s history. And it’s Creighton’s first game-winning shot as time expired since Booker Woodfox’s famous “Two dribbles and a ham sandwich” play against Wichita State in the 2009 MVC Tournament. They’ve had countless game-winning shots on their final possession since then, but no true buzzer-beaters.
The 12-2 run to end the game and a defense that held SIU to just one basket on their final five possessions obscured what had been a rather ugly game to that point. Southern Illinois dictated tempo with discipline on both ends of the floor, grinding it into a 60-possession game. Creighton’s 12 turnovers loomed large in a game played at that pace. McDermott said that’s one of the biggest lessons his team needs to take from the win. Every possession matters, and you don’t know which possession is going to have the biggest impact so you have to treat each one the same.
12 turnovers in a 60 possession game is 20% of your trips down the floor. It’s hard to win a game when you dig yourself that sort of hole. Even when they were building a 39-30 lead early in the second half, the game felt off-kilter and like SIU had them where they wanted them. O’Connell and Arthur Kaluma had their minutes limited by foul trouble, and that disrupted Creighton’s rotations. At one point, freshman John Christofilis checked in to try and give them a spark with O’Connell on the bench; McDermott had said in a pregame radio interview with John Bishop, quite prophetically in hindsight, that Christofilis was going to have his number called at some point and that he’d been telling him to stay ready. His time came on Monday, and he hit a big second-half shot.
And while their defense struggled for a lot of the day, it came up big when it had to.
“When we’re playing our bigger lineup, Hawkins and Art are both really power forwards but somebody has to guard the wing. There’s some benefits to that lineup offensively, but you lose a little bit defensively. Late in the game, we just decided to make a switch and make them stop Kalkbrenner. He changed some shots defensively. Shereef was fantastic on Jones. Today was the first day that he looked like himself, the Shereef who’s such a pest that they went away from even trying to run stuff for Jones. They went to their secondary scorers.”
It wasn’t pretty, but it was a win, and one that the Jays can learn a lot from. And if all those years in the Valley taught us anything, it’s that wins over SIU are rarely pretty anyway.
“This felt like a Southern Illinois game, didn’t it? The numbers have changed, the coach has moved from the point guard position to the end of the bench, but they’re doing all the same stuff they used to do,” McDermott said. “They fight and claw and you’re not going to break ‘em. With a young team, that’s hard to play against.”
Joking with John Bishop, he laughed and said, “It was fun tonight but I don’t ever need to go to Carbondale again, that’s OK. I’ve been there enough times for one lifetime.”
Key Stats:
There wasn’t a lot to like statistically in this one. Creighton had 14 assists and 12 turnovers. They were even on the glass 26-26 against a smaller opponent who shot the exact same numbers as the Jays did — both teams were 25-51 from the floor — meaning both teams had equal chances for boards.
Individually, Ryan Kalkbrenner scored 14 points with five rebounds and five blocks. 12 of those 14 points came in the final nine minutes of the game. And those five blocks are the most by any Bluejay since Jacob Epperson’s five in the 2018 Big East title game.
Ryan Hawkins added 13 points and six boards, while Ryan Nembhard had 12 points and four assists. All totaled, the “Ryan Express” as CU SID Rob Anderson is calling them had 39 of the Jays’ 64 points.
