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Men's Basketball

Morning After: St. John’s 70, #12 Creighton 65

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[Box Score]

Key Stats: Creighton misses 11 free throws (14-25). CU makes just 3-11 three-pointers in the first half, and 2-11 in the second half. CU outrebounds St. John’s 41-38.

Favorite Moment: In the first half, Doug McDermott had a chance for a bunny at the rim, but uncharacteristically missed it. He was visibly annoyed with himself. About 90 seconds later, he stole the ball in the backcourt and instead of going for another layup, he threw down a ruthless dunk and posterized Sir’Dominic Pointer in the process. I’m not sure what’s going on here that a McDermott dunk has been the highlight of each of the past two games, but I like it.

Quick Recap: It’s tempting to say, after a tough loss like Sunday night’s defeat in NYC, that the victor “exposed” the gameplan for beating a great team like Creighton. It’s tempting, but don’t give in to that temptation. St. John’s might be a top five team, nationally, in terms of sheer athleticism, and the things that they did to disrupt Creighton offensively are not replicable by most teams they’ll face. Led by JaKarr Sampson, who was in Doug McDermott’s hip pocket all night long, they shadowed every offensive player from the rim to 25 feet away from the basket.

Just as they did last week in Omaha, they didn’t allow Ethan Wragge to catch the ball, much less to shoot it (though he did manage to get off four heavily contested threes, making one). They took away Doug McDermott’s pick-and-pop opportunities, making him put the ball on the floor and work for every shot he took. Their suffocating defense wore the Jays down, mentally and physically, and though they’d never admit it, that probably had a lot to do with their shooting woes both at the line and the few times they actually got an open look.

That’s frustrating, because with St. John’s playing at a high level on both ends of the floor, if Creighton makes half of the 11 free throws they missed, they potentially win the game. And despite St. John’s terrific defense, there were four or five open looks from behind the arc that Jahenns Manigat and Austin Chatman normally hit, but that they missed on this night. If half of those fall, they potentially win the game. Creighton actually won the rebounding battle, 41-38, and committed just 11 turnovers after turning it over 17 times against St. John’s in Omaha.

This wasn’t the Providence game, where the Jays were run out of the gym by a team that completely dominated them. This was a five-point loss on the road to a team that’s talented enough to be worthy of an NCAA Tourney berth, though their early-season struggles will likely preclude them from that discussion even with this recent stretch of great play. That’s life on the road in a major conference.

As long as Creighton doesn’t allow St. John’s to beat them twice, and they take care of business at Butler Thursday night, there’s still a showdown for first place in the Big East awaiting them Sunday afternoon at home. I don’t know about you, but that sounds pretty good to me.

Quotables:

“We’ve had games where we did a poor job of getting the ball in to Doug, and this was one of them unfortunately. A lot of it was what they were doing defensively, with their length especially, and they were really keying on him. But a lot of people have done that. What they really did well was keeping him from moving on the baseline, realizing that would cut down on open looks for us.” -Grant Gibbs on 1620AM Postgame

“My knee is alright. It’s not an excuse. I think I’m killing us on defense because I’m too slow to move into the gaps. They had open looks, and that’s my fault for not being back in the swing of things yet in terms of attention to detail and intensity. I have to get my legs back so I can be able to push off better, because it’s hurting us a lot defensively. You can tell.” -Grant Gibbs on 1620AM Postgame

“We have to put this one behind us, we can’t let it snowball. We have to come home pissed off, and watch the film and realize we did this to ourselves. I think we’re gonna be pissed off when we watch the film because we sat (in the film room) and scouted this since the last time we played them. We said we had to get back in transition and we didn’t do a good job of that, we said we had to contain penetration and we didn’t do a good job of that, and just our attention to detail on our scouting report in general — this is two games in a row where the main facets of our scouting report we haven’t done a good job of. We kind of turned ’em loose in transition and that’s their game, so we got what we deserved in that regard. We didn’t play the way our scouting report was drawn up, and that’s entirely on the players…the coaches give you the answers to the test with the scouting report, but then you have to fill in the blanks. We didn’t do a good job of that and that’s why we got beat.” -Grant Gibbs on 1620AM Postgame

“It was not easy. You have to give them a lot of credit, they did a great of taking me out of the game. I probably wasn’t cutting as hard as I was at the start of the game, and I regret that, I was probably a little fatigued. But I can’t allow that to affect me.” -Doug McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“They were making tough shots early in the game. We let them take shots that we wanted them to early, and we got off to such a great start offensively, we kind of let that get to our heads, like ‘We’re just going to outscore these guys.’ We can’t do that. We have to be able to string together some stops because when we have it going on both ends of the floor we’re tough to beat.” -Doug McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“They’re just so long and athletic, they make every shot tough. They’re playing so much better, and you just tell by their body language — they’re competing so much harder than they did at the beginning of the year. They’re playing well as a team.” -Doug McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“It almost came too easy for us early on the offensive end, and it came so easy that I didn’t feel like we dug our teeth in defensively like we’re capable of. It was almost like we felt, they’re not going to be able to stop us, so we’re just going to outscore them tonight. I never thought we got the mentality that we wanted defensively in the first half. We got it back in the second half, we played much better defensively in the second half and obviously rebounded much better.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“We had too many casual turnovers, some missed free throws at the wrong times that we don’t normally miss, and we didn’t shoot the three well. The other thing, though, is I did not do a good enough job of getting the ball in Doug’s hands when the game was being decided. That starts and ends with me. Obviously, I talked to the team about it, and told them some of it falls on him, some of it falls on them for not working harder to get the ball to him, but most of it falls on me for not drawing up something to get our best player touches when the game’s being decided.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“The reality of it is, it’s a tie game and we got Doug a wide open three. We’re down two, we run a little play, both guys go with Doug and we got Jahenns a wide open three at the top. Those are shots that are a big part of what we do. And tonight they didn’t go down.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“Ethan was down there fighting with Obekpa, which is not an easy fight, and so I thought Ethan did a good job of keeping him off the glass. We just have to do a better job of putting Ethan into situations in practice where teams do this to him, so we can work with him to get open. And then he really has to become a screener, because they’re not going to switch, they’re not going to help, so now when he sets a screen, there’s a teammate wide open. We have to work with him on that, to have him be productive even if they’re taking him away and not allowing him to shoot threes.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

“We’ll learn from it, and figure out why it happened. Our guys will watch it on film, and be critical of themselves and try to figure out how to correct it. Because the reality of it is, this was a one possession game in the last minute. That’s one play on either end of the floor. You fix five or six of those and it’s a totally different basketball game. That’s what we want to be mature enough to do.” -Coach Greg McDermott on 1620AM Postgame

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