Recap:
Three separate times in the final minutes of Saturday’s thrilling 66-61 win, Trey Alexander either tied or gave the Bluejays the lead. His three with 7:42 left put CU ahead 54-51; his putback jumper at the 3:43 mark put them ahead 58-56; his pair of free throws with 26 seconds left put them ahead for good 62-61.
“I was looking to draw contact,” Alexander said of that sequence. “It’s one of those situations where you have to know time and score. We were down by one, we were in the bonus and I knew I could make two free throws — plus it stops the clock so we can set up our defense. They went into a double, and messed up the switch. I took advantage, drew the foul, and knocked them down. That was a good play call by Mac.”
Then he clinched the win with a defensive gem, poking the ball away from the veteran Caleb Daniels and into the hands of Baylor Scheierman, who passed it back to Alexander immediately knowing a foul was coming. He then made two more free throws, his 26th and 27th points of the night, to seal a legendary two-way performance.
“The job Trey did on Daniels was outstanding,” Greg McDermott said. “He’s taken the most shots of anyone on their team, so for him to only get three 3-point shots up tells you that we made his looks tough. And that play that he made in the post defensively on Daniels to poke the ball away? That was huge.”
Alexander said he felt like that was potentially the deciding possession of the game. “I knew he was going to try to get downhill, so I tried to beat him to his spot,” he explained. “I felt like once I had enough space in front of him that I could tip it out, and Baylor was right there to pick it up.”
And when Eric Dixon’s three-pointer missed badly, Scheierman officially put the game on ice at the line. CU sniffed out Villanova’s plan for that last-gasp shot, and pulled Kalkbrenner off of the Wildcats’ big man to give them a better perimeter defender — and keep their own big man close to the rim to defend against a putback.
“Coach Miller made that call, and it was a great call,” McDermott said, crediting his assistant for correctly anticipating Villanova’s plan and concocting an adjustment to beat it. “Dixon had just hit one, and we figured they’d go to a ball screen to get him another one. We pulled Kalk onto Slater, and had Art go out onto Dixon. He switched the screen and made it a really, really tough shot.”
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For all of Villanova’s injuries and struggles to find their footing in the post-Jay Wright Era, the fact remains that their roster is full of players who competed in the Final Four a year ago and have experienced — and won — on big stages. Hostile environments and double-digit leads don’t intimidate them. And so you knew that even with a 10-point second half lead, a run was coming.
CU controlled the first 20 minutes, leading 35-27 thanks to an offense that had done a good job of finding opportunities to push tempo and being patient when they couldn’t. They grabbed a rebound on 37% of their missed shots, a big reason they had 1.13 points per possession in the first half. And five minutes into the second, Creighton had built a 46-36 lead after a three-pointer from Trey Alexander — his fourth of the night on six attempts. The sold-out crowd was rocking, Alexander was cooking, and Villanova had to call timeout.
That wound up being the turning point in the game, just not in the way it appeared — instead of CU beginning to run away, the Wildcats began to ratchet up the pressure and grind down the pace. Turnovers and mistakes began piling up, and once Ryan Kalkbrenner got into foul trouble, things went from bad to worse. Fredrick King proved no match for the experience and savvy of Eric Dixon in the paint, and he scored seven straight points to fully erase that Bluejay lead. His three-point play at the 9:35 mark gave Villanova a 51-49 lead and forced the Jays to put Kalkbrenner back in, foul trouble or not.
Alexander’s fifth 3-pointer of the game put Creighton back ahead, 54-51. But then Kalkbrenner picked up his fourth foul on a made basket by Dixon, leaving the Jays with a dilemma. They rolled the dice and left him in. Moments later, a Brandon Slater three put Villanova back ahead 56-54. And then the gamble nearly exploded when he took a charge with three minutes to go — a 50/50 judgment call where you’re trusting the officials to rule in your favor. When the contact happened and the whistle blew, there was a moment where Bluejay fans wondered if he’d just fouled out. Alexander said on the postgame radio show that it “scared the God out of me,” while Kalkbrenner himself said he wasn’t sure he’d ever purposely taken a charge before.
“I didn’t know how Kalk would play with four fouls because he’s never had to do it before,” Greg McDermott said. “To take a charge and rotate over there in that situation is a big time, big time play.”
After the Slater three, Villanova only made one more shot the rest of the game. Unfortunately, Creighton wasn’t much better, and with 34 seconds left Villanova’s only made basket of the final six minutes — a three-pointer by Dixon that put the Wildcats ahead 61-60 — looked like it might be the game-winner.
Except Alexander had other thoughts.
“Tonight was Trey’s night,” coach Greg McDermott said. “We recognized that and ran a couple plays for him. He did what good players are supposed to do.”
The Jays’ sixth-straight win moves them to 9-3 in the Big East, keeping pace with Xavier and Marquette ahead of them in the standings.
“Villanova’s had our number. They’ve had everybody’s number,” McDermott said. “We’ve beaten them as much as anybody in our league but that isn’t very much, six or seven times. And this is not the same Villanova team from November and December and January. They had a chance to win at Providence late in the game. They led Marquette inside of five minutes. They led here in the final minute. This is a really good basketball team.”
Inside the Box:
Trey Alexander’s made huge, game-winning plays before — Exhibit A being the NCAA Tournament against San Diego State — and added to his resume Saturday night. He scored 27 points, 15 of them in the second half, with five 3-pointers. Three times he tied or gave them the lead in the deciding moments. And when they had to have a play, he delivered, on both ends.
“Tonight was my night,” Alexander said. “I was feeling it. Mac and my teammates entrusted me to go make big plays down the stretch.”
His defense on Caleb Daniels was just as important. Villanova’s leading scorer at 16.2 points per game, Daniels scored just 12 and was never really able to get off an open look. The number of shots he took — or didn’t take — was indicative of just how tightly Alexander covered him. Daniels came in averaging seven 3-point attempts per game, and he took just three in this game (making one). Two of those came in end-of-shot-clock scenarios where getting a shot off at all was more important than getting off a good shot.
Fun fact: FOX’s Jim Jackson has been the commentator for two Creighton games this year. Alexander has 59 points (32 and 27) and made 12-of-21 three-pointers in wins over DePaul and Villanova. Jackson will be on the call again this Saturday when UConn visits, according to CU Sports Information Director Rob Anderson.
Arthur Kaluma didn’t make much of an impact offensively, but he grabbed eight rebounds — including two massive boards in the final two minutes to create extra possessions. The first led to a go-ahead layup from Ryan Nembhard, 60-58.
The second sent him to the line where he had a chance to extend the lead (although he missed the front-end). Still, the extra effort expended on those plays shows the improvement in Kaluma’s game since Christmas — even on a night where he doesn’t score, he affected the outcome in other ways.
“It was a critical moment in the game. We really needed the possession,” Kaluma said of the rebound that led to Nembhard’s layup. “I saw the ball come off the rim in a perfect way, and I got crammed like three different times. The ball poked out into the perfect spot where I could get it. I knew I was gonna get that ball and get that rebound, to get another possession for our team. And we capitalized on it.”
As for the second, where he poked the ball away?
“That little moment after they grab the ball and relax for a second, it’s easy to tip it out of their hands,” Kaluma explained. “That’s what I did.”
After entering the week not having won a game since 1986 when its bench was scoreless, Creighton won its second straight game without a bench point. Stranger: Villanova also got zero points from their bench. That’s not surprising, perhaps, given that these two teams rank 340th and 353rd in bench points nationally, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a game where both teams failed to get a single point from anyone but their starters.
Stranger still: there were zero fastbreak points from either team. The 63 possessions tied a season-low for Creighton, who also had a 63-possession game against Texas Tech in Maui.
Highlights:
Press Conference:
