Recap:
30 seconds into Sunday’s game, Baylor Scheierman stopped-and-popped for a three-pointer.
It was a sign of things to come for the Jays, who scorched the nets in a Christmas Day victory. Two 3-pointers in a span of three possessions for Ryan Nembhard soon followed; by the under-12 timeout, Arthur Kaluma and Trey Alexander had also connected from deep, and CU led 20-8.
They’d scored on eight of the 12 possessions that had ended with a shot — but that was the problem. 13 first-half turnovers, often on sloppy, ill-conceived passes, kept DePaul in the game by giving the Blue Demons nearly twice as many shot attempts as the Jays. They cut the lead to four after three 3-pointers in the span of five possessions, prompting a timeout from Greg McDermott.
Scheierman answered with a three from the logo, and following a short jumper by Nembhard, they’d stopped the bleeding. Still, the turnovers were piling up — as they took a 33-24 lead into the final media timeout of the first half, they had identical 40.6% scoring rates and turnover rates. Not ideal.
By game’s end, the Jays had a season-worst 18 turnovers. “Obviously our turnovers were a problem,” Greg McDermott said on his postgame radio show. “And on the offensive glass we did a great job in the first half, but we imploded on that in the second half. We’re still a work in progress. I think a little time away from here and a little time with family is going to be healthy for these guys.”
Though DePaul’s defense was designed to take away Ryan Kalkbrenner’s shots at the rim, the Jays took what they gave them instead — three-pointers — and made them pay. The fact that so many players were hitting made it more difficult for the Blue Demons. And as the second half began, Kalkbrenner began to insert his stamp on the game in other ways. He screened to get a three-pointer for Nembhard early, and on the next possession used a high-low move to free up Kaluma for a driving layup. At 47-35, they were pulling away.
Then Alexander went to work. He hit back-to-back threes at the 16-minute mark:
“The last couple of games, I’ve gotten the ball in my hands a little more often to initiate the offense,” Alexander said on the postgame show. “That helps me to find a rhythm with my shot. Me and R2 don’t care who gets the ball, because he knows I can run the ball screen as well as he can. We feed off of each other — he likes to catch and shoot, and so do I.”
He wound up with 18 of their 41 points after halftime, pushing the Jays to a 80-65 win. The last of his threes, with 45 seconds to play and the Jays ahead 77-63, came courtesy of an offensive rebound by Scheierman. Alexander said on this postgame show that McDermott asked him, “‘If we were in a close game you wouldn’t have shot that, would you?’ And I was like, nah! But we both knew I had to go up with it in that situation.”
The situation: Alexander was sitting on 29 points, and taking that heavily-contested three instead of running clock gave him a chance at breaking the 30-point barrier.
“Trey works hard. He’s always in there getting shots up. Today was his day,” McDermott said. “And the guys did a good job of finding him. He carried us with some big shots today.”
Defensively, the Jays made everything difficult for the Blue Demons. Their top two scorers, Javan Johnson and Umoja Gibson, combined to shoot just 9-of-26 with Bluejay defenders forcing them into contested mid-range jumpers, long threes, and desperation shots late in the shot clock.
They’ve picked up two straight wins to end 2022 after a six-game skid, and now head into a weeklong holiday break with momentum ahead of Seton Hall visiting Omaha on January 3. The Jays will return to campus on the 29th to begin prep for the Pirates.
“I talked to the team about wrapping up 2022 with a bang,” McDermott said. “It’s been an interesting year, the way we ended last season with the injuries and how we overcame that to finish well in the Big East Tournament and the NCAA Tournament. And then the expectations of this season, with the great start and the hiccup that followed, and trying to dig our way out of that.”
Inside the Box:
Early in Sunday’s Christmas Day win, someone on DePaul’s bench decided to poke a sleeping tiger — and trash talk the struggling Trey Alexander. He mockingly yelled “shooter!” as one of Alexander’s first shot attempts went up; he yelled “hell no! That’s off!”.
When it went in, Alexander winked at the bench as if to say, “oh yeah?”
He responded by delivering a heckuva present to Bluejay fans: a career-high 32 points, punctuated with some return-fire trash talk to DePaul’s bench after every basket. And there were a lot of them: 11-of-16 overall, 7-of-12 from three.
Yes, Alexander had been mired in a massive slump, shooting 5-of-32 (15.6%) overall and 8-of-21 from three-point range over the last six games. But with the DePaul bench trying their best to get under his skin and keep him mired in that slump, he did the opposite.
“I like that part of the game,” he said afterward. “I think it’s what makes it more fun. I talk on the low. I really don’t make it too well known. I like to whisper stuff to people. I don’t really get into all that.”
His chirping at DePaul’s bench was anything but low-key — it was noticeable inside the arena, and Fox’s broadcast crew of Jason Benetti and Jim Jackson made mention of it on more than one occasion. Whether it was their attempt to throw him off, or a reworked pregame shooting routine where he focused more on spot-up shots, Alexander ended 2022 on a high note.
His career-best 32 points were the highlight number on a day where Creighton shot 16-of-29 from three-point range (55%), both season highs.
He also joins Doug McDermott, Isaiah Zierden, and Mitch Ballock as Bluejays who’ve hung 30 points on DePaul in the Jays’ 10 years in the Big East. Courtesy of WBR’s Matt DeMarinis, here’s a super cut of the 34 combined made threes from those four games:
In notching back-to-back home wins over Butler and DePaul, the Jays shot 24-for-45 from beyond the arc. Noting that the Shot Quality numbers have been roughly the same all year long, McDermott then alluded to the criticism “Let it Fly” has elicited in some online corners of Bluejay fandom.
“It’s who we are. It’s what we’re going to do,” he said on his postgame radio show. “That’s how we play. That’s how we’re going to continue to play. You’re going to have games that are outliers where you don’t shoot it well, and you hope you can still figure out a way to win those games. Sometimes you can’t.”