Jim Flanery’s team pulled off a big comeback and a big win. (Juszyk / WBR)
Jim Flanery has won nearly 350 games in his 18 years as the head coach of the Creighton women’s basketball program, plus another 201 in 13 seasons as an assistant. In all of those victories over the span of five different decades, he struggled to think of one that seemed more improbable than Friday night’s 63-61 win at No. 11 DePaul.
The Bluejays were playing without the services of senior superstar Jaylyn Agnew and sophomore reserve Payton Brotzki. On top of that, sophomore guard Rachael Saunders was on a workload restriction after sustaining a bone bruise in her knee in the first half of last weekend’s home win over Xavier. Then the ball was tipped and Creighton watched, almost helplessly at times, as the Blue Demons scored the first 11 points of the game en route to a 20-5 lead at the end of the first quarter. A 3-pointer by fifth-year senior Olivia Elger and a layup by freshman forward Carly Bachelor accounted for the only times Creighton came with away with points on its first 20 possessions, eight of which ended in a turnover.
Elger engineered a personal 7-0 run early in the second quarter to trim the deficit to single digits, but DePaul responded with a 15-2 spurt to open up its largest lead of the night at 39-17 with 3:27 to play before halftime. The Bluejays got stops on five of DePaul’s final six possessions of the half, but they only managed to score on one of theirs as well and therefore had to settle for a 41-21 deficit at the break.
Creighton chipped 18 points off of that margin by outscoring the Blue Demons 20-2 over the first 7:43 of the third quarter. The game opened up a bit the rest of the period with both teams trading baskets down the stretch. The Bluejays landed the final blow just before the buzzer as Rachael Saunders drove baseline and scored off the glass for her first points of the night to send her team to the fourth quarter, trailing 49-46.
After only three players made a field goal in the first half, five different Bluejays got buckets in the final period. Saunders started it off with a layup to cut the deficit to one. Junior guard Temi Carda went off the glass to tie the game at 50. Elger gave Creighton its first lead with a layup, then gave them their final lead with a 3-pointer to make it 56-53 with 5:12 remaining. A layup by junior point guard Tatum Rembao made it 58-55, thenย Bachelor followed a basket by Carda with her first field goal of the fourth quarter to extend the lead to 63-57 with 3:08 to go.
DePaul senior forward Chante Stonewall hit a pair of free throws and then scored inside with a savvy up-and-under move to pull the Blue Demons within two, but Bachelor rejected Kelly Campbell’s potential game-tying layup in the final seconds to put the finishing touches on what is at the very least one of the grittiest wins in the 47-year history of the program.
“I’m still trying to process it, because I feel like I haven’t been a part of a win like that,” Flanery said. “I thought the first five minutes of the third quarter was key just to trim that thing down to where our players could believe that they could win. To get it down as quickly as we did was huge. I felt like we could have a chance if we could get to the end of the third quarter playing like that.”
Olivia Elger
Olivia Elger came up big in the victory for the Jays (Juszyk / WBR)
There isn’t a day that goes by where she doesn’t feel the pain that her passion for the game has produced, but every now and then the fifth-year senior from Peoria, Ill., is able to suppress it enough to dazzle with her spectacular shot-making talent. On Friday night, she was better than ever in that regard as she poured in a career-high 28 points — 25 of which came over the final three quarters — on 9-of-17 shooting to go along with seven rebounds, and a career-high four steals in 38 grueling minutes to not only provide a spark when it looked hopeless, but also to get the team over the hump when they ultimately did pull within striking distance.
“I think that’s what is really special about this team,” Elger said. “We’re not going to give up. We’re going to play all 40 minutes and even if we get down we’re going to keep fighting. That’s really what we talked about at halftime. We didn’t know what was going to happen, but we were going to keep fighting.”
Through the first nine games since the start of conference play, the 5-foot-7 combo guard had shot just 7-for-43 from 3-point range and been held to single digit scoring outputs in six of the games. On Friday night back in her home state, she doubled her perimeter shooting production with a 7-for-10 performance from distance, bumping up her 3-point field percentage in league play from 16.3% to 26.4%.
Creighton’s Defense
I know what you’re thinking about this one. Creighton came back from a 22-point deficit, so they must have hit a bajillion 3-pointers after DePaul let their foot off the gas with the big lead. In reality, Creighton only went 5-of-9 from beyond the arc over the final 23:27. The 12 turnovers and 1.05 points per possession they scored during that stretch is hardly indicative of an offensive onslaught. Where the Bluejays really made up ground in a hurry is what they did to the Blue Demons on the defensive end. After falling behind 39-17 with 3:27 left in the first half, Creighton outscored DePaul 46-22 the rest of the way.
DePaul shot 17.6% from the field, including 0-for-11 from 3-point range, over that final 23 minutes and change. Of their final 42 possessions, the Blue Demons scored on 11 of them and turned it over on 12.
The Bluejays also flipped the script on the defensive glass. After allowing nine offensive rebounds on 18 opportunities in the first half, Creighton secured 18 of DePaul’s 23 missed shots after halftime.