Remember when Creighton couldn’t defeat Southern Illinois for the life of them? It seems like ages ago, doesn’t it? After the legendary 80-56 beatdown in the MVC Tournament championship game in March of 2003, the Jays lost eight in a row to the Salukis. They went to two NCAA Tournaments and two NIT’s in that span, which made it all the more unfathomable — they beat just about everyone else, yet couldn’t beat SIU even once. Heck, Anthony Tolliver went 1-8 against them in his career.
Since losing 48-44 in the primetime “showcase” game when ESPN College Gameday visited Carbondale in 2008, Creighton has won seven straight in the series, including three wins in overtime and another decided by two points. This has remained an incredibly entertaining series, despite the massive downturn SIU basketball has taken in the last four years.
Sunday night, the Jays won their eighth straight game against SIU, which sounds unbelievable to anyone who sat through the other side of such a streak. Unlike many of the previous seven wins in the streak, this one had very little drama — except for a brief run early in the second half, the outcome was never seriously in doubt.
Playing their fourth game in eight days (and third in six days), Coach Greg McDermott went to his bench early and often, with nine players getting double-digit minutes. Avery Dingman played 12 minutes, Austin Chatman logged 10, and Will Artino had 7 minutes to go along with the usual big minutes for Josh Jones (21) and Ethan Wragge (16). There was even a Dana Altman-style line change midway through the second half where he substituted five players off the bench at once.
“It’s been a heckuva week, and it’s been a tough week on our guys,” Greg McDermott said on the postgame show. “Four games in eight days takes a toll on you. We’ve got some guys that are playing 30-plus minutes a game, so we tried to rest them as much as we could tonight.”
The very first possession of the game hinted at the Jays’ strategy for the game: Antoine Young put up a shot and missed, Doug McDermott rebounded the ball but missed the follow-up, Gregory Echenique snared his miss and put the ball back up but also missed, and then McDermott grabbed their third offensive rebound of the possession and was fouled on the shot attempt. Mamadou Seck, the Salukis’ excellent center, knew from that moment forward that he was in for a battle, and while he wound up with 10 points and 8 rebounds, nothing came easy.
“Besides just the rebounding, Gregory did a great job on Mamadou Seck,” Greg McDermott explained in the postgame show. “Seck is one of the players on their team capable of scoring 20 if you let him get started, so I thought it was critical early in the game that he felt Gregory’s presence, and that he knew that he could drive it in there but Gregory’s not going to leave his feet, and he’s not going for your shot fakes — you’re going to have to score over top of him.”
As the Jays built an early 19-9 lead, it was clear that this was a night when the referees were going to call fouls, so Creighton wisely drove the ball to the rim every chance they could. In the first half alone, they were 20-22 from the foul line, a pace that slowed the game to a halt at times and kept them from sustaining any momentum. Even if it was tough to watch at times, and dragged the half out to nearly an hour of real time, it was a smart strategy and it paid dividends.
With 7:41 to play in the half, McDermott hit a jump shot to give him eight for the game, and 1,001 for his career. The public address announcer informed the crowd of the achievement as the team ran up the floor on defense, and the arena rose to give him a well-deserved standing ovation.
Creighton’s statistical records pre-dating 1970 are incomplete, so it’s unknown who actually holds the record for quickest journeys to 1,000 points. What is known is the great Paul Silas got there in 47 games, Rodney Buford got there in 59 games, and Rod Mason got there in 60 (scoring 28 in his final game to wind up with 1,023 for his two-year career). Bob Portman finished his second season with 1,195 points after playing 50 games, so while it’s unverifiable how many games it took him to reach 1,000, we know he’s either first or second on the list (and probably first, unless he scored 196 points in the last four games of his second year, an improbable task even for a player as great as Portman). So by my math, Doug McDermott doing so in 57 games makes him the third quickest in CU history. Quite an accomplishment.
“At halftime, a few of the guys told me that’s the quietest 1,000 points they’ve seen,” Doug said on the AM590 postgame show. “I couldn’t have done it without these guys. I play with a lot of unselfish guys, and it means a lot more to me now that we’re winning.”
His dad joked after the game, “I’m a little ticked off. He did it in two-and-a-half years less than I did it in. It took me forever to get 1,000!” After sharing a laugh with T. Scott Marr and Jimmy Motz, he got serious. “No, it’s a neat milestone. It’s something that you celebrate when it happens, and then you move on to the next game. He’s had an incredible season so far, and he’d be the first one to tell you he’s playing with a bunch of unselfish guys that understand how to get him the ball, where to get him the ball, and let him go to work. On a night when he didn’t shoot the three very well, he was physical and got to the line.”
His bucket to pass the 1,000 point mark gave the Jays a 31-18 lead, and they would grow that lead to 48-36 at the break. It was an odd statistical half — despite scoring 36 points, SIU shot only 36.1% (13-36), and despite attempting 13 fewer shots than SIU, the Jays outrebounded them 23-16.
Coming out of the break, SIU took the ball to the rim hoping to replicate the strategy that had worked so well for the Jays in the first half, and for a time, it worked. They scratched and clawed their way back into the game, and at the first media timeout of the half it was 53-48. They would get no closer, as Gregory Echenique came out of the timeout breathing fire — playing lock-down defense, grabbing rebounds, and dunking the ball on the other end. By the end of the night, the big man had his fifth straight game with double-digit rebounds, and he finished one point short of a double-double.
“It makes it a lot easier when Greg’s grabbing everything at the rim,” Doug McDermott noted on the postgame show. “It allows me to run more in transition, and get those quick post-ups. These last couple of games have been huge, and show what kind of player he can be for us.”
Behind Echenique and McDermott’s dominance in the paint, they steadily grew the lead, keeping a pesky Saluki team at arms length and finally blew the game open late, allowing the walkons to get some much-deserved minutes.
If you insist on finding things to nit-pick about, the Jays did have 12 turnovers, including four from Grant Gibbs and three from Antoine Young. But for a team playing it’s fourth game in eight days, you can excuse a bit of tired, sloppy play, especially when it’s overshadowed by solid defense and good shooting.
And so the Jays move to 16-2 overall, 6-1 in the MVC, and have won six straight games since the humbling homecourt loss to Missouri State to open conference play. They’ll get a chance at revenge in their next game, as they travel to Springfield to play a Bears team that is on the ropes, losers of two straight. A Jays win all but excuses MSU from the conference race. Given their recent struggles against the Bears, it would be an awfully sweet knockout punch to deliver on their home court.