Bluejay Beat Wrap-Up:
In Creighton’s 10th game of the 2021-22 season, we finally saw where the ceiling might be for this team. They dismantled the 24th ranked BYU Cougars for 40 minutes, dominating both ends of the floor and leading by as many as 21 points in an 83-71 win. And it began in the paint.
Creighton held BYU to just 7-of-26 shooting (26.9%) on two-point shots in the first half, blocking seven shots in the process. After BYU opened the game with a bucket, the Jays used a 10-0 run to take control of the game and never trailed again. It looked like they had learned some lessons from the loss to Iowa State a week prior, where the Cyclones repeatedly pushed them around and took over the game with physical play. This time, BYU was on the receiving end.
“The physicality of the game took us by surprise a little bit, which is really disappointing for us,” BYU coach Mark Pope said. “We’re usually the ones that are bringing the physicality to the game, and we were getting pushed around today. It took us a long time to finally respond.”
Pope said his players appeared sped up, and that they forced shots and picked up their dribble earlier than they should have. It wasn’t just Creighton’s physicality, though — their gameplan was smart, and the Jays executed it brilliantly.
“I thought our guys really had some teeth to what they were doing, especially defensively, to start the game,” Greg McDermott said. “We felt like (Alex) Barcello and (Te’Jon) Lucas, when they get comfortable, are really, really hard to stop. So we started by switching every screen on them, then changed it up by blitzing a few screens, and then went back to switching. We’ve done an awful lot of drop coverage defense this year, and the downside to that is it often leads to mid-range jump shots. And that’s their strength. That’s where they’re elite. So we wanted to take away that part of their game.”
That switching, combined with the threat (and often the promise) of Kalkbrenner swatting away shot attempts, turned the veteran BYU squad into an impatient group who rushed plays and made poor decisions. With the rim closed off for their drivers, and their bread-and-butter midrange jumpers mostly taken away, BYU’s offense sputtered while CU attacked them on the other end with clinical precision.
Barcello had two turnovers in that early 10-0 run that led to points, and the normally sure-handed Cougars had 15 on the day. In a later 12-0 Bluejay run that extended their lead to 36-19, they put together seven straight defensive possessions that ended in no points for BYU. On the final play of that run, the Jays suffocating defense gave BYU little room to operate, and it ended with Alex O’Connell jumping a passing lane on the baseline to knock the ball loose — then diving out of bounds to save the possession and throwing it back to Trey Alexander. The result? A fastbreak layup for Ryan Nembhard, and an electrifying sequence that was the perfect encapsulation of the entire game.
From there, Ryan Hawkins took over. He scored 25 points for the second consecutive game, and did his best Doug McDermott impression in this one. A similar-sized player to CU’s all-time leading scorer, the sight of a ‘4’ man in Creighton’s offense backing down defenders to score on jumpers inside the arc, curling off of screens to hit threes with a lightning-fast release, and creating his own shots with crafty moves in the paint certainly brought back memories of McDermott. While he’s obviously not on the same level as the former Naismith Award winner and 3,000 point scorer, Hawkins scored 2,000 points in his DII career and is proving that his game translates just fine to Division 1.
With the Jays ahead 36-24, he scored nine straight points. First, he cleared space for an offensive rebound and then hit a three. Then he drove inside and made a one-handed floater over a BYU defender. And then came this one, a beautiful set play where Rati Andronikashvili threw an inbounds bounce-pass to a wide-open Hawkins in the corner.
He had 19 points on 7-of-10 shooting in the first half, and got them rolling in the second on this set play just nine seconds in — a driving one-handed floater straight out of Doug McDermott’s bag of tricks.
BYU eventually settled in offensively, and cut the lead to 10 on two separate occasions. But Creighton had just one turnover over the game’s final eight minutes despite full-court pressure from the Cougars, and they were a perfect 14-for-14 at the free throw line during those eight minutes. And they answered BYU’s final push with a series of big-time shots that slammed the door on any comeback hopes. Ahead 63-53, Alex O’Connell buried a three from the corner.
And then Hawkins made the play of the game, corralling a loose ball after a missed Cougar shot and racing full-speed down the length of the floor for a one-handed dunk in the face of BYU’s Te’Jon Lucas — who found himself in the unfortunate position of being the only line of defense in front of a charging freight train.
“I had my steps right leading up to it,” Hawkins said. “I’m a left-foot jumper, too. I was like, I gotta try it.”
He did more than try. The dunk was the exclamation point on the victory, pushing the lead back out to 70-54 and sent the majority-Creighton crowd into chants of “C-U! C-U!” that were deafening on FS1’s broadcast.
Here’s how John Bishop described it on Creighton’s radio broadcast — a “hammer slam”.
Kalkbrenner once again a difference maker
Creighton’s 7’1” sophomore once again put his stamp on a game, this time turning in a monster performance with 14 points on 6-of-7 shooting, nine rebounds, and (officially) five blocks.
“He’s a load down there,” BYU coach Mark Pope said of Kalkbrenner. “When you’re undersized and you’re getting beat down the floor, that’s a problem.”
The play Pope was talking about? With about seven minutes gone in the first half, Kalkbrenner swallowed up a jump shot by BYU’s Spencer Johnson ten feet away from the hoop, then raced down court ahead of BYU’s defense. Though they stopped him from scoring at the rim, the chaos left them scrambling to cover shooters in transition — and then unable to prevent the offensive rebound of Trey Alexander’s missed three. All of that in 20 seconds.
He did it again a few minutes later, on a play where BYU’s defense fell asleep and Kalkbrenner sprinted past four Cougar defenders in transition. Rati Andronikashvili saw it unfold and zipped a pass halfway down the court for an easy bucket at the rim.
And then there was this play, where Kalkbrenner just simply would not be denied. After missing a turnaround jumper at the rim, he grabbed his own miss, had a shot blocked but got the ball back, dribbled through two defenders to the other side of the rim, and finally laid it in.
“Ryan’s presence at the rim defensively, and on the offensive glass, was huge,” McDermott said. “We also hit some threes early which put pressure on BYU because now they had to decide whether to bring an extra defender out on the ball, or keep the help defender in the paint to deal with Kalkbrenner. He was such a factor in this game on the defensive end, both in blocking shots and changing shots.”
Key Stats:
Creighton’s 83 points are the most an opponent has scored against BYU this year. Through 10 games, the Jays have been over 100 on Basketball-Reference.com’s offensive efficiency rating in eight of them. Defensively, they’ve now held opponents to under 100 in eight of 10 games.
They shot 21-of-25 from the free throw line, including a perfect 14-for-14 during the game’s final minutes. After struggling from the line in the first five games (58.9%) they’ve now made 78.8% over the last five.
And while BYU made 12-of-23 from three-point range, they were just 15-of-46 from everywhere else. There’s work to do on the perimeter for Creighton’s defense, but inside — and especially at the rim — they’re becoming close to impenetrable.
