When Creighton takes the floor Wednesday night, it will have been 11 days since they last played, a 86-70 win over #5 Villanova. The two previous times they had a break of a week or longer, it took them a bit to get back on track. On January 2, they returned from a 10-day break at Providence, ran out of gas at the end as they blew a big lead, then won on a buzzer-beater. On January 16, they returned from a week off at Butler and lost in overtime to a bad Bulldogs team (albeit without Marcus Zegarowski). A home loss to the Friars where they fell behind 23-6 at the outset followed. So the big storyline heading into this game is how long it takes Creighton to get back into a rhythm — and whether they can sustain it for 40 minutes.
DePaul gave the Jays trouble in the first meeting of a year, a 69-62 win made possible by Creighton ending the game on a 10-2 run. All-Big East guard Charlie Moore, who leads the Blue Demons in points (14.6) and assists (4.5) didn’t play in that game. Neither did guard Oscar Lopez, who has only played in three games this season and since returning last week is averaging 10.0 points on 66.7% shooting. Freshman forward David Jones, a four-star recruit ranked #110 by Rivals, also didn’t play in that game. Since making his DePaul debut two weeks ago, he’s averaging 6.6 points and 3.3 rebounds a game.
So while DePaul is in last place in the Big East with the worst record by far (4-10 overall, 2-10 in the league; Butler is the next-worst at 6-11 in Big East play) this is a different team than they’ve had for much of the year. And they’re coming off their best game this season, an 88-83 win at St. John’s that put a dent in the Johnnies’ NCAA Tourney resume.
All Big East pedigree aside, Moore is an interesting player in that he’s really good in counting stats (14.6 points per game, 9th in the Big East; 4.5 assists per game, 6th in the Big East) but gets less impressive the deeper you look at advanced analytics, or, you know, the more you watch him play with a critical eye. For a player who has taken 40% of his shots at the rim (57 of 142 total shots), making just 47.4% is pretty bad. His teammate Javon Freeman-Liberty takes a similar percentage (44.6% of his shots have been at the rim, or 66 of his 149 total shots) but he’s made 57.6% of them. Creighton’s not exactly known as a team with great scorers in the paint, yet they have a whopping seven players in their rotation who have made 50.0% or better on shots at the rim. Four of them are north of 70%.
Moore has been similarly unimpressive on midrange jumpers, connecting on just 32.4% of them. He’s made 37.3% on three-pointers. All of that is taking the long road to saying that Moore is what you might charitably refer to as a volume scorer — he piles up points but takes a ton of shots to get there. Look at some of these ridiculous lines: 7-of-20 at Providence, 8-of-24 combined in two games against UConn (4-of-12 each time), 5-of-13 at Marquette, 8-of-18 against St. John’s.
On assists, it’s the same story, different verse. His 1.3 assist-to-turnover ratio is nothing to brag about for a player that handles the ball as much as Moore does — he has 49 assists in 11 games played (good) and 38 turnovers (bad). But the interesting thing is, he is tough to keep out of the paint off the dribble, and he does score quite a bit and create shots for teammates once he’s in there.
He just also misses more shots than he takes and turns it over almost as often as he assists in a made basket for someone else. Make of that what you will.
Freeman-Liberty is second on the team in scoring at 13.4 points per game, and leads them in rebounds at 5.3 boards per game. He had 13 points, five assists and three steals in the first meeting with CU, but has missed the last two games with a concussion and is questionable for this one.
Ray Salnave, a grad transfer from Monmouth, has scored in double figures twice in a DePaul uniform — 11 points on 3-of-5 shooting in the win over St. John’s over the weekend, and 21 points in the first game against the Jays on 5-of-6 shooting in the paint and 3-of-7 on threes. He averages just 5.6 points per game but lit the Jays up. They’ll have to adjust their gameplan accordingly.
6’8″ senior Pauly Paulicap has the best offensive rebounding percentage in the Big East (14.0% of his team’s missed shots while he’s on the floor have been rebounded by Paulicap). That’s skewed a bit by two outlier games (10 offensive boards against St. John’s in January, and seven at Seton Hall last week) but he is a skilled, athletic forward who can clear the glass. And he pretty much lives at the rim, with 79.2% of his shot attempts coming at or near the rim (he’s only taken 15 shots from anywhere else this year). So anything you can do to move him away from the basket not only takes away his offense, it takes away his rebounding. CU was successful at making him play further out than he’d like to in the first meeting, giving up just two offensive boards to Paulicap.
That applies to most of the team, really. The Blue Demons get just 24.4% of their points on three-pointers (314th in the country, fewest in the Big East). They only attempted eight of them in the win over St. John’s, and nine last week against Providence. More than any team CU has played this season, DePaul will focus almost entirely on scoring in the paint.
The adjustments Creighton made at halftime of the first meeting — stopping DePaul’s dribble, and working to get shots in the paint for themselves — would seem to be beneficial in the rematch as well. For all their struggles, DePaul does have length and athleticism at every position except the 5’11” point guard Charlie Moore. They force a fair amount of turnovers (on 20.4 of opponents possessions) and block a lot of shots (12.0% of opponents shots, 37th best in D1). But the Jays can’t be discouraged — they need to attack inside to open things up a bit on the perimeter.
- Tip: 8:00pm
- Venue: CHI Health Center Omaha
- TV: CBSSN
- Announcers: Tom McCarthy and Jim Spanarkel
- In Omaha: Cox channel 234 (SD), 1234 (HD); CenturyLink Prism channel 643 (SD), 1643 (HD)
- Outside Omaha: CBSSN Channel Finder
- Satellite: DirecTV channel 221; Dish Network channel 158
- Streaming info
- Radio: 1620AM
- Announcers: John Bishop and Brody Deren
- Streaming on 1620TheZone.com and the 1620 The Zone mobile app
- Satellite Radio:
- Sirius channel 146, XM 202
- DePaul shot a season high 63.0% (34-54) from the field in their win at St. John’s. The last time DePaul shot higher than 60% from the field was Nov. 11, 2019 at Iowa — and their 63.0% field goal percentage was the highest since the Blue Demons combined to shoot 66.7% (38-57) from the field in a 109-61 win over Chicago State on Dec. 17, 2016.
- DePaul leads the league in all games with a 30.7% team three-point field goal percentage defense, is ranked second with 12.6 offensive rebounds per game and third with 38.5 rebounds per game.
- Charlie Moore picked up his first Player of the Week honor this season after he led the Blue Demons to a win at St. John’s on Saturday. Moore posted season highs of 24 points and six rebounds while matching high season high with eight assists. He went 6-for-6 at the free throw line including four makes in the final 1:06, and was 8-for-13 (.615) from the field including 2-for-3 (.667) from the behind the arc.
- Creighton stands in second place in the Big East standings with an 12-4 league record, trailing only Villanova’s 9-2 mark. The Bluejays are a perfect 8-0 against the four teams it has met who are .500 or better in league play (2-0 vs. Seton Hall, UConn and St. John’s; 1-0 vs. Xavier, 1-0 vs. Villanova). But they’re 4-4 against the schools who are under .500 in Big East action, having gone 1-1 vs. Providence, Marquette and Georgetown, 1-0 vs. DePaul and 0-1 vs. Butler.
- Creighton had a pair of players record a double-double in the Feb. 13 victory vs. Villanova as Christian Bishop (16 points, 10 rebounds) and Damien Jefferson (10 points, 10 rebounds) each did it. Bishop (11 points, 10 rebounds) and Jefferson (10 points, 10 rebounds) also accomplished the feat earlier this season in CU’s Dec. 17 win at St. John’s. Before them, the last Bluejay duo to record double-doubles in the same contest since Dec. 9, 2017, when both Martin Krampelj and Ronnie Harrell Jr. did it.
- Bishop has averaged 15.0 points and 8.6 rebounds over the past five games, a stretch that started with Creighton’s Jan. 30 win at DePaul. In that same span, he’s made 29-of-37 field goal attempts (78.4 percent). For the year, Bishop is shooting 70.5 percent from the field, far ahead of the next best competitor in the Big East (Nate Watson, 59.4 percent).
Creighton has won 18 of the last 19 meetings with DePaul to take a 23-16 lead in the all-time series. Creighton is 16-1 in the series since joining the Big East, including 13 straight victories.
Fifteen of the last 17 meetings in the series have been decided by double-figures, but one of those exceptions was Creighton’s 69-62 win at DePaul last month.
If you haven’t checked out WBR’s latest podcast, “Scurry and The Scrub”, there’s never been a better time to dive in. Last week, co-hosts Jordan Scurry and Matt DeMarinis interviewed Marcus Zegarowski. This week, they talked to Simon Gerszberg of ShotQuality.com about the newest metric that Greg McDermott is using to analyze how the Jays are performing.
On February 24, 2007, Creighton defeated Wichita State 71-54 in front of 17,110 fans on Senior Night for Nate Funk, Anthony Tolliver, Nick Porter, and Manny Gakou. They’d blown double-digit halftime leads in two straight games — losses to Drexel and Illinois State — and were determined not to do the same to the Shockers when they took an eight-point advantage into the break. The Bluejays doubled the lead to 16 in the first five minutes of the second half, then locked down defensively to close out the win.
Despite early foul trouble, Porter scored 13 of his 17 points in the second half. Funk scored 16, and also had a big second half, making 4 of 5 shots after halftime. Tolliver added 11 points, seven rebounds and three blocked shots, and even the little-used Gakou got on the board with a spin move in the first half that netted him two points.
The win moved the Jays to 19-10 overall and 13-5 in the Valley, good enough for sole possession of second place. They’d sweep three games in St. Louis a week later to take the league’s auto bid to the NCAA Tournament.
The Bottom Line:
KenPom predicts a 14-point Bluejay win (78-64) and ESPN’s BPI places the probability of a Bluejay win at 92.3%. I do think they’ll come out a little rusty after their 11-day layoff, but will ultimately pull away late.
Jays 83, DePaul 69