After Creighton’s 72-60 win over St. Thomas in their opener one week ago, a game where they trailed in the second half, Greg McDermott said he was pretty sure he’d have his team’s attention when they hit the practice floor the next day. Sure enough, they looked like a different team by Thursday — they led by as many as 41 points in a 96-61 destruction of North Dakota, and were locked in on both ends of the floor. In short, it looked like you’d expect a game between the ninth-ranked team in the country and a bottom-tier Summit League team to look.
Creighton’s schedule gets immeasurably tougher one week from today in Maui, when they battle Texas Tech. In the meantime, two more home games where they’re overwhelming favorites against Q3/Q4 opponents are on the slate. First up is Holy Cross out of the Patriot League, a team picked ninth out of ten teams in the preseason poll. They come into Monday night with a 1-1 record, having stumbled 75-68 in their opener against Siena. The Crusaders were 9-22 a year ago, but come into the season with a bit of momentum based on their showing in Patriot League games — they fought to a 7-11 record in the league, including road wins at Boston University, Navy and Army, three of the league’s top five squads.
Gerrale Gates leads the Crusaders with 21.5 points, 8.0 rebounds and 4.0 blocked shots per game. A year ago, he averaged a team-best 16.2 points and 8.6 rebounds per contest with 14 double-doubles, and in conference play he put up 18.6 points and 9.0 boards per game.
Listed at 6’6”, 237 pounds, Gates is a strong, experienced player who can score both around or underneath the taller defenders he encounters in the paint. Their offense runs through Gates, as he’s not just a good scorer but he’s also adapt at kicking it out to open shooters. A year ago, his usage rate (making a shot, missing a shot that isn’t rebounded by the offense, or committing a turnover) was 44th highest in all of D1 — 30.4% of possessions when he was on the floor ended with the ball in Gates’ hands.
A fifth-year senior, Gates is versatile enough to play alongside the 6’10” Michael Rabinovich or 6’11” Simon Wilbar in big lineups, or with 6’5” Caleb Kenney at the ‘4’ in a small lineup. Kenney has great length that allows him to guard taller players, and he actually led the team in blocks a year ago (28). He has five this year through two games.
Everything runs through Gates, but he’s not the biggest key to their success. That would be Bo Montgomery, their sophomore guard who averaged 8.5 points, 2.8 rebounds and 0.7 steals per game a year ago. Not huge numbers, sure, but when Montgomery scored 12 or more points, Holy Cross went 8-2. On the flip side, when he scored fewer than 12 points, the Crusaders went 1-20. His versatility on the perimeter, and the fact that he is their best three-point shooter (36.4% a year ago) makes him a great one-two punch to pair with Gates inside.
Joe Octave, a 6’4” transfer from Air Force, gives them another experienced guard. He was fourth on the team in scoring (8.3 points per game) and fifth in rebounding (3.0 rebounds per game) a year ago, and hit 45.8 percent of his field goal attempts and 37.0 percent of his three-pointers. In his Holy Cross debut, Octave had 16 points, seven rebounds and two assists in 29 minutes against Siena.
And freshman guard Will Batchelder has confidence that belies his youth — he led the team with 24 points and four assists while hitting 6-of-12 from three-point range in their win over Dean last week.
The Crusaders played a slow, grind-it-out style in each of Brett Nelson’s first three years as their head coach — partially because the roster he inherited from Bill Carmody was full of the same types of big, plodding players Carmody won with at Northwestern. A year ago, their average possession length was nearly 18 seconds. They’ve tried to go faster this year now that Nelson finally has a roster he believes can play the more free-wheeling style he prefers (their average possession length is 13.9 seconds, 10th fastest in D1) but in order for that to succeed, they’ll need to shoot a lot better.
From outside, they struggled — the returning roster combined to make just 58 threes a year ago, and as a team they ranked 343rd in 3-point attempt rate. Inside, they ranked 342nd in field goal percentage at the rim, and their raw shooting percentage on two-pointers (43.2%) ranked 350th. No matter where they shot it from, they were bad at it. Through two games this year, that has continued. Their 91.7 adjusted offensive efficiency ranks 338th. That presents a problem, because if they want to run with the Jays tonight, they don’t have the shooters to keep up. And if they want to slow the game down, they don’t have the personnel to defend Creighton at the rim.
CU has 99% odds of victory tonight on KenPom for a reason.
- Tip: 8:00pm
- Venue: CHI Health Center Omaha
- TV: CBSSN
- Announcers: Carter Blackburn and Pete Gillen
- 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, 101.9FM
- Announcers: John Bishop and Nick Bahe
- Streaming on 1620TheZone.com and the 1620 The Zone mobile app
- Satellite Radio: SiriusXM channel 84 (SXM app channel 84)
- Creighton Athletic Director Marcus Blossom served as the Athletic Director at Holy Cross from 2019-21. Among Blossom’s hires at Holy Cross was men’s basketball head coach Brett Nelson. Nelson has faced Creighton as an assistant coach at Drake (2011-13) and Marquette (2014-19) — and as a player at Florida, where he scored 13 points in the Gators’ 83-82 double-overtime loss to the Jays in the 2002 NCAA Tournament.
- Holy Cross has lost its last eight games against opponents from the Big East Conference, since a 78-73 victory over then-Big East member Notre Dame in the first round of the National Invitation Tournament on March 15, 2005. Against the 11 schools which currently compete in the Big East, the Crusaders stand 111-115 all-time.
- Creighton leads the Big East in assist/turnover ratio (32/16). In Monday’s win vs. St. Thomas, the Bluejays had just five turnovers in 63 possessions. CU then had 11 turnovers in 69 possessions vs. North Dakota. Ryan Nembhard, who had seven assists and no turnovers prior to suffering a wrist injury in his final game last season at St. John’s, opened his sophomore campaign with five assists and no turnovers last Monday, then had six assists and two turnovers in Thursday’s victory vs. North Dakota.
- Baylor Scheierman has grabbed 10 rebounds in each of the first two games of the year, just the second time this century it’s happened by a Bluejay. Last season Northwest Missouri State transfer Ryan Hawkins grabbed 10+ rebounds in each of the first three games for CU, becoming the first Bluejay to do so since Benoit Benjamin opened his junior campaign with 27 such consecutive contests. Prior to Hawkins, no CU player had 10+ rebounds in the first two games of a season since Doug Swenson in 1998-99.
- Creighton took a 41 point lead (96-55) late in Thursday’s game against North Dakota. It was CU’s largest lead at any point of any game since taking a 89-47 lead over Seton Hall on Jan. 6, 2021. Creighton’s largest lead in any game last season was an 84-52 advantage over No. 11 Providence in the semifinals of the Big East Tournament.
Holy Cross has hosted and won both previous meetings against Creighton, winning 67-47 in 1951 and 97-60 in 1956.
On November 14, 1998, Creighton jumped out to a 20-2 lead in the early moments and rolled to a 93-48 season-opening win over Towson State. The Jays had looked lethargic in two exhibition games, including a nail-biting three-point win over Team Pella, and were “rewarded” with marathon four-hour practices in the days leading up to the season opener. Whatever Dana Altman did in those practices worked. He noted in the World-Herald the next day, “I was really, really pleased with the energy and the passion with which we played tonight. We were diving after loose balls, taking passes away and running the floor hard.”
Senior Rodney Buford scored 24 points on 10-14 shooting, and scored 19 points in the first half alone, as the Jays opened led 48-19 at the break. They never really let up, holding leads of 54-26, 63-28, and 81-40 throughout the second half, and wound up with their largest margin of victory in seven years.
Doug Swenson had 12 points and 14 rebounds in 19 minutes, while Nerijus Karlikanovas and Donnie Johnson scored 15 and 13, respectively, in their Bluejay debuts.
The Bottom Line:
In a game that will look a lot like Thursday’s blowout of North Dakota, Creighton will run around, past, and occasionally through Holy Cross.
#9 Creighton 95, Holy Cross 60