Last Sunday, Creighton appeared to suffer a season-altering injury to Ryan Kalkbrenner when he fell to the court awkwardly against St. John’s, and had to be assisted to the locker room. But after 25 or so tense minutes of real time, he returned to finish the game as Bluejay fans breathed a sigh of relief. Miraculously, given how it looked, he told WBR’s Matt DeMarinis on the way to the bus that he was sore, nothing more.
And he’s ready to go for Sunday’s game.
“Ryan’s doing good,” Greg McDermott said on Friday. “He hasn’t missed any practice so I expect him to be a full go.”
In accumulating an 11-4 record through 15 Big East games, the Jays have beaten everyone in the league at least once — everyone except for Sunday’s opponent, Georgetown. The Hoyas handed CU an embarrassing 81-57 loss on December 18, smacking the Jays with a 38-13 run spanning both halves.
That’s not me calling it embarrassing, by the way. Creighton’s players and coaches did it.
“It was embarrassing,” freshman Jackson McAndrew said on the postgame radio show. “We got out toughed in all assets of the game.”
“I’m very, very disappointed,” Greg McDermott added in his postgame radio interview. “It’s embarrassing the way that we played.”
Georgetown had 6 — count ‘em, six — fastbreak dunks off live-ball turnovers in that game. All totaled, they scored 20 points off 16 Bluejay turnovers. Add in 11 second chance points off of nine offensive rebounds, and that’s 31 extra possession points. 31!
The Hoyas’ Micah Peavy had four of those six, with all of them turned into fastbreak dunks in less than five minutes of game time in the second half. And though he harassed Steven Ashworth, everyone had a hand in the nightmare. Every Bluejay who played in the game had at least one turnover with the exception of Fredrick King. And the live ball turnovers were equally distributed — Neal, Ashworth, Kalkbrenner and Thomas had one apiece leading to a Hoya dunk, and Ty Davis had two.
Two months later, they’re not using the word ‘embarrassing’ to describe it, at least not publicly, but you can tell the loss has stuck with them.
“Well, we certainly didn’t enjoy it much the last time we saw them,” McDermott said on Friday. “Obviously we didn’t play very well that game and and made a lot of mistakes that allowed them to get out into transition and have easy opportunities, and we have to clean that up on Sunday.”
“That got away from us in a hurry in the second half. It was really, you know, a three or four-point game with 16 minutes left in the game and then they just went on that huge run. But we have to do a better job of taking care of the basketball.”
Two months is a long time, and in many respects Creighton is a much different team than the one the Hoyas saw. Jamiya Neal has emerged as a threat off the dribble and is a more confident secondary ballhandler than he was in December. Fedor Zugic wasn’t eligible until three days later, and has shown steady improvement backing up Neal. They’ve gotten better at feeding the ball into the post for Kalkbrenner, and their three-point shooting has improved.
The turnovers are a problem they’ve yet to fix, though. And offensive rebounds remain an issue from time to time, too. Sunday at St. John’s, the Red Storm had 40 extra possession points — 20 points off 15 turnovers, and 20 points off 20 offensive boards.
And now here come the Hoyas, whose defense is great at forcing opponents into poor decisions. As a team, they force a turnover on 20.1% of possessions, 4th in the Big East and 35th nationally. Peavy leads the way individually, getting a steal on 4% of possessions he’s been on the floor for (49th most of all players in D1).
“I think (Peavy) is one of the elite defenders not just in our conference but in the country,” McDermott said. “He’s hard to screen…he just blows up screens because he’s so powerful and his anticipation skills are really good — and you combine that with the fact that he absolutely plays his tail off, that’s a recipe for for a high level defender and he certainly changed the game defensively when we played the first time.”
Peavy had 20 points, eight rebounds, eight assists and seven steals in that game, coming extremely close to a quadruple-double. Earlier this week he scored a career-high 30 points with seven rebounds, seven assists and six steals in a win over Providence; it was his fifth straight game with 20 or more points. That stretch has upped his season averages to 16.0 points per game, 5.5 rebounds, 3.7 assists and and 2.5 steals.
Jayden Epps averages 12.2 points, but had 21 in the first meeting thanks to making 5-of-6 from three-point range. While he’s shooting 36.1% from three for the year, the game against CU is an outlier — he’s only made more than three 3’s in a game two other times, and one of those took 12 attempts to get there. He’s missed five games since that first CU game with various nagging injuries, and scored in double figures just four times since — but two of them have come in the past week.
Malik Mack averages 12.6 points and 4.6 assists per game. This will be the Jays’ first look at the sophomore transfer from Harvard, as he sat out the first meeting. He’s made the most threes on the team with 41, making 33.6%, and has scored 13 or more points in five of the last seven games.
Starters Thomas Sorber and Caleb Williams both missed the Providence game and are game-time decisions for Sunday. Of those, Williams is the more likely to play as he’s been in the concussion protocol; Sorber has turf toe, an injury suffered last weekend.
Sorber had eight points, six rebounds and three blocks in the first meeting, shooting 4-of-14 from the field. If he can’t go — and especially if Williams is also out — Georgetown is awfully thin up front. Drew Fielder had 17 points and nine boards in place of Sorber at Providence, intimidating the Friars at the rim while stretching their defense with two 3’s. But there’s not much behind him without Sorber and Williams.
At 16-10 (7-8 Big East), Georgetown somewhat surprisingly remains in contention for a bye in the Big East tournament. They’re chasing Xavier (9-7 Big East) and Villanova (9-8) for fifth place. Even if they don’t catch both of them, year two of the Ed Cooley era has to be considered a success to most if not all observers.
As for the Jays, after dropping last Sunday’s game at St. John’s, they squandered a chance to control their own destiny as they fight for a Big East regular season title. They’re heavily favored in four of the final five games by KenPom, and the loss (at Xavier) is predicted as a tossup. But going 5-0 won’t be enough.
“Obviously we need some help now, but the reality of it is you take every game one at a time and all you can control is your preparation. Then you hope it’s good enough,” McDermott said on Friday. “These five games are important for a lot of reasons — for Big East seeding in the conference tournament, obviously, and hopefully NCAA tournament seeding as well. Everything we’d like to accomplish is still ahead of us, we’ve just got to make sure we have a good couple weeks.”
CU also shared a cryptic message on social media Saturday afternoon, changing their profile picture to the “interlocking CU” emblem used in the 1970s by Eddie Sutton and Tom Apke’s teams. Could they be unveiling true throwback uniforms to that era? If they do, here’s a rare color picture showing what they might look like.
Tip: 3:00pm
Venue: CHI Health Center Omaha
TV: Peacock
Announcers: Noah Reed and Nick Bahe
Streaming in the Peacock app (subscription required)
Radio: 1620AM, 101.9FM
Announcers: John Bishop and Taylor Stormberg
Streaming on 1620TheZone.com and the 1620 The Zone mobile app
Simulcast on SiriusXM channel 85 as well as on the SiriusXM App
If Thomas Sorber can’t go Sunday, it will be a huge loss: he currently ranks second on the team in points (14.5 ppg), and first in rebounds (8.5 rpg) and blocks (2.0 bpg). The last Hoya freshman to lead the team in all three categories was Othella Harrington during the 1992-93 season when he averaged 16.8 ppg, 8.8 rpg and 1.5 blocks.
On Wednesday night, Georgetown defeated Providence 93-72 at Capital One Arena. Micah Peavy led a quartet of Hoyas in double figures with a career-best 30 points on 11 made field goals. The graduate student also added seven boards, and game bests in assists (7) and steals (6). Jayden Epps (18), Drew Fielder (17) and Jordan Burks (13) rounded out those in double figures for the Hoyas. The Blue & Gray shot 50.8% (30-59) from the floor, 43.5% (10-23) from three and 82.1% (23-28) from the charity stripe.
In the month of February, Peavy is averaging 25.0 points on 50.0% shooting (40-of-80) from the floor, with 6.3 rebounds, 6.3 assists and 3.5 steals per game.
Ryan Kalkbrenner is closing in on a couple of milestones: he owns 1,286 career points in Big East play, two shy of Kerry Kittles for eighth in league history and four away from St. John’s legend Chris Mullin for seventh place. He also owns 237 career blocked shots in Big East play, just 10 shy of the record held by Patrick Ewing
Creighton’s 81-57 loss at Georgetown on Dec. 18th was just the program’s eighth league loss by 20 points or more in the past nine seasons. CU has won the other meeting against the team that blew them out in six of the last seven occasions, and five of the wins were by double-figures.
After scoring eight points or more just twice in Creighton’s first 23 games of the season while averaging 3.2 points per game, Jasen Green has now scored at least eight points in three straight games during which time he’s averaged 9.0 points per contest. Green has made 10-of-15 baskets (.667) in that time after starting the year 28-for-58 (.482). His rebounds are also up from 2.6 to 4.7 boards per contest in that span. And if that’s not enough Green has also blocked a shot in five consecutive contests.
Creighton is 16-10 all-time versus Georgetown and has won 13 of the last 17 meetings in the series.
Creighton is 9-2 all-time in Omaha against the Hoyas, and has won the last three of those encounters by an average of 24 points. Each of the last nine Bluejay wins, and each of the last nine series meetings regardless of victor, have been decided by double-digits.
On February 23, 2019, Creighton hit 14 3-pointers, shot 51.8 percent and recorded 20 assists on 29 makes in a 82-69 win over Georgetown played during a blizzard outside the CHI Health Center at the same time as the game.
The Bottom Line:
Creighton is 11.5 point favorites in Vegas, 10 point favorites on KenPom, and has 87.3% odds of winning according to ESPN’s BPI. Peavy will keep the Hoyas in the game, but CU should pull away late at home.
Creighton 83, Georgetown 71