Saturday’s 80-69 loss was Creighton’s fifth in the last six games, and they’re 3-7 over the last 10. At 7-8 in the Big East, this the latest in the season that they’ve been below .500 in league play in seven years. The 2018-19 team lost four straight in early February (including two in overtime) to fall to 4-9 on Feb. 17, though that team would win its final five to finish 9-9. The 2014-15 team was underwater all year and finished 4-14. Before that, the 1995-96 team was the last one to be under .500 in February.
In other words, in the last 30 years, there’s only been four seasons where the Jays had a losing record in league play by the time February rolled around, including the one we’re currently witnessing.
And now they head east on their most daunting road trip of the season: at UConn, and at St. John’s, in the span of four days. They’re 16.5 point underdogs to UConn and the odds will be similarly stacked against them on Saturday. Only the most reckless gambler would believe CU could return to Omaha with anything but a two more losses.
“You can’t really change the approach,” Greg McDermott said after Saturday’s loss. “We’re not in a position, emotionally, that I could probably yell and scream at them right now. They don’t need that with what they’ve been through this last week. So you’re trying to teach basketball, you’re trying to help them get better, but you also have to understand they’re kids, and they’ve been through something they never been through before. So you have to try to make sure that – I don’t want to crush them emotionally because their emotions have been tested this week. They need a steady hand as well. Now we have a responsibility to get better, we have a responsibility to play better and we’re going to do everything we can to make that happen. But we also – it’s a slippery slope because they’re young people that have experienced something that was pretty hard for them.”
They’re walking into a monstrous scenario. UConn is 24-2, 14-1 in the league and beat Creighton in Omaha by 27 points. As if that wasn’t enough, it’s $2 beer night at Gampel, and the Huskies are retiring Emeka Okafor’s jersey at halftime.
Good grief.
All five of UConn’s starters average in double figures, led by Solo Ball at 14.7 points per game. He’s the reigning Big East Player of the Week after scoring 24 points against Butler and 20 against Georgetown in a pair of wins. Notably, he took a combined 27 threes in those two games (5-of-15 against Georgetown, 6-of-12 against Butler). Whatever slim chance the Jays have of winning lies in catching fire from deep — they can’t trade a two-pointer for a two-pointer. They have to win the math from three-point range. Solo Ball making five or six by himself will make that very difficult to do. With that said, he’s made just 30.9% from three for the season (54-of-175) and was 3-of-7 against the Jays in the first meeting.
Point guard Silas Demary leads the Big East with 6.4 assists per game, a number that has increased to 7.3 per game in conference play. Defensively, Dan Hurley refers to him as the “head of the snake” as he’s the point man in their attack — he disrupts ball movement, gets deflections and steals, and helps dictate tempo on both ends. In the first meeting, Demary had 15 points, six rebounds, five assists and three made 3’s.
Inside, the duo of Tarris Reed and Alex Karaban were difficult for Creighton to contain in the first game and will be enough tougher in the rematch given the venue. Reed leads the team with 7.5 rebounds per game, ranks third in the Big East in blocks with 2.1 per game, and leads the league in field goal percentage at 63.6%. He averages 13.6 points, second on the team. Here’s the scary thing: he fouled out of the first meeting and played just 21 minutes. In those minutes he was a perfect 4-of-4 from the field and grabbed five rebounds with two assists and a block. And UConn still won by 27.
Karaban averages 13.4 points and 5.5 rebounds, and is an increasingly rare species in college basketball: a four-year starter for the same team. Karaban has made 42.2% of his threes (49-of-116) and 53.1% inside the arc (76-of-143). He scored 15 in the first game against CU, but it was his five offensive rebounds that were particularly brutal.
Defensively, UConn is elite, with an adjusted defensive efficiency that ranks 10th (93.6). They turn teams over on 18.6% of possessions and get a steal on 10.6% of possessions. And they block 15.3% of the shots opponents take when they manage to keep the ball. No wonder their opponents have made just 45.6% of their two-pointers (13th best nationally) and 29.7% from three (16th best) — those opponents don’t even get a got off on nearly a third of their possessions (29.2%).
For Creighton to win as a double-digit underdog, they can’t have a poor or even average shooting night. They’ve made 35.8% of their threes in conference play, connecting on an average of of 10 per game. That has to be the baseline in this one if they want to be in it. The more they can force turnovers and score in transition before UConn’s defense gets set, the higher the probability of them making 10 or more threes becomes. And of course, they have to weather the early storm — Gampel will be juiced at tipoff from the $2 beers, and if UConn runs out to a double-digit lead early on, the atmosphere and opponent will feed off each other to suffocate the Jays.
For his part, Dan Hurley and the Huskies are preparing to see a much better version of the Bluejays than what they faced three weeks ago in Omaha.
“I don’t think there’s anyone that you ever have more respect as a program that you coach against than Creighton and (Greg McDermott) and their organization, the quality, the class that they have,” Hurley said this week. “They had the major injury to a guy that’s potentially one of the best players in the league to start the year (Jackson McAndrew), right as you’re in a brutal non-conference slate, and things started going the other way. They’ve dealt with a lot of emotional things, too. And prayers to the Dix family; incredible hardship for everyone associated with the family and the program. Everyone is so close it affects everyone. We’ve got the ultimate respect for Creighton.”
Tip: 6:00pm
Venue: Gampel Pavilion, Storrs, CT
TV: TNT
Announcers: Spero Dedes, Grant Hill and Jared Greenberg
In Omaha: Cox channel 36
Satellite: DirecTV channel 246, Dish Network channel 138
Streaming on HBO Max
Radio: 1620AM, 101.9FM
Announcer: John Bishop
Streaming on 1620TheZone.com and the 1620 The Zone mobile app
Simulcast on SiriusXM channel 385 as well as on the SiriusXM App
Live Stats:
Follow along on Stat Broadcast
UConn will raise No. 50 into the rafters of Gampel Pavilion when it retires the number of all-time great Emeka Okafor. He joins Ray Allen (No. 34) and Richard “Rip” Hamilton (No. 32) as the only men’s basketball players forever living in the Gampel rafters. The greatest big man in program history, Okafor was the 2004 Final Four Most Outstanding Player as he led Connecticut to its second national title. He was a two-time All American including a consensus First Team pick in 2004, a two-time National Defensive Player of the Year and the 2004 NABC Co-Player of the Year, the lone Player of the Year honoree in UConn history. During his incredible run at UConn the Huskies went 83-23 and reached three Sweet 16s, two Elite Eights and won the 2004 National Championship. In addition to his 2004 MOP honors, he was selected to the 2003 South and 2004 Phoenix All-Regional teams. Okafor went on to be selected in the first round of the 2004 NBA Draft at No. 2 overall by the Charlotte Bobcats. He was the 2005 NBA Rookie of the Year and played in 10 total seasons from 2004-13 and 2017-18.
UConn has an overall record of 237-44 (.843) at Gampel Pavilion since the building opened on January 27, 1990. The Huskies are 111-11 (.910) against non-league competition, are 101-25 (.802) against Big East opponents and were 26-8 (.765) against AAC foes in Gampel. In his first eight seasons at the helm of the Huskies, Dan Hurley is 58-9 (.866) at Gampel. The Huskies have won 39 of their last 43 games on campus.
Creighton has finished with a .500 mark or better in league play 29 times in the previous 30 seasons, one of six schools nationally that can say that. The only Big East teams to finish .500 or better in league play each of the previous 10 seasons are Creighton and Villanova. Creighton is also the only “Power 5” school with an active streak of six years or longer with 12 or more league wins.
Creighton will be facing Connecticut on Wednesday for the 14th time, but it’ll be just the second time the Jays won’t have Ryan Kalkbrenner patrolling the paint. Kalkbrenner, who starred for five seasons at Creighton from 2020-25, is now shooting 75.8 percent from the field and averaging 8.2 points and 6.0 rebounds per game for the Charlotte Hornets. As a collegian, Kalkbrenner averaged 11.1 points and 6.0 rebounds per game in 12 all-time meetings against the Huskies. Creighton won nine of those battles.
Creighton has made five or more three-pointers in 97 straight games, the nation’s second-longest active streak. It’s the longest streak by a Big East team since former league member West Virginia had a streak of 97 games in a row from Feb. 12, 2005 to Jan. 6, 2008.
Creighton is 9-4 all-time against UConn, with the 13 meetings taking place in four different cities since 2020. The 13 games have been decided by a total of 107 points, with 10 of those decided by single-digits. Creighton is 3-2 all-time in road games in the series, which includes a 2-2 record at Harry A. Gampel Pavilion.
The last time Creighton won as a double-digit underdog was at UConn in 2022, when they won 59-55 as 10.5 underdogs.
On February 18, 2012, Creighton beat Long Beach State 81-79 in a late-night BracketBuster game. Relive highlights from the entire crazy game below; here’s an excerpt from our postgame recap:
Saturday night, Antoine Young got his chance for a signature moment, and he turned it into one of the most memorable shots in the history of Creighton basketball. In front a rowdy, rambunctious crowd and a national television audience, against an incredibly talented opponent who had led virtually the entire game and turned away Bluejay rallies time after time, Young drove the lane as he’s done hundreds of times before, making the same slightly-off-balance shot he’s made hundreds of times before, to finally give his team a lead just as the game clock read all zeroes. Creighton students rushed the court, lifting Young up on their shoulders as the conquering hero, and who could blame them?
In his second-to-last home game, the player who’s been a Bluejay since his 16th birthday when he became the youngest commit in school history finally had his moment.
Long after the records for assists and games played that he’s setting at the twilight of his collegiate career are broken by a new generation of great Bluejays, his shot just after 11PM on a Saturday in February of 2012 will be remembered.
“It’s just something that I was taught growing up. You live for moments like that,” Young said on the AM590 postgame show. “There’s players that either want to take that shot or don’t want to take that shot, and I want to take the shot. I feel like I’m confident enough that if I can get the last shot of a game, I can make it at anytime on anyone. So I just went out there relaxed, and knew I was going to make a play.”
UConn is heavy favorites in this one, and with Creighton’s struggles to win on the road, their defensive miscues, and their frequent scoring droughts, this feels like a game where even CU’s best might not be enough.
UConn 83, Creighton 68