After a week off for finals, Creighton plays three games in the next six days — beginning with a neutral court battle against BYU in Sioux Falls. While these sort of games are becoming more and more common around college hoops, it’s a rarity for the Jays, who haven’t played a neutral court game in the regular season that wasn’t affiliated with a MTE since facing North Carolina in Charlotte on Dec. 12, 1970 (51 years ago on Sunday, but who’s counting). CU and BYU plan to play again next year on a neutral floor in Las Vegas, too.
The Cougars are an impressive team, bringing an 8-1 record, a #24 national ranking, and four or five wins better than any CU has so far. They beat San Diego State (#46 KenPom) 66-60, blew out Oregon (#52) 81-49, won true road games at Utah (#81) 75-64 and Missouri State (#68) 74-68, and took care of Utah State (#61) 82-71.
It’s even more impressive when you consider coach Mark Pope has basically re-built the style his team plays on the fly. They expected to rely on size, interior defense and rebounding as their calling cards, with a pair of veteran centers anchoring the post.
6’11” senior center Richard Harward, expected to log the most minutes in the middle for them, has been dealing with a cardiovascular issue since their exhibition game and is out indefinitely. The other, 6’9” senior Gavin Baxter, tore his ACL on December 1 in their only loss of the year (72-65 in overtime at Utah Valley) and is done for the year. 6’6” senior forward Gideon George missed two games in early December due to an illness; he’s back now, but not 100% after losing 12 pounds while he was sick.
In their place are two freshmen BYU didn’t intend to play much this season, Atiki Ally Atiki and Fousseyni Traore. They’ve shown flashes, but like most freshmen, are up-and-down instead of the consistency they expected from the veterans whose spots they took. Traore scored eight of his career-high 14 points in the final four minutes of the game against Utah State this week, and also made eight free throws, two more than he had made in his first seven collegiate games combined.
The Cougars had little choice but to reinvent themselves as a pace-and-space squad built around their guards on offense, and a defense that switches most screens and often sends a second defender to the ball instead of relying on big, veteran centers to clean up dribble penetration in the paint.
A look at their box scores reveals the change in stark terms. They had 18 offensive rebounds in the win against Utah, 13 against San Diego State, 20 against Texas Southern, and 17 against Central Methodist. That version of BYU ranked #333 nationally in three-point shooting. With their smaller lineup, they’re averaging just five offensive boards a game, but they’re a better jump shooting team — they made 11-of-24 (45%) from three-point range in this week’s win at Utah State, for example.
“We’re not going to be biggest team out on the floor most games, probably,” Alex Barcello told the Salt Lake Tribune earlier this week. “So we need to continue to be physical…One of our main keys going into every game is, ‘Can we beat them out on the defensive boards and can we beat them out on the offensive boards?’ Our guards are definitely going to need to step up with that.”
Luckily, BYU’s guards are fantastic, or their season could have gone off the rails. Barcello is the best of those guards, a dangerous player averaging 18.4 points a game. He’s not much of a slasher, at least not in the traditional sense; only 11 of his 96 shot attempts have come at the rim. But when you’re as deadly as he is from everywhere else, driving to the rim is overrated. Barcello prefers to dribble into the defense, and then pull up for jumpers. He shoots 55% on two-point jumpers (22-of-40) and 42.2% on three-pointers (19-of-45). He’s a savvy player who knows which spots on the floor he shoots better from, and because he creates his own shot so well, he takes most of his pull-up jumpers from those spots. Just one of those 22 made two-point jumpers had an assist credited to them, showing how skilled he is at doing just that.
From behind the arc, it’s the opposite. 14 of his 19 made threes were assisted by a teammate. He’s a catch-and-shoot master who seems to excel at finding holes in the opposing defense, and draining a three before they can recover, or in pulling up for backbreaking threes in transition before they set up at all — he’s 6-of-12 on threes taken in transition. And he draws a ton of fouls, and almost never misses from the line, shooting 49-of-55 (89.1%) on free throws this year.
Senior guard Te’Jon Lucas transferred from UW-Milwaukee, and has given BYU the perfect backcourt compliment to Barcello. Lucas is a playmaker, leading the team with 46 assists against just 21 turnovers, and does two things Barcello doesn’t: he gets to the rim a lot off the dribble, and he scores well off of ball-screens. If you want to know what type of player Lucas is, KenPom says his closest comp so far this season is some guy named Antoine Young (his 2011-12 senior season, to be exact).
6’6” Gideon George and 6’8” Caleb Lohner have taken the rebounding mantel for BYU, and both average 7.0 rebounds a game. Neither is as skilled on the offensive glass as the Cougars’ injured centers, but getting so many rebounds from wings instead of from traditional bigs changes the dimension of their offense quite a bit.
Neither is much of an offensive threat outside of the paint; George is making 66% of his shots taken near the rim, but is just 6-of-15 on all other two-point shots and 1-of-14 on three-pointers. Lohner has drawn a goose egg (0-for-14) from three, and has similar splits on twos. Those numbers figure to improve as they settle into their new roles, so CU is probably getting them at a good time.
It’s a fascinating matchup for a Bluejay team whose strength lays on the interior, where 7’1” Ryan Kalkbrenner has changed the identity of the team. “In the past, our advantage was at the 3-point line,” Creighton head coach Greg McDermott told us this week. “We were scoring 12-15 points more at the 3-point line than our opponents. But because we haven’t shot the three as well this season, we have to create a gap somewhere, and (at the rim) is where we’ve been able to create our gap.”
WBR’s Matt DeMarinis went in-depth on the Kalkbrenner Effect, and how Creighton’s changed their gameplan accordingly. Against a BYU team whose focus has shifted out of necessity to guard play instead of running everything through two dominant big men, Kalkbrenner could be poised for a big day. It’s another stat in that piece that’s concerning — CU is in eighth place in the Big East in defending the 3-point line (allowing opponents to make 33.7%). So this is another strength-versus-strength battle.
- Tip: 11:00am
- Venue: Sanford Pentagon, Sioux Falls, SD
- TV: FS1
- Announcers: Telly Hughes, Shon Morris
- In Omaha: Cox channel 78 (SD), 1078 (HD); CenturyLink Prism channel 620 (SD), 1620 (HD)
- Outside Omaha: FS1 Channel Finder
- Satellite: DirecTV channel 219, Dish Network channel 150
- Cable Cutters: Available on all major streaming platforms
- Streaming on the Fox Sports app and website
- Radio: 1620AM
- Announcers: John Bishop and Tyler Clement
- Streaming on 1620TheZone.com and the 1620 The Zone mobile app
The Cougars tied a season-high with 11 3-pointers on Wednesday evening, three of those coming from Trevin Knell. The junior guard was 3-of-4 from beyond the arc for a season-high 13 points.
Alex Barcello reached double figures in scoring for the 12th straight game with 17 points against USU. The All-American guard is shooting 49.6 percent from the floor, 41.9 percent from 3-point range and 90.6 percent from the free throw line during the streak.
Creighton hasn’t won a neutral site game in the regular-season that wasn’t affiliated with a tournament since defeating Oklahoma State on Dec. 1, 1966 in Oklahoma City.
Creighton had 21 turnovers in last Saturday’s game vs. Iowa State. Not only was it a season-high, but it was also the most in Creighton’s 387 games under Greg McDermott. CU hadn’t had 21 or more miscues in a contest since it had 24 turnovers at Nebraska on Nov. 29, 2008. Creighton’s 15 turnovers before intermission were its most in any half since also having 15 in the first half vs. Drake on Jan. 11, 2004.
Creighton also finished the Iowa State game with just five assists. It tied the fewest in a game by any Bluejay team under McDermott. They currently have 128 assists and 131 turnovers. The only time since 1999-2000 that it has finished a season with more turnovers than assists was 2005-06 (398 assists, 400 turnovers).
BYU leads the all-time series against Creighton by a 7-3 count and won the only previous meeting on a neutral floor in Oklahoma City in 1964.
In the last meeting, BYU ended Creighton’s 2015-16 season with a 88-82 win the NIT Quarterfinals. This tweet pretty much sums up what happened in that game as the Jays squandered an early lead and let BYU pull away in the second half:
Kellen Miliner hit a 15-foot jumper with 0.7 seconds left to lift Creighton past Nebraska, 50-48, on December 11, 2004. The win was Creighton’s third straight in Lincoln and sixth in the last seven meetings overall in the series. Creighton was paced by 20 points from Miliner, who hit 7-of-13 shots from the floor and 4-of-7 shots from three-point range. Nate Funk added 13 points and five rebounds, while Dane Watts contributed seven points off the bench.
The Bottom Line:
It’s possible that Creighton is catching BYU at a good time — they’re adjusting to playing with smaller lineups, their schemes are totally different on both ends of the floor than they were a month ago. The Cougars’ weakness, interior play, is the one place Creighton seems likeliest to be able to exploit with Ryan Kalkbrenner’s emergence. And the crowd in the Sanford Pentagon, while technically neutral, is expected to lean heavily CU. This has all the ingredients for a Bluejay upset.
Creighton 72, BYU 66