With one month until the Big East Tournament tips off, Creighton has six games remaining against teams with postseason aspirations. The seventh is tonight against Georgetown, a team who comes in with a 1-11 mark in league play and is riding an eight-game losing streak. Their lone win is a 68-65 defeat of fellow cellar-dweller DePaul. It’s tempting to overlook them, especially with what’s to come. But the Hoyas have been a much better team on the road than they have at home — their last three games away from D.C. have all been decided by single digits, and in two of them, they had a lead in the final three minutes but couldn’t close it out.
Greg McDermott has tried to drive that point home to his team this week.
“We talked to the team yesterday about how they led Xavier for the entire game and lost at the very end, and we know how good Xavier is,” McDermott said. “The Seton Hall game was, I think, a three-point game with four minutes to go; it could have been anybody’s game. Coach (Ed) Cooley does a heck of a job. He puts them in positions to get shots and they have a lot of shot-makers; they don’t have anybody you can sag off of.”
While DePaul has been wildly uncompetitive in racking up an 0-12 league mark, Georgetown is a few possessions away from having a much better record.
At Providence two weeks ago, the Hoyas rallied from a 12-point second half deficit to take a 69-66 lead with 2:57 to play before the Friars answered with an 11-0 run to take control of the game and win 84-76. Last week at Seton Hall, the Hoyas never led but made the game uncomfortably close for the Pirates — they had three separate big runs in the second half to close the gap to a one-possession game, including twice in the final 90 seconds. And at Xavier, the Hoyas led by as many as 12 points, and fended off repeated rallies only to lose on the final possession 92-91.
In Creighton’s 77-60 win over Georgetown on January 3, the Hoyas ground the game to a halt — at 63 possessions, it’s the third-slowest game of the year for the Jays (only UNLV, at 61, at at UConn, at 62 possessions, were slower). Creighton lost the other two, but beat Georgetown by 17 despite shooting 8-of-25 from three-point range (32.0%).
A big reason was Trey Alexander’s big second half, where he made 8-of-10 from the floor, 2-of-3 from three-point range, with three assists and a steal — and zero turnovers. He’d committed five turnovers in the first half, part of an ugly 20 minutes where the Jays gave it away 11 times and kept the Hoyas in the game.
The Georgetown team CU will see tonight has improved. Leading scorer Jayden Epps did not play in the first meeting with a right ankle injury; he averages 17.6 points (fourth-most in the Big East) and 4.4 assists per game. He’s scored in double-figures in all but three games this year, though two of them have been in the last ten days (against UConn and Marquette at home). And he’s a terrific facilitator, with an assist on 30.9% of his team’s baskets while on the floor. In the loss to Xavier, he had 32 points and 11 assists, including a perfect 11-of-11 at the line.
North Carolina transfer Dontrez Styles averages 13.5 points and 5.9 rebounds per game, and has had back-to-back 20-point games (23 against UConn including 3-of-6 from three-point range, and 20 against Seton Hall thanks to 4-of-8 from three). He played through foul trouble in both games, however, and fouled out of the loss to the Pirates. For the season, Styles has done a great job on the offensive glass, grabbing 7.7% of his team’s misses — but Creighton did a great job boxing him out in the first meeting. It’s one of just two games this year where Styles had zero offensive boards. He had just nine points (4-of-9 shooting) and two rebounds in 36 minutes of that game.
Fairfield transfer Supreme Cook averages 11.3 points and 8.0 rebounds per game, and is even better than Styles at grabbing offensive boards — he’s corralled an astonishing 15.7% of his team’s missed shots when he’s on the floor, a mark that ranks 20th best in D1. He’s torched nearly everyone — Cook grabbed 13 offensive boards in two meetings with UConn, 11 in two games against Butler, and 10 in two meetings with Seton Hall. Creighton did a better job on him than almost anyone else, holding him to only three offensive boards in the first meeting.
“We have to get stops, we have to get out in transition, we’ve got to locate their shooters,” McDermott said. “And I hope our guys are mature enough to understand that we’d better respect this opponent, because they’ll come in here with nothing to lose and give us a game.”
Creighton is a different team than they were in the first meeting, too, to some extent. After the home loss to Butler, McDermott reshuffled the rotation and began experimenting with the 6’10” freshman Isaac Traudt as the backup ‘5’. In essence, it was a benching for sophomore Fred King, whose massive struggles on both ends of the floor could no longer be tolerated for a team built to win now. While Traudt hasn’t done anything extraordinary, his minutes have been acceptable enough to allow Ryan Kalkbrenner to have a real, actual break once in a while — which is something King had not been able to provide.
His move to the ‘5’ has also created space for freshman Jasen Green at the ‘4’, who has provided a spark off the bench in two straight games. Green had played just seven minutes in Big East games against opponents other than DePaul before this past week (17 of his 25 total minutes in league play had come in blowout wins over the Blue Demons); he scored four points on a pair of offensive rebound putbacks against Providence, and grabbed another contested offensive board against Xavier, plays indicative of his aggressive nature.
“Jasen just keeps getting better,” McDermott said. “He’s doing some really good things in practice and as a result, he’s earned some time.”
And then there’s Mason Miller. Though he’s started all 13 Big East games, and 22 times on the season, he had been mired in a big time slump that had some fans wondering if the Jays should shake up the lineup. On Monday, Miller revealed that he’d been playing through a shoulder injury and that it had affected the rotation on his shot. But because of the nature of the injury, he couldn’t tweak his shooting mechanics by getting extra shots up, and it became a vicious cycle. As the injury has healed, he’s been able to work on his shot outside of practice — and he was a perfect 3-of-3 from three-point range in Saturday’s win at Xavier.
“It was kind of strain to the outside rotator cuff, but it’s feeling a lot better now,” Miller said on Monday. “It’s more of just a confidence thing; I kind of came into Saturday’s game not worrying about my shoulder as much. And just knowing that it’s still my jump shot, I can still do what I want to do, made a difference.”
McDermott agreed.
“I felt like Mason was close to being back to his old form after tweaking his shoulder,” he said. “I felt it the practice before Providence and then it carried over from that. It just looked like his stroke was back to where it was before.”
Tip: 7:30pm
Venue: CHI Health Center Omaha
TV: FS1
Announcers: Kevin Kugler and Nick Bahe
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
Creighton 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 162 or 201, as well as on the SiriusXM App
Georgetown Radio: The Team 980AM
Announcer: Rich Chvotkin
Simulcast on SiriusXM channel 389, as well as on the SiriusXM App
Supreme Cook continues to lead the Hoyas in efficiency on the offensive front, knocking down 62.3% (96-154) of his shots, putting him third in the conference in field goal percentage. Cook is also second in the league in offensive boards with 3.9 per game, which ranks 15th nationally.
Jayden Epps has tallied a quartet of 30-point games, most recently dropping 32 at Xavier on Jan. 19. It was his second 30-point Big East game as he tallied 30 against Seton Hall on Jan. 9
Taking out two lopsided wins over DePaul, Creighton’s other 11 Big East games have been decided by a total of 70 points (an average of 6.36 per game). Creighton has played in three games that went to overtime and another two that were decided by a single point. Nine of CU’s league games (of 13) were within six points in the final minute.
Baylor Scheierman is working on a streak of four straight games with 10 or more rebounds, having grabbed 10 vs. DePaul, 11 vs. Butler, 12 at Providence and 12 at Xavier. No Bluejay has grabbed 10 or more rebounds in five straight games since Benoit Benjamin in 1984-85. Scheierman is also working on a streak of four straight double-doubles. No Bluejay has had five double-doubles in a row since Benjamin had an unbelievable 28 in a row 1984-85.
In 24 all-time meetings against the Hoyas, Creighton is 13-2 when scoring 74 points or more against Georgetown, but 2-7 when scoring 73 points or less. The Bluejays average 82.07 points in the 15 wins, but 61.11 points per game in the nine losses.
Creighton is 15-9 all-time against Georgetown and has won 12 of the last 15 meetings in the series. Creighton is 8-2 in Omaha, including last year’s 99-59 victory. CU opened that game on a 19-0 run, and the 40-point win was their second-largest ever in Big East play, one point shy of a near-identical 100-59 triumph vs. St. John’s that was also on a Senior Day. As for Georgetown, it was the Hoyas largest loss since falling 88-44 on Dec. 27, 1971 at Marquette.
Earlier this year, Creighton defeated Georgetown 77-60 in D.C.
On February 13, 2014, Doug McDermott scored 10 of Creighton’s first 13 points, and 8 of their final 14. And with his team down by two with less than a minute to go, in front of a loud, hostile Hinkle Fieldhouse crowd, McDermott sank a three-pointer to silence them. Then Will Artino blocked not one but two shots on a final defensive stand, and the Jays defeated Butler.
The Bottom Line:
Creighton opened as 17.5 point favorites in Vegas, and the line moved to 19.5 by the time we published. KenPom predicts a 19-point win, and ESPN’s BPI gives the Jays 98.2% odds of victory.
Georgetown has managed to hang around and make teams sweat on the road, so don’t be surprised if that’s the case tonight, and for longer than you’d hope for. CU will ultimately pull away for a big win, though.
Creighton 85, Georgetown 65