Creighton’s season-opening win over Western Illinois was even more uneven than the first game of a season typically is, and outside of the first 10 minutes of the second half where they turned a one-point halftime lead into a game with a little breathing room, they looked every bit the second-division Big East team most prognosticators picked them to be.
“It’s going to be a growing process with this group,” Greg McDermott said in his postgame interview on 1620 The Zone. “They need to get better. And they know it. There’s nothing better from a coaching perspective than to get this on film, break it down, and sit down with the guys to go through it. I know they’re eager to do that.”
As they looked at the film this week, there was plenty of both good and bad to break down. Among the most egregious problems? On offense, as they struggled to score, they tried to force too many shots instead of letting things happen, which made the struggles worse.
“I don’t think our guys are selfish,” McDermott noted. “It wasn’t a case of ‘hey, I’m going to go get a basket’ or ‘I need to get myself a basket.’ It was a case of ‘my team is struggling, and I’m going to go do something about it.’ And when your offense is in a rut, you need more ball movement not less. We fell into the trap of trying to do everything ourselves.”
Their coach is confident that will turn around, because he believes the Bluejays have the right mindset. “I listen to the guys when they’re coming into the huddle, and they’re talking about the right kinds of things. They’re talking about ‘I have to be better, I was late on my communication on that screen’ or on offense, ‘I should have made one more pass.’ As long as those are the conversations, and it’s not all about ‘me’, we’ll be fine and we’ll grow.”
As for the good? Damien Jefferson grabbed 12 rebounds in his Bluejay debut, and showed promise defensively — particularly in the second half when he played a big part in holding Western Illinois’ Isaac Johnson to 1-for-7 shooting after scoring 16 points before halftime. His 12 boards were the most by any Bluejay in their debut since Cyril Baptiste grabbed 17 in the 1969 season opener.
McDermott said on his postgame show that Jefferson has the potential to be the team’s best rebounder and best individual defender. He certainly has the skill to be just that; doing those things consistently has been Jefferson’s issue in preseason practices.
“I hope the fact that it happened in a game, and it impacted us winning as much as it did, that the message is received a little more. I hope he understands that his teammates need this from him, and they need it on a consistent basis.”
If the practices leading up to Sunday’s game are any indication, the message has been received loud and clear. In Matt DeMarinis’ latest practice report, he noted that “during 5-on-5, he buried a corner three, forced a turnover by sealing off an entry pass into the post, and reenacted some of the solid defense (from Tuesday).”
For all the good and bad, Creighton won by 11 in a game they were favored to win by 20 — and thanks to a pair of free throws from Davion Mintz with 26 seconds remaining, it goes into the books as a “blowout” in the NCAA’s new NET ranking, which caps scoring margin at 10. In other words, if the young Bluejays grow into a team worthy of NCAA Tournament bubble conversation over the next four months, there won’t be any difference between winning this one by 20 or by the 11 that they did.
“There’s a lot to learn from this game, and the learning curve is going to be steep for a lot of guys with not much time to get there,” McDermott commented. “We have to get better, and we have to get better quick.”
Indeed they do, because the schedule gets a lot tougher starting with Sunday’s game against ETSU. The Buccaneers finished 25-9 a year ago and very nearly beat (should have beaten, honestly) Xavier in Cincinnati, but have almost an entirely new roster this year featuring 10 new players. Despite the roster turnover, their style of play remains intact — they crash the glass like few teams in D1. ETSU has out-rebounded teams by a combined total of 105-61 through two games, including 46 offensive boards. Three separate players had 10 or more boards in their 109-44 win over Hiwassee College on Thursday night. Similar to recent Seton Hall teams, ETSU’s best offense is typically off of a mad scramble following a missed shot. They send all five players into the paint after a shot, turning the area around the basket into a scrum with seven or eight players fighting for space.
That style of play is ETSU’s fingerprint as a program under coach Steve Forbes. Last year they grabbed 19 — yes, NINETEEN — offensive rebounds in a loss at Kentucky, frustrating the Rupp Arena crowd by out-toughing the Wildcats time after time. They secured 12 offensive boards on the road at Xavier, out-rebounding the Musketeers at Cintas Center and very nearly beating them (they led 51-29 with 14 minutes to play, and lost 68-66.) Two years ago, they grabbed 17 offensive boards on the road at Tennessee, and 13 in an NCAA Tournament loss to Florida.
If you can clear a board against these guys, that means there’s a lot of opportunities to run in transition. But that’s a big if.
It’s a huge challenge for the Bluejays, which is why they started preparation for ETSU by showing the team a nightmarish highlight reel of the Buccaneers mauling opponents on the glass. They’ll need to be aggressive, energetic, and ready to fight.
Three players average in double figures for ETSU. All-SoCon Freshman Team selection Mladen Armus (13.0 ppg., 9.5 rpg.) is one of six Bucs averaging at least 8.0 points per game. A 6’10”, 240-pound sophomore and native of Belgrade, Serbia, Armus doesn’t have much shooting range — 82% of his 134 shot attempts a year ago came within four feet of the rim, and the same ratio has been true so far this year. But fully one-quarter of his shots come on offensive rebound putbacks, and with an increased role this year, he’s a player your bigs have to stay in front of at all times.
Isaiah Tisdale (11.5 ppg.) and Bo Hodges (11.5 ppg.) aren’t far behind. The 6’1″ Tisdale is a JuCo transfer from Vincennes JC where he was a JuCo All-American. Like most of the ETSU roster, he does most of his offensive damage at the rim. He’s a slasher, able to use dribble penetration to get to the basket. Here’s the interesting thing: among their regular rotation players, Tisdale has attempted the highest percentage of three-pointers, and it’s still just 31% of his shot attempts.
Hodges, a 6’4″ sophomore who was named SoCon Freshman of the Year last season, is less of a slasher and more of a player who needs teammates to create shots for him — over half of his shots a year ago came off assists, and that number has grown this year (albeit in a small sample size).
For one of the only times this year, the perimeter isn’t really a place where Creighton has to worry about getting beat by their opponent. Just 37 of ETSU’s 149 shot attempts through two games have been three-pointers, which is probably a good thing because they’re kind of bad at making them. In fact, among players with more than two attempts from behind the arc, no one has made better than 33%, and as a team they’re making 29% from behind the arc.
This game will be won or lost in the paint, and will tell us a lot about where the Bluejays are heading into a battle against Ohio State next week.
- Tip: 12:30pm
- Venue: CHI Health Center Omaha
- TV: FS1
- Announcers: Rich Waltz 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
- Streaming on FoxSportsGO
- Radio: 1620AM
- Announcers: John Bishop and Taylor Stormberg
- Streaming on 1620TheZone.com and the 1620 The Zone mobile app
- For Cord Cutters
- Head coach Steve Forbes enters his fourth season at the helm of the Bucs’ ship having led the Bucs to three straight Southern Conference Tournament title games, a league title and NCAA Tournament trip in 2017, and a league high 76 total wins over the last three years. ETSU tied a program record with 11 true road wins a year ago and marked their third straight 20-win season under Forbes, having won 24, 27 and 25 games over the last three seasons.
- Forbes has built ETSU into one of the top mid-major programs in the country thanks to solid recruiting from the JuCo ranks — JuCo All-Americans Isaiah Tisdale and Kevon Tucker join the squad this year — and D1 transfers such as former Memphis Tiger Tray Boyd III.
- Despite a style of play that focuses more on shots in the paint, ETSU has the seventh-longest active streak of making at least one 3-pointer in a game — 963 consecutive games, to be exact, dating back to February 16, 1987.
- Meanwhile, Creighton has made at least one three-pointer in 817 straight games — dating back to a 59-53 loss at Illinois State on February 20, 1993. The streak is the nation’s 17th-longest active streak.
- Creighton has won its second home game of the season each of the last 22 seasons, with 1995-96 standing as the last time that CU didn’t open 2-0 at home. The Bluejays have won their second home game of the season by double-digits in seven straight campaigns, including a 2016 win over No. 9 Wisconsin.
- Last year’s team used five different starting line-up combinations over the course of the season, and didn’t make a change until the fourth game of the winter when the injured Toby Hegner was replaced by Ronnie Harrell. Since Greg McDermott took over in 2010, Creighton has started the same starting five in the second game as it did in the season-opener each year. You have to go all the way back to 2002-03 to find a season where McDermott changed his starting five in just the second game of the season — as Northern Iowa’s head coach that year, he replaced Pete Schmit with future MVC Tournament MVP Ben Jacobson.
Creighton has never faced East Tennessee State. Greg McDermott has never faced East Tennessee State, either, and is 3-1 versus teams from the Southern Conference (1-0 at Creighton).
ETSU boasts a lot of recognizable names among its’ alumni, including a host of PGA golfers past and present. The most famous is undoubtedly country music superstar Kenny Chesney, who graduated from ETSU in 1990. That’s ironic, because he’s been spotted in a Creighton baseball shirt more than once.
https://twitter.com/nick3lopez/status/363346741283676160
Is he secretly a Jaybacker? Probably not. He just really likes wearing shirts of random teams and schools he has little/no connection to. Don’t laugh; SB Nation put a list together a couple of years ago and found 36 examples.
Whatever the story, the legend of Chesney and his Creighton Baseball shirt live on in Omaha.
Creighton has played on November 11 twice in the past five seasons, both times against UMKC. They defeated the Kangaroos 96-70 in 2013, and 89-82 in 2016.
That 2013 game saw Doug McDermott score 37 points, just another ho-hum, pedestrian offensive game for the most prolific scorer in school history. From Ott’s wrap-up:
“Creighton’s All American scored the team’s first 9 points and 14 of the team’s first 18 points. His CU teammates were feeding the school’s all-time leading scorer, facilitating the type of night that could have knocked Bob Portman out of possession of the single-game scoring record (51 points in December 1967).
McDermott finished the first half with 25 points after playing nearly the entire first stanza. He was needed on the floor because despite his scoring outburst the Bluejays allowed a 12-3 run that turned an 18-11 CU lead into a 23-21 deficit with 7:35 left in the first half.
No worries. McDermott went to work again, tying the game with a layup and then grabbing a defensive rebound during the Kangaroos’ next possession. He hit a triple on Creighton’s subsequent trip down the court to give the Jays a lead they would never relinquish.
All told, McDermott captained a 32-8 run, one that he capped with a layup and a three-pointer within the first minute of the second half. Just like that, the Bluejays were up by 22 points and could play the rest of the evening out testing various personnel combinations.
Please, Creighton fans. Never take Doug McDermott for granted.”
Sage advice as we watch a Bluejay team that might have a different leading scorer every night.
What else can it possibly be than Kenny Chesney’s greatest song?
The Bottom Line:
ETSU’s rebounding skill keeps this one close, but Creighton pulls away late.
Bluejays 80, Bucs 66
