Riding their first four-game losing streak since early 2019, Creighton dropped out of the Top 25 on Monday after rising as high as #7. If you go off of teams receiving votes, they clock in at #40 in the AP poll, which is a precipitous 33-point drop in the span of two weeks.
Playing without the reigning Big East Defensive Player of the Year, Ryan Kalkbrenner, who is out indefinitely with a non-COVID illness exposed how reliant they really are on him. (That’s the official diagnosis from the team, by the way. The details aren’t hard to find if you read message boards or social media, but until that diagnosis is confirmed by the team or Kalkbrenner himself the Primer will respect his privacy.)
Much has been written about how their defensive scheme is predicated around funneling opponents to the rim, where Kalkbrenner waits to block or alter their shots. Without that threat, everything changes.
Freshman Fredrick King has the size and athleticism, but isn’t polished enough to step into Kalkbrenner’s minutes by himself. Saturday, it left CU searching for other options; among them was sliding Arthur Kaluma into the post defensively. He has the athleticism to compete but is undersized at the ‘5’ and fouled out for the first time this season after spending time defending that spot Saturday. And while walk-on Zander Yates has decent size, good fundamentals and footwork to (mostly) stay in front of opposing bigs, once BYU had seen a few minutes of him they quickly developed a plan to expose him off the dribble. Yates also showed a penchant for firing up wide-open threes early in the shot clock — three of them, to be precise — that took the “Let it Fly” mantra too literally. There’s no good solution here, in other words.
The Jays had been the best team in the country in defensive rebounding (i.e. preventing an opponent from grabbing an offensive rebound). BYU had 16 offensive rebounds and 21 second-chance points, including the game winning basket on their final possession. And that came against a relatively small Cougars team; 6’6” Fousseyni Traore is their primary post player as 6’10” Noah Waterman is a perimeter-based big.
Arizona State is built differently, with a legit big man anchoring the post. 7’0”, 225-pound Warren Washington, a senior transfer from Nevada, gives them a great post player both on the glass and as a rim protector. He has a career-best 8.1% block rate thus far, and his offensive rebound percentage (grabbing 12.0% of missed shots while he’s on the floor) ranks among the best in D1 hoops. Washington gets up and down the floor quickly, making him a threat in transition and on lob passes from their guards. Without Kalkbrenner, the Jays will struggle to match up with him.
The Sun Devils have won seven straight without star Marcus Bagley, who initially was benched and later suspended. To hear Bagley tell it, the benching was because he got into an argument with head coach Bobby Hurley — and the suspension is because he tweeted about it. He later deleted his Twitter account altogether.
To hear Hurley tell it, Bagley is simply a victim of circumstance. “I think it’s a byproduct of other guys playing well and just not having the opportunity to get him out on the floor,” Hurley said in a local radio interview. “That’s all it comes down to. … We have a stacked perimeter and right now there’s just no minutes for him.”
As usual, the truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Regardless of the reason, ASU has struggled offensively without Bagley — their effective field goal percentage is 49.4% (195th in D1) and their adjusted offensive efficiency is just slightly above average at 105.7 (106th). By raw numbers, they aren’t much better as they shoot just 30.4% from three-point range (289th), and their two-point field goal percentage is 51.9% (122nd).
They’re built on defense. ASU ranks 17th nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency (90.4) and 4th in effective field goal percentage (39.1%), and they’re stingy from everywhere on the floor. Opponents shoot just 25.4% from three (7th in D1) and 39.3% from inside the arc (4th in D1). They aren’t especially aggressive, at least not in terms of forcing turnovers — their defensive turnover and steal rates are roughly D1 average — they just defend really well for the length of the floor and make opponents uncomfortable. And with Washington, they have an elite rim protector surrounded by long, athletic players who can alter shots from anywhere. They average 5.6 blocks per game, and Washington has 18 through ten games.
“Playing for someone like Bobby who is just tough-minded and just a competitor in general, he always preaches to us you can’t depend on scoring and you can’t look at scoring as something to judge whether you played good or not,” Washington told SunDevilSource.com last week about their defensive philosophy. “I feel like we all just want to win and to win, we got to play defense. Defense wins championships, so I feel like we’re just following the blueprint that Bobby [made] for us.”
A pair of 6’1” guards in DJ Horne (12.9 points per game) and Frankie Collins (12.4 points per game) lead them in scoring. Brothers Desmond (10.9) and Devan Cambridge (9.3) are close behind. But everything runs through Collins, their starting point guard. On a team who gets 21.8% of its points from the foul line, it’s the slashing Collins who leads the charge — he draws around six fouls per game on average. 27.1% of possessions end with the ball in his hands when he’s on the floor.
- Tip: 8:00pm
- Venue: Michelob ULTRA Arena, Las Vegas, NV
- TV: FS1
- Announcers: Brandon Gaudin 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
- Radio: 1620AM, 101.9FM
- Announcers: John Bishop and Taylor Stormberg
- Streaming on 1620TheZone.com and the 1620 The Zone mobile app
- In a 75-57 win at SMU last week, Arizona State held their opponent under 35% shooting for the fifth time in 10 games. They held SMU scoreless for nine minutes, ripping off a 15-0 run. Notable: after SMU started 7-of-14 in the first half from behind the arc, Arizona State held them to 2-of-10 in the second half. Opponents are now shooting 56-217 (25.8%) overall from three point range against ASU, the seventh best mark in the country.
- ASU has played in a two-possession (or fewer) game in five of its first ten contests, boasting a 4-1 record. The Sun Devils are 27-12 in two possession games over the last three seasons, the most wins in the Pac-12 during that span.
- With non-conference matchups including trips to 2022 NCAA Tournament teams Texas Southern and San Francisco as well as to SMU, Arizona State is one of only a handful of Power 5 teams with three true road games before conference play.
- Fredrick King had four points (on two dunks) and three blocked shots in his first career start on Saturday vs. BYU. King was the first Bluejay true freshman to start a game at center since Kenton Walker (remember that name?) on Feb. 5, 2008, when the Jays topped UNI, 74-50.
- Arthur Kaluma scored a career-high 27 points before fouling out with more than six minutes left in Saturday’s contest vs. BYU. Kaluma’s 27 points eclipsed the 24 points he scored in last year’s NCAA Tournament against Kansas, which is the only other college game he’s played in that Ryan Kalkbrenner missed.
- Trey Alexander tied his season-high with 17 points vs. BYU on Saturday, including 11 points in the second half. That’s one point shy of the career-high 18 points he scored in an NCAA Tournament win vs. San Diego State in March. Creighton is 14-4 all-time when Alexander scores in double-figures.
Creighton and Arizona State have split 12 all-time meetings, but the Bluejays are 2-0 on neutral floors.
Creighton won neutral-site games by double-figures in Las Vegas (2012) and Fullerton, Calif. (2013). The teams have played four times since then, with the road club emerging victorious on each occasion.
Greg McDermott is 4-2 in his career against ASU and 2-2 against Bobby Hurley.
On December 12, 1980, Creighton beat Iowa State 77-72 in Ames. Protecting a two point lead with 4:25 to play, coach Tom Apke called timeout and drew up a play to get Paul Trieschman the ball near the rim. It worked, but he missed the shot, teammate Jim Honz rebounded it, and was subsequently fouled by Iowa State’s Ron Falenschek on his follow-up shot. It was not a well-received call.
Falenschek was enraged, got into an argument with the Bluejays’ Kevin McKenna, and ultimately shoved McKenna to the floor in his fit of post-foul rage, drawing a technical foul. That drew the ire of ISU coach Johnny Orr, who was also T’d up. The flurry of foul shots pushed the Bluejay lead from 57-55 to 62-55, and was the decisive sequence in the game.
Afterward, Orr gave his usually-colorful description of the sequence to the media.
“Orr said the referee who called both technicals asked him if he saw Falenschek foul Honz. Orr said he told the official he didn’t see the play, and then was assessed the technical. ‘Ask him,’ Orr said. ‘If he says differently, he’s a liar and I’ll punch him in the mouth.'”
George Morrow had a double-double for the Jays with 15 points, 14 rebounds and 4 assists, while McKenna had 26 points on 7-13 shooting, including a nearly-perfect 12-13 from the line.
The Bottom Line:
Despite their struggles, Creighton remains a two-point favorite on KenPom and a 2.5 point favorite at most Vegas sportsbooks. ESPN’s BPI gives the Jays a 55.3% chance of victory. Why the optimism? Perhaps the experts aren’t yet convinced that Arizona State’s 9-1 start is for real, and may be inflated by a non-conference strength of schedule ranking 255th.
While Warren Washington presents some very real issues inside, I think the Jays will look better prepared to battle without Kalkbrenner than they did on Saturday. It’ll be close, though.
Creighton 68, Arizona State 64