Monday night’s season opener didn’t exactly go off as planned for #9 Creighton. Though they won 72-60, they needed a second-half rally to do it. In the aftermath, it was their poor shooting from the perimeter that was of paramount concern to Bluejay fans — and with good reason. Last year’s team shot 30.8% from three-point range, 305th in D1 and their worst mark in nearly 30 years.*
* (The 1993-94 team, Rick Johnson’s final Bluejay squad, also shot 30.8% from three. Only one other club has been south of 33% in that span.)
And with their two best shooters by far, Ryan Hawkins and Alex O’Connell, off to professional hoops, scoring from outside was a legitimate worry. So you can understand how shooting 8-of-34 in the opener against an undersized team picked seventh in the Summit League would have people concerned.
Greg McDermott does not share those sentiments. On his postgame radio interview after Monday’s win, he said last year’s team would occasionally struggle to shoot in practice, too, but this year’s team has consistently shot well on the practice floor, as well as in exhibitions against Drury and Iowa State.
“St. Thomas dared us to shoot it. We didn’t make it. And when you don’t make it, the paint gets tighter and tighter,” he said. “I thought for the most part our threes were all good looks, we just didn’t make them.”
Shot Quality confirmed his initial feeling. Based on the quality of shot attempts they got, their expected margin of victory was 26.9 points.
“Shot quality is big with us,” he added. “You want the right guys shooting the right shots at the right times. And our guys have shot it well enough — Arthur, R2, Trey, Baylor, Francisco, Shereef — when they’re open, they have the green light. I don’t want them turning down an open shot. You hope you don’t have a bunch of guys shooting poorly all on the same night, but that’s what we had happen tonight.”
One game is a small sample size. How they perform in the next three games — all games they’ll be favored to win by 20+ points — will either start to dismiss those fears or amplify them. First up is North Dakota, a team picked dead last in the Summit League in the preseason poll after finishing 6-25 a year ago.
It’s a team that definitely makes you wonder “what if?”, because in another era of college basketball, we’d likely be talking about a team favored to win the league instead of finishing in last place. North Dakota had the Summit League Freshman of the Year two straight seasons (Tyree Ihenacho in 2020-21; Paul Bruns in 2021-22), and lost both of them to the transfer portal after those breakout seasons. 2021 All-Summit League center Filip Rebraca left, too, becoming a key starter on Iowa’s NCAA Tourney team a year ago. What if those three were still playing in Grand Forks?
Combine that exodus of talent with significant injuries (three of their eight returning players had offseason surgery and a fourth missed all of last season due to injury), and you get the situation UND finds themselves in.
The problems start on the defensive side of the ball. UND was 354th in adjusted defensive efficiency a year ago, 352nd in two-point field goal defense and 347th in block rate. They were 339th in field goal percentage at the rim and 300th in points allowed per possession on post-ups. Everywhere you looked, there was a leak.
They continue on offense, where they were 322nd in percentage of shots taken at or near the rim — they were an extreme jump-shooting team, but unlike their Summit League rival St. Thomas, they weren’t very good at it. UND shot just 33.4% on three-pointers and 29.8% on two-point jumpers. The only player to average more than 10 points per game last year was Bruns, and he’s playing for rival South Dakota now.
The question, then, is how improved (if at all) are they over a year ago? The return of Mitchell Sueker, a 6’9”, 225-pound senior, is perhaps the key piece to that puzzle. He played only 15 games a year ago due to an ankle injury, but when healthy he averaged 11.9 points and shot 48.1% from three-point range. His size and mobility create matchup problems for opponents, especially in the Summit.
He has company inside this year, with 6’8” freshman BJ Omot and 6’9”, 235-pound junior Tsotne Tsartsidze both starting Monday’s opener against Incarnate Word. True freshman Omot had 11 points on 3-of-8 shooting inside the arc, with five rebounds and a block, while Tsartsidze had seven points and seven boards. Tsartsidze, a native of Tbilisi, Georgia, was used primarily as a back-to-the-basket post player a year ago (178 of his 198 shot attempts were two-pointers; he made 50.6% of them). This year their plan is to let him attack the rim on the run and shoot a bit more from outside. He took three 3-pointers in Monday’s opener (missing all three) after taking 20 total in 29 games a year ago.
Sueker is the only proven inside scorer they have, so getting him touches will be important. That was evident in their opening game, where he took just three shots. Caleb Nero (6’2” senior who averaged 7.5 points and 1.7 assists a year ago) and Matt Norman (6’4” junior who averaged 9.1 and 1.8) will draw the assignment of creating offense, as will JuCo transfer Jalun Trent.
Nero, like Sueker, is coming off of an injury that derailed his 2021-22 season. In his first nine games, he averaged 12.1 points, 4.1 rebounds and 2.8 assists; in 11 games after that, his numbers dropped in half across the board. Norman is fairly one-dimensional — 70% of his shot attempts were threes a year ago, and 7 of his 10 shots in Monday’s win were also threes. But he made 33.1% of them a year ago and 3-of-7 on Monday, so he’s a capable shooter.
Trent, on the other hand, is a dynamic guard who nearly averaged a triple-double at Cochise College a year ago. And unlike a lot of JuCo players only looking to score, he had 7.0 assists per game (sixth most in the country). That carried over to Monday’s debut, where he had six assists to just one turnover in 20 minutes off the bench.
Fellow newcomer Elijah Brooks was also impressive in his UND debut, scoring nine points on 3-of-5 shooting. He drew fouls with his ability to slash in the paint, he grabbed seven rebounds, dished out three assists, and had two steals. Brooks was a recruiting coup for UND, finishing as the leading scorer at Topeka (KS) West history and winning Mr. Basketball Kansas last year.
Outside of keeping their returning players healthy, adding players like Trent and Brooks and turning them loose might be their best hope at beating their 10th place prediction. CU isn’t likely to have much trouble bottling up UND’s frontcourt, so if there’s any path to a Fighting Hawks upset it would likely come from someone like Norman or Brooks getting hot from outside.
- Tip: 8:00pm
- Venue: CHI Health Center Omaha
- TV: FS1
- Announcers: Matt Schumacher 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
- Jalun Trent averaged 9.4 points per game, 8.0 assists per game and 7.2 rebounds per game while at Cochise College a year ago, and shot 78.3 percent from the free throw line and 61.0 percent from the field in the NJCAA. Trent was named the ACCAC & NJCAA Region I Defensive Player of the Year in 2021-22 and earned both First-Team All-ACCAC and NJCAA All-Region I honors.
- Brady Danielson has drawn 33 charges in his career. Last season alone, Danielson led the team with 15 charges drawn, including a season-high three offensive fouls drawn against Dixie State (now named Utah Tech) on Dec. 18.
- UND is 0-11 since 2000 against ranked Division I opponents, with the 2019 matchup at No. 8/7 Gonzaga being the highest-ranked regular season opponent since the No. 3 ranking held by Kansas when the Jayhawks visited Grand Forks in 2001.
- Since 1980, only three players have had a double-double in their first regular-season game in a Creighton uniform. Last year Ryan Nembhard (15 pts., 10 ast) and Ryan Hawkins (16 pts., 11 reb.) both did it, while on Monday Baylor Scheierman (11 pts., 10 reb.) joined them.
- Greg McDermott’s first coaching job was at North Dakota from 1989-94, where he served as an assistant coach. The 1989-90 team was inducted into the UND Hall of Fame in 2008; they went 28-7 and won the North Central Conference before finishing the season in the Elite Eight. One of the players on that team was current Northern Iowa head coach Ben Jacobson, who would replace McDermott as Northern Iowa’s head coach in 2006. Oh, and while McDermott was in Grand Forks as a UND assistant, his son Doug McDermott, was born.
- Meanwhile, North Dakota coach Paul Sather got his start in coaching as a graduate assistant under Greg McDermott at Wayne State College in 1997-98. Sather then moved on to be an assistant coach at Northern State from 1998-2004, where current Creighton assistant Ryan Miller was among his star players. Miller captained the 1998 team to a region championship and Elite Eight appearance, when he was named the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference Player of the Year and an All-American.
Creighton has won 10 of 13 meetings all-time, including a 7-2 mark in Omaha. The last meeting on December 5, 2017 saw the Jays score 111 points.
CU built a 51-31 lead late in the half, but North Dakota used a 6-0 run to end the half to slice the deficit to 14, and they refused to go quietly as the second half began. They made six straight field goals midway through the second, and with 10:35 to play trailed 75-61. That bucket seemed to wake up the Bluejays, who turned on the afterburners and outscored UND 36-7 the rest of the game to win 111-68.
The Jays scored 10 straight points over the next two minutes, fueled by four points from Mitch Ballock (on a pair of free throws and a nifty up-and-under driving layup) and three’s from Ronnie Harrell and Khyri Thomas to push the lead to 85-61. Another 10-0 run followed shortly after to make it 100-66; a 9-0 run ended the game. It wasn’t so much a case of the Jays’ defense smothering North Dakota as it was North Dakota crashing a car into a brick wall at 120MPH time after time, taking quick (and often bad) shots that allowed Creighton to run in transition time after time.
They scored 60 points on 63% shooting after halftime, had 13 assists on 22 made baskets, and scored 1.54 points per possession.
CU has played on November 10 just once in the regular season: a 92-76 win over Yale in the 2017-18 season opener.
On the opening night of the 2017-18 season, Creighton wasted little time settling in. They made eight of their first 12 baskets, including back-to-back threes from Khyri Thomas and Toby Hegner — both assisted by Marcus Foster — to begin the night. The last of those eight made baskets in the opening salvo was this gem from Foster where he was simply stronger than Yale’s defender:
Later in the half, freshman Mitch Ballock started a fast break by grabbing a rebound and feeding it to Mintz in transition, who found Martin Krampelj streaking down the floor; Krampelj slammed home this dunk:
Ballock’s first points in his CU career came next on a three:
And then Thomas scored seven straight points on an array of moves in the paint and beyond the arc to extend the Jays’ lead.
The Bottom Line:
Creighton will shoot much better now that the first-game jitters are out of their system, and this one will look more like people expected Monday’s opener to look.
#9 Creighton 88, North Dakota 63
