A lot has changed since January 3 when Marquette beat Creighton 79-71 in Milwaukee. That defeat dropped CU to 9-6 overall and 2-2 in the Big East; Marquette improved to 13-2 and 4-0 in the league. The Jays were reeling a bit both before and after that game, having lost three of five.
Creighton hasn’t lost since, winning eight straight to catapult into sole possession of second place at 10-2 with wins over everyone in the top half of the league…except Marquette. They’re 17-6 overall and have gone from the outside looking in on the NCAA Tournament to a very real possibility of moving up to a 5 or 6 seed.
Meanwhile, Marquette has lost three games since then, falling from first to third at 9-3 and 18-5 overall, and entering the rematch the roles have reversed — now it’s Marquette who’s reeling. They’ve lost two in a row, albeit to UConn and St. John’s, and have fallen out of the top ten for the first time since November.
“We showed some good signs at Marquette. We took the lead early, we had a bad finish to the first half, a bad start to the second half and then got down 15 but got back in it,” Greg McDermott said on Friday. “We gave ourselves a chance to win the game in the last three or four minutes. So there were some signs of where we were headed, it just wasn’t consistent. I think we’ve been a little bit more consistent as time has gone on especially on the defensive end of the floor. The offense has come and gone, which you know, that happens especially on the road. But defensively we’ve been pretty solid and I think we’re a better defensive team than we were then.”
“It kind of got away from us up there a little bit,” Ryan Kalkbrenner said. “But at the end of the day you can’t go back and change it, so learn what you can from it and move on. I think we did that. I think we got better after that game. We built on the things that we messed up on and improved on them, and now we’re in a better spot.”
The Golden Eagles present some difficult matchup problems for the Bluejays, particularly on defense. In Big East play, they’ve forced a turnover on 24.0% of opponent’s possessions, a full percentage more than the next closest team (St. John’s at 23.0%. And they’ve only turned it over on 12.0% of their own possessions, a full 2-1/2 percentage points better than the next closest (Villanova at 14.4%). That gap is huge — they turn opponents over twice as much as they give it away — and it might be the biggest key to how they win games.
In the first meeting, Marquette had 30 extra-possession points (21 off of 12 Bluejay turnovers, and nine off of 11 offensive rebounds). Those points were the difference — despite similar shooting percentages (CU shot 40.0%, MU 41.1%; CU was 22.6% from three-point range and MU was 32.4%), Marquette attempted 10 more shots and made five more than the Jays.
The Jays’ only had 12 turnovers (on 16.9% of their possessions), but they unfortunately were bunched together. Half of them came in the 26-3 Marquette run that changed the game, providing momentum through live-ball turnovers that were converted into easy transition buckets. The 12-0 spurt to end the first half featured turnovers from Steven Ashworth and Ryan Kalkbrenner that led to points; the 14-3 burst the begin the second half had three more turnovers that directly led to points.
“We had a hard time getting into our offense against Marquette the last time, and when we did have good looks, we didn’t knock them down,” Greg McDermott said on Friday. “If we expect to be successful tomorrow, we have to take care of the ball, which we did there for the most part. I mean it’s hard, you know, because we understand we’re a little bit limited in some areas from a ball handling perspective. It’s not like we have four or five guys that can do it. So we’ve got to try to do as much as we can in the middle of the floor, attack that way and then try to establish Ryan. We got him the ball around the basket in Milwaukee and he had kind of an ‘out of body’ not finishing type of game which he doesn’t have very often.”
Indeed, Ryan Kalkbrenner scored 16 points, but shot 4-of-11 from the floor with five of the misses coming inside the restricted area. Marquette’s activity and aggressiveness defensively had him sped up — anticipating contact, he shot before totally setting himself, and the results were unsurprisingly ugly.
Ashworth, likewise, was 1-of-13 from three point range. He had 10 assists (on 24 made Bluejay shots) against just one turnover in 39 minutes, and was 3-of-5 inside the arc. But he, too, seemed sped up and took too many of his three-pointers out of rhythm.
It’s fair to believe Kalkbrenner and Ashworth will improve on those numbers at home, especially with the experience of playing against their defense a month ago. But is it likely that they can do that and also keep their live-ball turnovers in check the way they (mostly) did in Milwaukee? Turnovers have been an achilles heel for the Jays even in their winning streak, a weakness they’ve overcome with solid play in other areas.
Offensively, Marquette is a challenging matchup because their primary big man, 6’11” Ben Gold, almost exclusively shoots from behind the perimeter. 105 of his 135 shot attempts have been threes.
“In past meetings, we’ve moved Ryan around on different guys to try to keep him in the paint,” McDermott noted. “He’ll guard Ben Gold some, and Royce Parham as well who’s playing really well. They provide challenges, not just to us but to everybody, because they really invert your defense and make you pull your shot blockers away from the basket. So when you’re guarding the dribble, those one-on-one matchups become really important because you’re not always going to have the comfort of having Kalk behind you at the rim.”
Creighton’s defense ideally tries to force teams into mid-range jumpers — they run you off the perimeter, and funnel you toward the rim where Kalkbrenner awaits. But Marquette almost never takes those shots. According to Haslametrics, just 13 of every 100 shots is classified as midrange, ranking 358th fewest in D1. Look at the shot chart from Milwaukee — they took zero two-pointers outside of the paint in that game. Wild.
Where Marquette has run into problems with that offensive strategy is when they’re struggling to make threes. And almost across the board, their volume shooters have been mired in slumps since Big East play began. Kam Jones, their leading scorer, is shooting just 25.4% from three — a 16% drop from non-conference play. Stevie Mitchell is at 32.1% — a 17.9% drop from his scorching 50.0% mark in non league games. Chase Ross is down 3.3%. David Joplin is down slightly at 1.9%. Ben Gold is the only starter to improve, shooting 41.5% in Big East games after being at 33.9% before.
As a team, they shot 33.9% in non-conference games — not great, but above average. In Big East games? 31.9%, 253rd in D1. When you take just under half of your shots from three and make less than 1/3 of them, you’re going to struggle to score. Outside of transition baskets, they have.
Mismatches can go both ways, and Creighton has a big one — Marquette has no real way to guard Kalkbrenner straight-up. Gold isn’t a great one-on-one post defender, and is three inches shorter. Marquette has typically double and even triple teamed Kalkbrenner when he gets a post touch, daring the Jays to beat them from outside. It worked in Milwaukee, as 31 of the Jays’ 60 shots were threes and they made just seven. Even if the Jays can manage to break even on extra possession points, another 1-of-13 day from Ashworth behind the arc will almost certainly end poorly on the scoreboard.
But they won’t double Kalkbrenner every time. And there will be opportunities in transition and early in the shot clock to find him on lob passes. It’s critical that the Jays exploit as many of those opportunities as they can.
Who navigates the mismatches better is the team likely to win.
Saturday is the start of an incredible eight days of basketball that could very well decide the trajectory of the season. After Marquette, UConn visits on Tuesday. Win those two and next Sunday’s game at Madison Square Garden against St. John’s could be for first place. You hate to look ahead…but right now, the Jays are favorites in all five games to end the season. Who’d have thought that would be the case the morning after the first Marquette game?
“I think it’ll be crazy in here tomorrow. Everybody understands the importance of this game,” McDermott said. “We’re fighting for a conference title, which is where we want to be. It’s all in front of us, and it’s in our control. We need to make this as difficult on Marquette tomorrow as we possibly can.”
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Kam Jones (18.8 ppg., 6.0 apg.) leads the Golden Eagles in points and assists and is sure to receive All-America consideration at year’s end.
David Joplin (14.1 ppg.) ranks second on the team in scoring and hauls in a team-leading 5.0 rebounds per game.
Also scoring in double-figures are Chase Ross (11.5 ppg.) and defensive menace Stevie Mitchell (11.4 ppg., 2.7 spg.).
Creighton has played a league-high seven Big East road games and is no doubt looking forward to having four of its next five games at home, where it is 11-1 this winter. Among the top four teams in serious contention for a Big East regular-season title, St. John’s has played seven home and five league road games, Marquette has played six of each and UConn has played six road games and five home games in conference action.
Creighton is just the fifth team since 1993-94 to beat Connecticut, Villanova and Providence on the road in the same season. The only other teams to do it since 1993-94 were Xavier (2022-23), Marquette (2011-12) and Syracuse (2011-12 and 1996-97), though Syracuse later vacated the wins from 2011-12.
Since the loss to Marquette, Kalkbrenner has averaged 23.0 points and 3.1 blocks on 66.0 percent shooting, while Ashworth has averaged 16.4 points per game on 43.3 percent shooting from the floor and 37.3 percent marksmanship from deep.
Marquette leads the 102-year old series with Creighton by a 60-40 margin, but Creighton has won eight of the past 13 meetings. Eighteen of the last 22 meetings have been decided by eight points or less. Creighton is 12-12 against MU since the teams became Big East rivals, but the road team is 12-11 in those match-ups (CU is 6-6 in Milwaukee; MU is 6-5 in Omaha).
Creighton has played 326 different schools in its history, but Marquette is just the third different opponent that Creighton has faced 100 times or more, joining its 153 meetings vs. Drake (who they have a 94-59 record against) and its 100 match-ups with Wichita State (the Jays have a 55-45 edge in that series).
On February 8, 2009, the Jays beat Northern Iowa 77-71, snapping UNI’s 11-game winning streak.
Creighton’s top three scorers, Booker Woodfox, P’Allen Stinnett, and Cavel Witter, were all held scoreless in the first half by the Panthers’ defense. They were mostly held in check in the second, too. So other players stepped up — Justin Carter led the Jays with 17 points, Kenny Lawson had 12, Kaleb Korver had seven, Kenton Walker had five. It was Carter who carried them, though.
He scored six points in an 8-2 run that gave CU the lead, including a reverse layup with 10 minutes to play.
“He hit a big 3 when we were really struggling, and he finished some plays,” Dana Altman told the media after the game. “The two drives he had were big. They were pushed out so far on Book and P’Allen, and those two baskets were really important for us.”
The Bottom Line:
KenPom predicts a one-point Bluejay win. ESPN’s BPI gives the Jays 59.6% odds of victory. Provided their shoot better than they did in Milwaukee, keep turnovers to around 15% of their possessions, and can exploit Kalkbrenner at the rim, I think they win a close one.