No. 17 Creighton men’s basketball outscored Xavier by 14 points in the final eight minutes to pull out an 85-78 win at CHI Health Center Omaha Tuesday night.
Just a few days after surviving a triple-overtime thriller at Seton Hall, Creighton’s veterans played heavy minutes once again and all four scored in double figures as the Jays improved to 15-5 overall and 6-3 in Big East play.
“I’m just really proud of my team,” Coach Greg McDermott said. “Saturday was hard. It was exciting for you fans, but it was it was hard on our guys — physically, emotionally. And then to play our third game in seven days with the first two both being on the East Coast, that’s tough stuff. Xavier … they’re playing great basketball right now … This league is hard, it’s really hard. I don’t know if people understand how hard it is. These wins are hard to come by and just really thankful that we were able to get it.”
Here are three takeaways from the game.
Closing Time
Things were looking a little rough for the Jays midway through the second half as Xavier put together a 9-3 spurt to extend its lead out to seven. Creighton finally got the ball inside to Ryan Kalkbrenner to end the run, but Xavier responded with a jumper from Quincy Olivari to push it back to seven at the under-12 timeout.
Creighton was having a tough time stringing together stops and buckets at that point, but out of the timeout McDermott called a play to get Baylor Scheierman an open look from 3, and he buried it for his first bucket of the second half, just his third of the game.
On the next trip down the floor, Scheierman got downhill off a curl and drew a foul, making the first free throw but missing the second. Kalkbrenner grabbed the board and kicked it back to Scheierman for a 3, which also missed. But Francisco Farabello tapped that rebound to Trey Alexander who swung the ball back to Scheierman for a quick-release 3, and this time it went down to cap a personal 7-1 run.
“I missed the free throw, which I shouldn’t do, and then I missed a wide open 3,” Scheierman said. “Trey caught the ball at the at the top of the key and he probably could have shot it, but he saw me on the wing kind of open and that just speaks to the selflessness of the team because obviously I missed the last two shots and Trey had the confidence to swing to me on the wing and I was able to knock it down.”
Alexander gave Creighton the lead on the following possession, but Xavier scored four straight to jump back in front 63-60 with eight minutes to play. Out of the under-8 timeout, McDermott called a play for Ashworth and he buried his first and only 3 of the game, triggering an 8-0 run aided by a technical foul on Xavier coach Sean Miller.
Xavier cut Creighton’s lead to two three different times from there, but each time the Jays had a response, the last of which was a between-the-legs, step-back 3 from Scheierman with about two minutes to go followed by four straight points from Alexander to seal the game.
“We talked about it after the Seton Hall game too, basketball is a game of runs,” Scheierman said. “They went on a run and we knew we weren’t going to get it all back at once, and that’s what we talked about in the huddle was just taking it one play at a time, and I think that’s what we did. We were able to get stops and rebounds and then get out in transition and run a little bit.”
Scheierman scored 15 of his 20 points in the last 12 minutes of the game, shooting 6-of-11 overall including 5-of-9 from 3 and a dunk and putting the team on his back down the stretch.
Old-School Duel
The first half turned into a battle between two tough guards in Alexander and Xavier’s Desmond Claude. The two combined for nearly half the total points scored in the first 20 minutes with Claude’s 18 leading the way and Alexander’s 16 right behind.
It took Alexander just over eight minutes to hit double figures as he went to work early and often. At the break, he had a game-high six rebounds and three assists to go with his point total.
Creighton made Claude work incredibly hard for his points as his 18 came on 15 shots and four free throws, but he converted some really tough in-between shots over the top of a contest in the lane.
Glen Rice, a current Miami Heat scout and three-time NBA all-star who knows a thing or two about a pull-up jumper, was certainly enjoying the show and the old-school nature of it from the media section.
However, Alexander definitively won the battle in the second half. He scored another 11 points to finish with a game-high 27 on 10-of-18 from the field and 5-of-5 from the line, nine boards and four assists.
With Creighton up by five and about 95 seconds remaining, Claude missed a pull-up, then with the shot clock winding down Alexander hit one of his own to all but seal the game with a minute to go. Alexander then hit a pair of free throws after another Claude miss to extend the lead to nine with 30 seconds to play.
Davion McKnight took over in the second half when Claude went cold with 17 of his 20 points, but Creighton’s big three of Alexander, Scheierman and Ryan Kalkbrenner outscored Xavier’s trio of Claude, McKnight and Olivari by eight in a seven-point victory.
“Baylor Scheierman and Trey Alexander, they were 16-of-29 from the floor, 7-of-15 from 3 — they’re really good,” Xavier coach Sean Miller said. “They ran us off screens, they made big shots. They’re tough, man. They’re really good players — really, really good. I think they’re two of the best guards not just in the Big East, I think they’re two of the best guards in the country, and we knew that going in and they did a great job in tonight’s game.”
Two-Way Impact
Scheierman’s shot-making down the stretch will likely steal the headlines, but his defensive effort deserves recognition as well. He was the primary defender on Claude, who finished with 20 points on 23 shots and six free throws.
Claude wasn’t Xavier’s leading scorer heading into the game, though. That was Olivari, and Ashworth got the assignment there. Averaging just over 18 points on the season heading in, Olivari finished with 15 points on 12 field goals and four free throws. Meanwhile, Ashworth chipped in 12 points, seven assists and just one turnover on the other end, and he’s leading the Big East in assist-to-turnover ratio on the year.
“Steven was terrific,” McDermott said. “He guarded [Uconn’s Cam] Spencer and did a great job, [Seton Hall’s Al-Amir] Dawes had no points at halftime, he got started on a couple of switches when Steven wasn’t on him, and he was terrific on Olivari. Six weeks ago, Steven Ashworth couldn’t do what he’s doing today, but his mindset has changed, and he went from someone that was somewhat of a liability defensively to someone that it’s hard to take him off the floor because of what he’s doing defensively. And then on top of that, 15 assists, one turnover the last two games in the Big East, that’s incredible stuff.”
Xavier had scored 85 or more in its previous three games heading into Tuesday, but once again Creighton’s drop defense managed to bait the Musketeers into taking the shots the Jays wanted them to for much of the night. To their credit, they hit some, but in the end the Jays’ shot quality won out as Xavier shot 40.8% overall from the field including 38.2% in the second half.
“We turned them into 2-point shooters a lot, and to their credit, they made a lot of them, especially McKnight,” McDermott said. “He made some rainbows in there that were difficult shots. One of them was off the glass and the numbers, analytically those are the shots we want teams to take. To their credit, they were able to make some tonight, but defensively they’ve been scoring 87, 88 points a game in the league and 78 points seems like a lot, but I felt like for the most part we defended them pretty well.”
Creighton got crushed in extra possession points overall with a 19-5 edge in points off turnovers and a 17-6 edge in second-chance points for Xavier, but most of that damage was done in the first 30 minutes as Creighton won some key 50-50 battles down the stretch.
“I thought we kept fighting,” McDermott said. “I thought Mason went and got one in traffic that was really important, Kalk got one, Trey went and got one in the guts of the game. But fast break points, they’ve been one of the most efficient teams in the first six seconds in the shot clock of anybody in the country and the fast break points were 12-11. We were only on the floor an hour the last two days because of what transpired Saturday, so for our guys to be able to put our transition defense together the way they did and keep their transition game in check when we’re running on fumes is a credit to our guys.”
