Creighton men’s basketball had high expectations and higher aspirations heading into the 2024-25 season, but little has gone according to plan.
In a season filled with injury and illness, the latest hit is the biggest yet as the team learned on Friday that Pop Isaacs, the team’s second-leading scorer, needed season-ending surgery and was shutting it down after eight games.
“From a coach’s perspective, your first emotion is with Pop,” Coach Greg McDermott said. “Obviously he was incredibly disappointed and sad. You’re coming off one of the best games of your career and then you kind of get the news that long-term, if you don’t take care of this now, it could impact you 10, 15 years down the road, and that’s priority one. So you go through the emotion with the player, and then you turn your attention to your team and how do we convey the message, and then what are we going to do about it.”
Two days after the team’s 76-63 win over then-No. 1 Kansas, in which Isaacs went off for 27 points and hit six 3-pointers, McDermott had to tell his team before Friday’s practice that the junior guard was done for the year.
“I think the coaching staff did a great job of reminding everybody to be confident in their moment because their moment is going to come and it’s going to come at different times for different guys with one of our star players going down like that,” Steven Ashworth said. “There’s a lot of opportunity to be had and I think that every player individually understood the opportunity at hand.”
Jamiya Neal, Isaac Traudt and Jasen Green all took advantage of that opportunity in the Bluejays’ first game post-Isaac news, combining for 46 points in an 83-65 win over UNLV on Saturday.
“I’m really proud of the way we responded,” McDermott said. “You have the potential hangover off a big win and then you have bad news that you lose one of your best players, to have the maturity to respond to it the way that we did makes me pretty proud.”
McDermott used the word “proud” at least four times during his post-game press conference after the UNLV win, and Ashworth used it as well. Creighton stands at 7-3 despite Isaacs missing two games and Ashworth and Ryan Kalkbrenner missing one each. The three best players on the team have combined for 55% of the team’s points, 53.7% of its assist and 56.7% of its 3-pointers, and Creighton has had the three of them together and close to full strength in less than half of its games.
“We have to go San Diego State, A&M, Notre Dame, Kansas and UNLV and Steven doesn’t play one and obviously he clearly wasn’t close to 100% in those two games in Vegas, yet we’re a possession away against [Texas] A&M, a top-25 team, of going 4-1 in that stretch. Again, it’s a credit to my locker room and the leadership in that locker room to stay positive. You’ve got young players playing, you’ve got guys playing that haven’t been in certain roles and positions, and it’s easy for doubt to creep in, but I think Kalk and Steven, even through their own problems, are finding ways to impact their teammates.”
McDermott said he hasn’t had a team deal with as many gut punches — injury, illness, disappointing results, Fedor Žugić’s eligibility status and more — as this year’s team has through the first month of the season.
“It’s pretty incredible that we were able to bounce back from what happened in Vegas, sick and hurt and everything that’s going on, and then to get the Pop news,” McDermott said. “I’m really proud of them. You hope you’ve prepared your team for it. It’s going to be a process this year, there’s no question, because our margin for error now is really, really slim. I appreciate our fans being there, and we’re going to need them this year more than ever. Because that margin for error is slim, we need every bit of fight out of them, just like we need out of our team, as we move forward with a little bit of a shorthanded group.”
Ashworth suffered a severe ankle sprain late in the Nebraska game, and Kalkbrenner suffered a lower body injury late against Texas A&M. They each only missed one game, despite neither one practicing much, if at all, in the past couple of weeks.
“As much as Kalk and Steven have been dealing with their own issues, not once have they looked at me and said ‘I need to come out,’ or ‘I need to do less,’” McDermott said. “They’re trying to help this team, and they recognize the importance, not just of their presence as players but their presence as leaders. Without that, you’d be in big trouble when adversity hits like this. If your leadership is weak, it’s really going to show its face in adverse times. Our leadership is strong, and those two guys, even when they can’t practice, mentally and vocally, they are involved in the practice, helping those guys develop.”
Despite the pain and frustration he and Kalkbrenner have had to deal with over the past two weeks, Ashworth said he’s focused on enjoying his final season of basketball as much as possible, and that continues to drive him to push through the adversity and do what he can for the team.
“You really have to be focused on the joy in the journey,” Ashworth said. “I’m a very faith-filled guy, and one of the leaders of our church has said ‘The joy in your life has little to do with your circumstances and everything to do with your focus.’ So personally for me, I’m really trying to stay focused on all the positive things that we have, reminding the guys that hey, we get to wake up in the morning and look forward to go playing basketball at the end of the day, and then once or twice a week, we get to play in front of 18,000 crazy fans every week.
“So really, although there is some adversity, in the grand scheme of things, it’s nothing life or death for this basketball team and that’s something to be grateful for in and of itself. The guys respond really, really well to the fact that we should have joy in all of this.”
Creighton’s reward for making it through a grueling stretch of the schedule is a lighter slate moving forward. With six days between games, the Jays took the first few days after UNLV off to focus on getting as healthy as possible before turning their attention to their next opponent, No. 7 Alabama. Ashworth should benefit as much as anybody after tweaking his ankle again in practice on Friday and in the game against UNLV. In addition to the injuries Kalkbrenner and Ashworth are recovering from, the whole team has extra off-court responsibilities this week.
“We haven’t been able to be in the mode of really rehabbing that ankle,” McDermott said. “It’s ‘What do we have to do to get the ankle ready to play the game?’, and then you play the game, it blows up the next day; ‘What do we have to do to get him ready to play the next game?’ I think this week we’ll be able to make some progress and hopefully Kalk can get some rest and get feeling better as well. Then it’s Finals too, so mentally, obviously their schedules are different. You hope to just survive practice in finals week because it’s really difficult, their sleep patterns are a little bit messed up, you’re practicing at different times of the day based on finals schedules.”
McDermott mentioned that fans saw some lineups for the first time in the UNLV game, which will likely be a theme moving forward as he seeks groups that click together and rides the hot hand with Isaacs out of commission. Ashworth and Neal combined for 16 assists against the Runnin’ Rebels, which is something McDermott said the team will need moving forward to make up for the loss of Isaacs’ playmaking.
“Unfortunately that’s the kind of year we’ve been having with Steven missing a game, Kalk missing a game, Pop missing the first game,” Neal said. “We’ve had the challenge of people having to step up all year, so guys knew that once again we had to step up. Unfortunately it’s going to be for the rest of the season and I don’t think anybody is happy about that, but I know everybody was prepared and mentally locked in to do what they needed to do.”
At a time when many teams are starting to settle on rotations and hit their stride heading into conference play, Creighton men’s basketball had to hit the reset button and start all over again. Thought the Jays will be without a key piece the rest of the way, the team is looking to put the lessons it has learned from a bumpy start to the year into practice.
“As cliché as it sounds, adversity makes us stronger,” Ashworth said. “When you’re a part of a group that really it’s just the 14, 15, 16 guys in that locker room right now kind of against the world, it’s an opportunity for us to look in the mirror and recognize ‘OK, this is where we fell short earlier and let’s not let it happen again.’ I think this group is a resilient group and we’ve been able to showcase that. The journey’s far from over; we can’t ride the lows and the highs too much, staying process oriented. By doing that, it allows to be getting better every single week. I think we’ve been able to showcase that and I’m really excited to be able to continue showcasing that as a team.”
