Creighton men’s basketball saw its nine-game winning streak snapped on Tuesday night with a 70-66 loss to UConn.
The Huskies (17-7, 9-4 Big East) secured their first win in Omaha after losing the previous four meetings. Creighton (18-7, 11-3) shot 29.2% from the field in the second half and made just seven field goals in the final 23 minutes of the game after building a 37-23 lead late in the first half.
Here are three takeaways from the loss.
Failure to Finish
Creighton built the 14-point lead in the first half, then dug itself an eight-point deficit in the second. However, the Jays rallied to tie it up with two minutes to play, making it anyone’s game with a raucous crowd firmly behind the home team.
It was the visitors who made the winning plays, however.
The tie lasted all of 15 seconds as Alex Karaban — who struggled to score much of the game and finished 5-of-14 from the field including 0-of-7 from 3 — curled to the basket and dropped in a floater to put the Huskies back in front with 1:44 to play.
Fedor Žugić, who played a big part in Creighton rallying from the eight-point deficit and hit the free throw to tie it up, got a look from the corner to give Creighton the lead but came up short.
Creighton forced a miss on defense but couldn’t secure the board, allowing the Huskies to burn more time. Jasen Green eventually made a great play to strip Samson Johnson and knock the ball off his leg with 41.1, giving the Jays another crack at erasing the deficit.
On the ensuing possession, Steven Ashworth found a bit of space to get off a 3-point attempt, but the shot circled the rim and popped back out with 30 seconds to go, forcing Creighton to play the foul game.
Solo Ball split a pair of free throws with 19.6 to play to make it a three-point game. The Jays pushed the ball up the court but couldn’t find space to get a look off from deep, allowing the Huskies to foul Jamiya Neal with 6.9 to play. He missed the front end, which led to Coach Greg McDermott calling his final timeout to set up an intentional miss play. However, the second miss dropped straight down into Karaban’s hands, forcing Creighton to foul.
Karaban missed the front end of the bonus, but Ball fouled Green on the rebound. He made the first, but the second also dropped straight off the rim into Liam McNeeley’s hands, and the freshman slammed the door shut by sinking a pair with 3.4 to go.
Creighton made a lot of winning plays down the stretch during its winning streak but couldn’t find a way to close it out on Tuesday night. Even so, the Jays remain alone in the second place, two games back of St. John’s.
“We’ve got to look in the mirror,” Coach Greg McDermott said. “We’ve got to understand little things matter. Sometimes teams just beat you, and sometimes you make enough mistakes that you kind of beat yourselves. Basketball is a game of mistakes, and oftentimes a team that makes the most mistakes ends up losing. I thought we had some critical mistakes tonight that we’re going to have to clean up moving forward.
“Having said all that, had I told you on February 11, we’re going to be 11-3 in the league, you’d have told me I was crazy. This team’s come a long ways, and we lost a close one tonight. We don’t like losing at home, especially in front of an electric crowd like this, but we’ll treat it just like we did the last nine games. We’ll evaluate the film, we’ll watch it, we’ll learn from it, and then we’ll flush it and move on to the next one.”
Missed Opportunities
“It’s a game of missed opportunities, I think, for us,” McDermott said during his opening statement postgame. “Some missed block-outs at critical times or times we had the ball in our hands and couldn’t secure it, couple turnovers that led to breakouts, and then we missed some free throws tonight that generally we don’t miss. When you’re playing a team as good as UConn, you’ve got to be a little bit more perfect than we were tonight.”
Creighton held UConn — a top-15 offense nationally — to 39.4% from the field including 23.1% from 3. The Jays committed four more turnovers yet still won the points-off-turnovers battle 10-9. They made more free throws than the Huskies attempted (21 to 15) — one of McDermott’s goals heading into every game.
Despite all that, Creighton found itself behind when the final buzzer sounded. As McDermott said, the Bluejays will find plenty of missed opportunities when they review the film.
“The reality of it is they shoot 39% from the field and 23% from the 3-point line, so we did our job defensively, and those numbers are good enough to win,” McDermott said. “Frankly, 10 turnovers, and some of them were just kind of self-inflicted, but we just didn’t do enough of the little things that we’ve been doing pretty well. We went the wrong way on a couple screens, we let [Liam] McNeeley walk into one in transition. That attention to detail has been pretty on point, and I think we got a little fatigued … Obviously, it’s been a long stretch for us with all these games without a lot of time off.”
Perhaps the most significant failure (beyond the missed shots down the stretch detailed above) was the inability to end possessions with defensive rebounds. UConn earned a 13-0 edge in second-chance points in the four-point win, offsetting a slightly more efficient shooting game from Creighton with more attempts at the basket. UConn grabbed 12 offensive rebounds, nine of which came in the second half.
“It’s just attention to detail and taking advantage of those opportunities when you force a miss.” Ashworth said. “In the first half, we were able to do that and secure the rebounds, get out and run and fly down the court and keep the tempo in a pace that we like it. In the second, we didn’t do that, and it led to them getting right back in the game, and then it was neck-and-neck the rest of the way.”
Creighton should have had a significant mismatch for much of the night in Ryan Kalkbrenner, who Dan Hurley said afterward would be his pick for Big East Player of the Year. Johnson, UConn’s starting center, committed four fouls in less than 12 minutes on the court. His backup, Tarris Reed Jr., also committed four fouls in 15 minutes of playing time. Youssouf Singare, a 6-foot-10 sophomore, only played 45 seconds. That left UConn with nearly 13 minutes of small-ball featuring either 6-foot-8 Alex Karaban or 6-foot-7 Jaylin Stewart at the five.
Even so, Kalkbrenner finished with just 13 points, nine shot attempts and four free throw attempts despite playing all 40 minutes. He only shot the ball three times and drew one shooting foul in the last 15 minutes of the game, converting all three shots and splitting the free throws.
Point guard Hassan Diarra, who is dealing with an injury, came off the bench and only played seven minutes. Hurley went with four players 6-foot-7 or taller around 6-foot-3 guard Solo Ball, giving the Huskies plenty of length to bother ball-handlers and deter entry passes. Kalkbrenner averaged 22.6 points during Creighton’s winning streak, but the Jays failed to make him a big enough weapon to extend the streak to 10.
“A lot of it was the backside help, and then obviously they have length on the perimeter, so making those entry passes are a little bit more difficult, trying to make sure that we can get Kalk a clean catch,” Ashworth said. “Some of those possessions kind of midway through the second half were definitely opportunities that that we missed him where we could have gotten it to them. I think we slowly figured it out a little bit with some more dribble penetration and then some different seals so the help couldn’t be there from the weak side, which led to easy baskets for Kalk.”
Finally, Creighton had a chance to take firm control of the game late in the first half. Ashworth picked up his second foul at the 7:41 mark and had to take a seat with Creighton clinging to a two-point lead. However, Neal orchestrated a 14-2 Creighton run that also featured big plays from Jackson McAndrew and Green to build a 14-point lead with three minutes to go. At that point, CHI Health Center was rocking and ready to explode even more if Creighton could finish strong to extend the lead heading into halftime.
Then the magic ran out. UConn scored the last six points of the half and the first seven of the second half to undo all that work, and the Jays never found a way to recapture that offensive rhythm.
“We had a real chance at the end of that first half to create some separation,” McDermott said. “Obviously, Steven was saddled with those two fouls, and we thought we could roll without him, and we built that lead without him, but unfortunately, they scored to cut it to eight and then came out of locker room on fire with a couple offensive rebounds as well.”
No Answer for McNeeley
Creighton shut down UConn’s top scorers in Ball and Karaban. The two combined to shoot 9-of-29 from the field including 0-of-11 from 3. The center combination totaled just two points, Stewart chipped in five and the whole UConn bench added just four points, all from Aidan Mahaney.
None of that mattered, though, because of what McNeeley did. The five-star recruit got loose to the tune of 38 points, shooting 12-of-22 from the field including 5-of-10 from 3 and 9-of-10 from the free-throw line.
“He’s a really good player, and Coach Hurley always does a good job of running those guys all over the place, making it hard to guard and not making it easy on our guys who are chasing them around,” Kalkbrenner said. “And then he does a good job using his body, getting down low, drawing fouls and finishing around the rim. He’s just a talented player, and we didn’t execute our plan to perfection like we would have liked. A player like that is going to make you pay when you don’t do everything the way you draw it up.”
McNeeley outscored the rest of the Huskies and matched what Creighton’s big three of Kalkbrenner, Ashworth and Neal produced by himself. The freshman did not play in the first meeting between the two teams because of an injury that sidelined him for eight games, and he made up for the lost time in a big way Tuesday.
Diarra’s limited playing time after logging 34 minutes in UConn’s loss to St. John’s caught the Creighton staff by surprise and changed the game plan they had prepared. Green and Neal, arguably Creighton’s top two perimeter defenders, both took turns on McNeeley, as did others on switches, but nothing Creighton tried seemed to work. The Bluejays made him a volume scorer early, but his efficiency rose as the game went on.
“It was a different matchup than we prepped for, and we tried a lot of different guys on him, but he’s a really good player, really good player,” McDermott said. “He scores in a lot of different ways. He’s crafty in drawing fouls … That’s him being savvy as well. He gets in there and he has a way to lean in and draw that contact. He’s just a really good player, and he had a phenomenal game, one of the best performances we’ve seen of an opponent in this building in quite some time.”
McNeeley added 10 rebounds, becoming the fourth Division-I freshman to record a 35-point double-double on the road against a top-25 team in the last 15 years. He’s the highest-scoring Big East freshman in conference play since Villanova’s Scottie Reynolds dropped 40 in 2007.
“We’re not going to overreact to this,” McDermott said. “We lost a heck of a basketball team, and a guy that will be playing in the NBA next year had an incredible, incredible night. We let him get started, and once he got started, he was really hard to stop.”
