Creighton women’s basketball caught fire in the fourth quarter to take down No. 21 Nebraska 80-74 at D.J. Sokol Arena on Friday afternoon.
The Bluejays (2-2) have now won eight of the past nine games in the series. Nebraska (5-1) outscored Creighton 50 to 26 in the paint, but the Bluejays offset that by shooting 13-of-29 from 3 to beat the Huskers by 24 points from the arc.
“Great win over a really good team,” Coach Jim Flanery said. “I thought we hung in. We didn’t really ever have an answer for [Alexis] Markowski, but we did, I thought, a good job on taking away 3s from a lot of their kids. We kind of had said that they had shot the 3 so well that that was kind of going to be our M.O. until it wasn’t. But I’m just proud of the way we hung in.
“We really moved the ball — 23 assists, seven turnovers. We found the right people. I thought Molly [Mogensen] hit some huge shots. Mal [Brake] was, I thought, really good all game and Lauren [Jensen] is Lauren; she’s really good.”
Here are three thoughts from the Creighton win.
The Stars Showed Up
Nebraska lost sophomore Natalie Potts — the team’s leading scorer through the first four games — to a torn ACL on Tuesday, meaning the huskers needed senior center Alexis Markowski to step up in a big way.
The 6-foot-3 post exploited her size advantage to the tune of 26 points on 60% shooting. She also corralled 12 rebounds, becoming the sixth player in program history to surpass 1,000 career caroms. Freshman Britt Prince added 20 points and six rebounds.
The best player on the floor was in a Creighton jersey, however. Senior Lauren Jensen notched her second 30-point outing in four games to start the season, finishing with 31 on 10-of-19 from the field (4-of-9 from 3) and 7-of-7 from the foul line. She added three rebounds, three assists, two blocks and a steal while playing the full 40 minutes without a turnover.
“I’m happy for her … She just has a great approach,” Flanery said. “She works really hard, but she’s a really good leader. She doesn’t get down on herself, she doesn’t get down on her teammates. The number of times where if I chew out somebody on the bench, she’s tapping them on the knee as a touch point, is really valuable. I just love the way she stays engaged. Part of that’s experience, part of that’s just who she is …
“She’s getting a lot of attention defensively. She’s getting a good defender, and she’s really good. Her strength has really improving. If you look at where she was when she got here, her ability to attack the rim and finish and play 40 minutes is really good, and that’s because she’s not just worked on the court, but she’s worked in the weight room. The way I look at it, her scholarship pays for 40 minutes of activity.”
Jensen scored 19 of her 31 in the second half including 11 in the fourth quarter. She assisted two 3-pointers, hit one of her own and knocked down a dagger pull-up jumper that put Creighton up eight with less than two minutes to play. She also went 6-for-6 at the foul line in the final 32 seconds to seal the victory.
“You guys think that it’s really cool, but she does that every single day, so it’s nothing really new for us,” Mogensen said. “She’s in the gym all the time, she’s one of our hardest workers and it just proves in the game.”
Morgan Maly didn’t have a great shooting game but still scored 18 points in the first three quarters to give Jensen support against Markowski and Prince.
Senior Steps Up
Maly didn’t score in the fourth quarter, but she didn’t need to thanks to fellow super-senior Molly Mogensen. She was scoreless in the first three quarters and had only attempted one 3-pointer. She was 3-of-10 from deep on the season heading into the final period.
Then Maly found her open on the perimeter 70 seconds in and she buried one to tie the game up.
“The past couple games, I haven’t really been hitting shots, but these guys have been on me all week about just staying in it, keep shooting,” Mogensen said. “Once I saw that first one going, I was like, ‘All right, here we go. I’m ready to go.’”
Indeed she was. Mogensen hit another two minutes later to put the Jays up four, then another on the next possession to answer an Allison Weidner trey, then she hit another with two and a half to play in the middle of a tie-breaking 8-0 Creighton run.
Mogensen went 4-for-4 from deep to lead all scorers with 12 fourth-quarter points. She added 12 assists and four rebounds while turning it over one time in 30 minutes.
“For Molly, I think it was huge because she hadn’t shot the ball,” Flanery said. “She scored 10 points at the very end of the South Dakota State game, but she has not scored the ball at the level that she’s going to. So I just think when you see the ball go in against a really good team in a tough game, that’s a huge. Even for a fifth-year kid, that’s important. The other part is she doesn’t have the ball in her hands as much. Now that we’re starting Kiani [Lockett] and Lauren, one of Molly’s adjustments is she’s not our primary point guard as much. She doesn’t have the ball in her hands as much, so it’s, maybe, a little bit harder for her to get a rhythm.”
All Gas for Brake
Perhaps the biggest bucket of the game came from the most unlikely of sources.
With the game tied at 66-all and less than three minutes on the clock, Jensen found the ball in her hands with the shot clock winding down. She looked to attack, drew a second defender and kicked the ball out to fellow senior Mallory Brake, who hadn’t attempted a 3 on the season. Even so, Brake rose up with confidence and swished the shot to give Creighton the lead.
“I told my teammates I was shooting it,” Brake said. “That thing was going up. I had a feeling once Lauren got denied a little bit it was coming my way.”
Brake does a lot of things for the team, but 3-point shooting isn’t one of them. She was 5-for-27 in her career heading into the night, and one of them was an unintentional bank.
“I will have to admit, it’s not like I have the confidence with Morgan being in the corner, but I was super, super hyped when it went it,” Jensen said. “But I was saying she was making them in warmups. I always shoot behind her in warmup lines and she was cashing them in warmups. So given that, I guess I’m not shocked.”
That 3 sparked the 8-0 run that put the Bluejays in the driver’s seat and allowed them to secure the victory.
Brake finished with 11 points on 5-of-6 shooting, outscoring her first total from the first three games combined (eight). She added six rebounds, four steals, three assists and a block while defending multiple positions, including Markowski at the five.
“They’re a very talented offense,” Brake said. “I know we’ve talked about having a gritty mindset, just kind of taking them out of their rhythm, whether that’s meeting Markowski before she gets too low on us, keeping our feet active, not getting too high, and just disrupting the passes to her and running them off the line. It was all those little things that got us this win.”
Up next for the Bluejays is a trip to Destin, Florida, for the Emerald Classic. Creighton women’s basketball will take on former conference foe Wichita State on Monday at 7:30 p.m. CT on FloHoops. On Tuesday, the Jays will take on either Syracuse or Missouri.
