Creighton women’s basketball improved to 5-0 at D.J. Sokol Arena on Wednesday with a 71-68 win over Marquette.
Creighton (13-3, 5-0 Big East) built up a double-digit lead then survived a late Golden Eagle rally thanks in large part to a prolific shooting display by Morgan Maly.
Here are three takeaways from the win.
Down to the Wire
Creighton led by 11 at halftime, by 15 a few minutes into the third quarter and by 12 with four and a half to play.
However, the final seconds ended up being far more stressful than they should have been because the Golden Eagles closed the game on a 10-1 run, scoring with 75 seconds left to make it a three-point game.
Creighton had two chances on the other end to make it a two-possession game but couldn’t convert, giving Marquette the ball with a chance to tie. After a timeout with 17.7 to go, the Golden Eagles ran some action that ended up with Jaidynn Mason — who was 3-for-9 from deep on the season heading in — flaring out to the 3-point line for a fading 3 at the top of the key as Kiani Lockett closed out for the contest with less than eight seconds to go. It didn’t fall and Mallory Brake secured the rebound.
Maly said the coaches’ directive was simple: switch everything, guard the arc and grab the rebound.
“We’ve practiced that enough,” Flanery said. “We’re switching everything, we’re not supposed to go inside the 3 … I thought they’d run some baseline screens and potentially an elevator screen to free somebody up. So we just say chase and then step off the body of your defender so you can take a switch … I was pretty comfortable. With the amount of time, I felt like they were going to have to go for a 3 …
“We had a veteran lineup in there, and Kiani gave a little bit more help, honestly, than she should have, because she did have to close a little bit to that kid. She was a little bit too far off the body, honestly. I don’t think she fouled the kid, but the kid fell down, so you’re holding your breath on that one.”
Marquette only had one foul at that point. The Golden Eagles used two more to stop the clock, but they missed their third attempt and Creighton ran out the remaining time to secure the victory.
Bombs Away
Creighton got crushed in the paint, 38-12. The Bluejays shot 12-of-31 (38.7%) inside the arc and just 5-of-16 on layups. It took the normally efficient Lauren Jensen 19 shots to score her 17 points, and no third scorer emerged to provide offensive support for the team’s stars.
None of that mattered though because the Bluejays rained 3-pointers to offset their deficits in other areas, 14 of them on 26 attempts to be exact. That’s good for 53.8%.
Most of that came from one person: Maly.
Crete’s finest went off for 28 points, shooting 8-of-9 from deep while knocking down both her mid-range attempts. She also corralled a team-high six rebounds.
“We needed it, because honestly, Lauren, in the first half, struggled by her standards for sure, and then we didn’t get as much offense out of Molly [Mogensen] and Kiani as we normally do, but I thought we did a good job of finding her,” Flanery said. “Eight-for-nine is pretty absurd, and I would say a lot of them were really makeable, but there were at least three tough ones … She shot it OK in practice the last couple days, but not at that level. But I think she’s like any player, you see a couple go in early, the basket gets a little bigger, and I think she sensed that we needed it a little bit more tonight.”
Flanery said Marquette’s frontcourt players are young, and oftentimes a forward’s first instinct is to protect the paint. The Bluejays took advantage of that time and time again, setting screens to free Maly all night or finding her in transition when her defender failed to locate her.
She scored eight in the first, eight in the second and six in each of the last two periods, knocking down her last seven shots.
“I saw the first one go down, and then from 3, their bigs were sunk in the paint and I think we did a good job of trying to touch the paint, come out the other side and have screeners there for me,” Maly said. “I just had a lot of really open shots tonight, and they went in … I just take my matchups a little personally. So I was like, ‘This young buck’s on me, she’s still sagging off,’ so I was just letting it be known.”
The Bluejays recorded assists on 21 of their 26 field goals, with nine of those going to Maly. Her only unassisted bucket was a 3-pointer when the defender finally flew by trying to chase her off the line. She took a dribble to the side, reset and fired away.
“It’s great,” Brake said. “I love watching her shoot and make 3s. It makes everyone’s job a little bit easier, so it’s fun.”
The eight 3s are a career-high, besting her previous high of six set four different times. She was two points shy of her career-high of 30, set twice, and one shy of her season-high, 29 against Wyoming. She’s now shooting 48.3% from 3 on the season, tops in the league by a good margin.
Tale of Two Halves Defensively
Marquette entered the day second in the Big East in defensive rating and third in points allowed, but it was the Bluejays who flexed their defensive muscles in the first half on Wednesday night.
The Golden Eagles shot decently well in the first half at 47.8%, but they only hit two 3s and two free throws and the Bluejays forced them into 15 turnovers, seven of which were steals. Creighton led 37-26 at the break.
“They were a little more predictable, I think, in terms of what they wanted, which was, other than [Lee] Volker, No. 1, and [Skylar] Forbes, 11, they don’t really shoot a lot of 3s,” Flanery said. “We preached activity on the post, and, like I said, I thought they were just a little bit more predictable by passing up some shots on the 3-point line, so we didn’t really have to second-guess ourselves by leaving the 3point line. A lot of the turnovers were, they had some travels, but either they drove it and we collapsed on the drive, or we collapsed on the post … Our preparation was good, because we talked about we felt like we could turn them over quite a bit in the post area and in the paint by just collapsing on the dribble.”
A big part of Creighton’s first-half defensive success was the work of Brake and Jayme Horan in particular on Marquette’s star forward, holding Forbes to one point and three shot attempts with two turnovers. She got loose a bit more in the second half but still finished with 13 points, well short of the 19.7 she averaged in her first three Big East games.
“We came into the game with a lot of respect of her game,” Brake said. “Coach told us she made a big jump in the off season, and we knew to take her seriously as a matchup and not to give her anything easy, just kind of pushing her out if she was trying to get a post up and face up, facing her with a little bit more physicality, and keeping her off the glass was huge. So containing her definitely helped the rest of our defenders kind of zone in on the other players.”
The Golden Eagles cleaned up the turnovers in the second half and Creighton had a much tougher time getting stops. Marquette shot 63% from the field in the second half and cut the turnovers down to four to give itself a chance at the end.
For the second straight home game, Flanery came away happy with the win but disappointed in the defensive effort, execution and consistency.
“We have to just tighten some things up defensively,” Flanery said. “The last two games have kind of had the similarity of getting out to a big enough lead and then we just had some loose possessions defensively where their confidence stayed at a high level. When you keep a good team’s confidence there, you risk what has happened the last couple games. So it’s a good learning experience that way, but we’re going to have to tighten that up, because I think Butler was 42 in the second half, maybe after 20-some in the first half, and tonight it was 26 and 42.”
One play stood out vividly in his mind as an example of the issues he’s been harping on. Jensen stole the ball and took it all the way for a layup, falling to the ground after finishing. The Golden Eagles immediately in-bounding the ball and threw it ahead to a cherry-picking Forbes for the uncontested layup.
“I’m like, ‘You guys, that can’t happen,’” Flanery said. “It was a fast break, we had people in the backcourt, and just to let her run by us — we gave up a free-throw rebound in that stretch. They played really well offensively in the second half, but we gave them probably four really easy baskets. Like I said, the one in transition where when we laid the ball in, we had three people in the backcourt. That cannot happen if you’re trying to accomplish some of the things that we’re trying to accomplish.”
Creighton can’t afford lapses like that on Saturday when the Bluejays head to South Orange to take on a 12-3 Seton Hall team who is off to a 4-0 start in Big East play.
