Creighton men’s basketball bounced back in a big way Wednesday night, taking down a Villanova team ranked in the top 25 in KenPom 76-72 at the Finneran Pavilion.
It is Creighton’s first Quad 1 win of the season, and the Bluejays return to Omaha with a split of its two-game road trip. After squandering a 16-point lead at Seton Hall on Sunday, the Bluejays made winning plays down the stretch to improve to 10-6 on the season and 4-1 in Big East play.
“We go on the road and we out-rebound both opponents,” Coach Greg McDermott said on 1620 the Zone after the game. “We keep our turnovers really in check, and that’s how you win on the road. You don’t beat yourselves. We beat ourselves with some mental mistakes late in that Seton Hall game. Everybody makes mistakes — coaches, players, officials — and there was a lot of that in that game.
“But our guys responded. They stuck together and obviously came into a place that’s a very difficult place to play and left with a left with a win, which a Creighton team had never done in this building.”
Wednesday was Creighton’s first win after trailing at halftime and its first time rallying from a double-digit deficit to win this season. It marked four straight wins against the Wildcats, a program first. While Creighton has beaten Villanova at Wells Fargo Center a handful of times, the Bluejays were 0-6 at the Finn before Wednesday.
Here are three takeaways from the victory.
Bluejay Backcourt Shines
After strong starts against Seton Hall, both Josh Dix and Austin Swartz struggled down the stretch. The Bluejays needed somebody to make one more play, and neither of their go-to players managed to rise to the occasion.
That certainly wasn’t the case on Wednesday night. The duo combined for 37 points, eight rebounds, three assists and just one turnover, and they took turns hitting big shot after big shot in the second half.
For the fourth time since entering the starting lineup, Swartz led Creighton in scoring, finishing with 20 points, four rebounds and three assists in 31 minutes. The 3-ball wasn’t falling (2-for-7) but he still found a way to be effective, shooting 7-for-8 inside the arc. In the first half, he scored three buckets around the rim, and in the second, he did all his damage from just beyond the free-throw line.
As a distributor, he found Owen Freeman for a bunny, Dix for a 3-pointer and Jasen Green for an alley-oop, giving him a hand in just over a third of Creighton’s points.
“I think he was 1-of-5 to start, so the job that he goes 8-of-10 the rest of the game, I thought he picked his spots,” McDermott said. “I thought he made some nice plays with the pass as well. And then defensively, sometimes he’s somebody I’ve got to get out of there when the games being decided, but I thought he was very locked in on the defensive end as well.”
Dix added 17 points on 50% shooting, though he also only hit two 3-pointers, on six attempts. Like Swartz, the senior guard did much of his damage from the mid-range, including three jumpers in a four-possession span down the stretch to help the Bluejays maintain the lead. Dix got some similar looks against Seton Hall and none of them fell, so Wednesday was something of a regression to the mean for a player who has been so good in that area throughout his career.
Additionally, as has become one of the most reliable trends with this team, Dix’s contributions on the defensive end matched our outweighed what he did on offense. He was the primary defender on Villanova’s star guard Bryce Lindsay, who entered the game averaging 16.9 points and shooting 44.7% from 3 while sinking 3.3 triples per game. Against the Bluejays, Lindsay finished with four points on 2-of-10 shooting, going 0-for-3 on 3s with two assists and two turnovers in 31 minutes.
“Josh is an elite mid-range player, and their drop coverage was something that we thought we could exploit, and I thought he made good decisions, really, the entire game in that regard,” McDermott said. “The job that he did on Bryce Lindsay, who, in my opinion, is one of the best 3-point shooters in the in the Big East was incredible. He got very few good looks, and he really frustrated him to the point where he was a non-factor in the game.”
Dix’s efforts on Lindsay proved pivotal, as freshman guard Acaden Lewis went off for 20 points and seven assists, junior wing Tyler Perkins added 18 points and senior big Duke Brennan totaled 16 points, 12 rebounds and three assists. That trio combined to shoot nearly 57% from the field. A normal day from Lindsay would have made it tough for the Bluejays to keep pace.
Big Bench Boost
Another reason Creighton came out on top despite the strong showings of Lewis, Perkins and Brennan was a 27-9 edge in bench points — three days after that reserve unit combined for just 11 points in the Seton Hall loss. The star of that group was sophomore Blake Harper, who finished with 17 points on 6-of-9 from the field (1-of-2 from 3) and 4-of-4 from the foul line, three rebounds, one assist (for a Green 3-pointer) and one block.
The Bluejays outscored the Wildcats by seven in his 27 minutes on the floor. Harper started the first nine games of the season, but since moving to the bench, he had averaged just 13.7 minutes per game and hadn’t hit the 20-minute mark in any game. Wednesday was his highest-scoring game since the Bluejays beat Oregon in Las Vegas on Nov. 27 and his third-highest as a Bluejay.
“Just a sigh of relief, and just my work paying off, I would say,” Harper told 1620 the Zone. “Just my teammates keeping me up. I had a little bump in the road, but that just makes the story a whole lot better. I just want to thank my teammates and my coaches for keeping me level-headed and knowing my ability and trusting me to go out there and do my thing.”
Harper played 16 minutes, scored 10 points and didn’t miss a shot in the second half as McDermott leaned on him at the four spot against a smaller Villanova unit.
“He fought defensively,” McDermott said. “He came up with a couple big offensive rebounds, and it was just one of those nights, with the matchup, it was a better matchup for him than it was for Isaac [Traudt]. There’ve been a lot of games where Isaac’s played a lot and Blake hasn’t played as much, but tonight, the roles were reversed, and fortunately, Blake was ready to answer the bell.”
While Harper was the star of the second unit, Fedor Žugić also outscored every Villanova reserve, finishing with five points on 2-of-3 shooting (with a 3 and a driving layup). Beyond the scoring, however, it was the hustle plays he made that most impressed his coach. Žugić grabbed four rebounds in 13 minutes, and the Bluejays were plus-13 with him on the floor.
“He laid out for a couple loose balls in the first half that saved possessions for us,” McDermott said. “He was the first to the floor when there were several Villanova guys that could have made an effort, and he was the first one there. That kind of effort, I think, is contagious, and he hit a big shot for us, and he was defending Lindsay when Josh was out, and he equally did a great job defensively.”
When the starters were struggling against Seton Hall, nobody off the bench stepped up to pick up the slack. Wednesday was a different story, and the Bluejays came out on top because of it.
Green Guts it Out
Creighton fans went to bed with a smile on their faces Wednesday, but early in the game many seemed ready to write off the season entirely. Just 95 seconds into the game, Green got tangled up fighting for rebounding position and went down in what looked to be a lot of pain, grasping the left shoulder that he’s worn a brace on for the last few weeks.
Green is first on the team in rebounds, second in points and blocks and third in assists. He’s played three different positions and has logged the second-most minutes on the team. Losing him would be catastrophic for a Bluejay team that had already lost Jackson McAndrew for the season and has limited versions of Owen Freeman and Hudson Greer (who didn’t play Wednesday after logging a few minutes against Seton Hall).
Green exited the game and went straight back to the locker room to get it examined or treated. Creighton called him questionable to return. Roughly nine minutes of game time later, he was back on the floor.
“It’s been an issue,” McDermott said. “We know that. We’re trying to monitor it as best we can, and if he gets hurt, hit or pulled a certain way, it’s not good, and obviously that happened. I thought Owen and Kerem [Konan] did a great job during that stretch of making sure the separation did not take place until we could get Jasen the back of the game.”
Freeman finished with a bucket, a block, a steal and four boards in eight minutes in the game. Konan played four minutes, grabbing an offensive rebound and splitting a pair of free throws after he didn’t play in either of Creighton’s previous two.
After missing so much time in the first half, Green played 17 minutes in the second. He missed a few shots around the rim he normally makes, finishing 3-for-8 from the field, but still contributed 10 points, seven rebounds, two assists and a block, without a turnover. He also made some key defensive plays down the stretch, twice forcing misses at the rim with textbook vertical challenges.
Creighton doesn’t come close to winning this game without Green, but fortunately for the Bluejays, he was able to return and finish what he started.
