In a season featuring its fair share of low points, Creighton men’s basketball hit rock bottom on Tuesday with an 86-62 loss at last-place Marquette.
“That first half was embarrassing,” Coach Greg McDermott said. “One team had energy, one team had focus, and our team didn’t. We were a little better the second half, but you’re also playing against a team that’s up 30, so you take that with a grain of salt. We weren’t hooked up from the start.”
Here are three takeaways from the loss.
Rock Bottom
Creighton (12-9) had already trailed by 18 points on its home court twice this season, but Tuesday night was a new low.
Marquette was 124th in KenPom and 144th in the NET heading into its second meeting with the Bluejays. In round one, Creighton hit the Golden Eagles with a 25-2 run in the first half then cruised to a 21-point victory.
In round two, Marquette returned the favor — with interest.
Five minutes into the game, Creighton trailed 10-9 despite getting some pretty good looks from the perimeter early that didn’t fall. Then Marquette seized control and outscored the Bluejays 42-14 the rest of the way — including a leaning, contested 3-pointer from Chase Ross at the buzzer to give Creighton its largest halftime deficit since the 1993 season — Rick Johnson’s last at the helm. Creighton trailed 52-23.
“I think it’s as simple as we didn’t come as ready to play as we needed to,” Ty Davis told 1620 the Zone. “It started with practice on Sunday, as we just talked about in the locker room. Our urgency wasn’t there, and it needs to be better, and just a couple plays kind of stacked on one another, and it got out of hand pretty quickly.”
Davis said there was no excuse for the way the team played, and McDermott agreed — especially with five days between games.
“Coming off a break where you got a couple days to kind of recharge your mind and your battery and get your body feeling a little bit better, we should have had three great practices in a row,” McDermott said. “I thought Saturday was good, Sunday was awful and yesterday was just OK.”
They trailed by 31 early in the second half before trimming the deficit to 15 with less than three minutes to play, but that’s as close as they got.
Marquette alternated between blowing by defenders on the perimeter and manhandling them inside. Creighton offered no resistance on one end and no fight on the other, with the respective shot attempts at the rim illustrating so quite well. Marquette was 16-of-19 on layups and dunks in the first half, while Creighton was only 2-of-3.
McDermott highlighted live-ball turnovers as the biggest key heading in, and the Bluejays gave the ball away 14 times (11 of them via steals) for 17 points on the other end. On the flip side, Creighton only forced six turnovers for nine points. No teeth.
“They’re always active,” McDermott said of the Golden Eagles. “Their ball screen coverage was aggressive. We didn’t do a good enough job of getting a piece of the paint on the second side of the floor. Too much of our offense operated on the first side, and some of the shots were open, some of them were relatively contested, and you don’t want to take those contested shots when you’re struggling to score. You want to try to find something easy. We didn’t have much at the rim the first half. We shot two free throws the entire half, which is indicative of our ability to try to get in the paint and make something out of it.”
While Creighton shot over 50% from the field in the second half, the Jays only attempted two more free throws and finished 9-for-10 on layups and dunks — a third of the attempts Marquette tallied as the Golden Eagles earned a 52-24 scoring edge in the paint.
After a frigid first half, Austin Swartz got going in the second for 15 of his team-high 17 points, while Blake Harper scored 13 of his 15 in the final 20 minutes. Those two outscored the rest of the team combined, however, with Jasen Green — back in the lineup after leaving the Xavier game with an aggravation of his shoulder injury — the third-leading scorer with eight points on eight shot attempts.
In Desperate Need of Defensive Answers
McDermott (somewhat) jokingly said after the Xavier game that he needed Josh Dix to be able to guard three different guys every game, yet he can only guard one at a time. He’s been terrific on that end all season, but the recent team results haven’t reflected that.
After Dix took the Ross assignment in the first meeting, he started on freshman point guard Nigel James Jr. on Tuesday, and I thought he did a good job containing the explosive lead guard early. However, as the game went on it became far too easy within Creighton’s switch-everything looks for James to hunt the matchups he wanted, and he torched almost everyone else.
James led Marquette with 23 points in the first meeting, but it took him 22 shooting possessions to get there, and he only dished out three assists while turning it over four times. On Tuesday, James was the best player on the floor, finishing with 21 points on 8-of-14 from the field (1-of-3 from 3) and 3-of-6 from the line with seven assists and just one turnover. The 6-foot guard also put an exclamation point on the victory with a breakaway windmill jam off a steal.
Three others scored in double figures, including sophomore big man Royce Parham who went to work inside for 19 points on 9-of-11 shooting. Marquette shot nearly 70% from the field in the first half and nearly 60% for the game.
Conversely, Creighton shot 7-for-34 (20.6%) from 3, and with every miss, the fight and effort on the other end seemed to wane.
“Tough-minded teams, that doesn’t bother you,” McDermott said. “You have to dig deeper defensively when you’re not making shots. We had a lot of good looks and we didn’t make them, especially early. That first five minutes, I thought we had a chance to be up 10 or 11 to nothing, potentially, with the shots that we got, but we missed them. Then they got rolling, and it was really difficult for us to stop them.”
It’s been difficult for Creighton to stop anyone lately. They Bluejays have surrendered 80 or more points in five straight games. During that stretch, Creighton’s adjusted defensive efficiency ranks 325th nationally according to Torvik.
That clearly isn’t going to get it done, and until the team can discover some solutions, it’s going to continue finding itself in shootouts (or blowouts when its shots aren’t falling).
Long-Term Implications
An NCAA Tournament bid was already a long shot for Creighton based on the way the team has been playing, but Tuesday’s result saddles Creighton with a second Quad 3 loss — to go with just one Quad 1 win. Simply piling up wins the rest of the way (something this team still hasn’t proven it can do) likely wouldn’t be enough without beating No. 2 UConn once (or maybe even twice).
Creighton is still sitting in fourth place in the conference at 6-4, but the Big East looks more and more like a three-bid conference as the days go on.
In college basketball, no team is ever truly mathematically eliminated until it loses in its conference tournament, but at this point, it’s safe to shutter any tournament talk the rest of the way until this team proves it’s figured some things out.
That’s what the rest of this season is about: game-to-game problem-solving. Is this team capable of finding consistency? Who are the long-term building blocks on this roster? Is anybody improving?
My advice for Creighton fans would be to find what joy you can in small victories. Recognize those players giving max effort or making strides in their individual development. Enjoy the stretches where things click and the product on the court looks like Creighton basketball.
An example from this game was the play of former walk-on Shane Thomas, who McDermott turned to midway through the second half in search of a defensive spark. He played 11 minutes, scored a layup on a smart cut to the rim, grabbed two rebounds and made James work.
Moving forward, the process doesn’t change for the team itself. McDermott is always focused on taking things one game at a time and tackling the task at hand, and that next task is the most difficult they’ve faced thus far as No. 2 UConn is slated to visit CHI Health Center Omaha for Creighton’s annual Pink Out on Saturday. To do that event justice, the Jays will have to dig deep.
“Our urgency and our preparation these next couple days have to be a complete 360 from what it was the couple days leading up to this,” Davis said. “I know we’re fully capable of it as you’ve seen. We’ve got the No. 2 team coming into our home court on Saturday, the Pink Out game is a very, very special game for our team and our fans and our community. We’ve just got to do our part, and we’ve got to prepare and tip it up at 7 o’clock on Saturday night.”
