Two and a half months and 19 games into the season, Creighton men’s basketball is still searching for consistency.
Greg McDermott and his staff have continued to experiment with different defensive looks and rotations, seeking what works best for this year’s squad. The Bluejays won their first three Big East games but have alternated losses and wins since to fall to 5-3 and 11-8 overall.
“You just hope, you just hope the daily repetition is going to show itself more and more on game day,” McDermott said. “We still make too many mistakes, especially the defensive end. Whether it’s just a positioning mistake or communication mistake, things that are that are very correctable and don’t take a lot of effort, we’re making too many of those mistakes for the third week of January.”
Creighton has given up more than 85 points in each of its last three games, including Friday at Providence. Josh Dix said the team had a tough film session on Sunday, and Jasen Green said most of it was focused on defense.
“The main thing was just our level of connection on the defensive end isn’t where we want it to be at,” Green said. “So we spent a lot of time talking about that, like where certain players should be in during certain situations and stuff, and also a little bit on the offensive end. Staying true to our game and playing how we play without letting the other teams beat us was also big point of emphasis.”
Creighton’s adjusted defensive efficiency ranking has dropped precipitously after cracking the top 50 at one point, down to 76th. In conference games alone, the Bluejays are fourth in effective field goal percentage allowed and fifth in defensive efficiency, but they’re also dead last in block percentage and 10th in opponent turnover percentage. Replacing four-time Big East Defensive Player of the Year Ryan Kalkbrenner with a 6-foot-8 five man playing through a shoulder injury has shrunk the teams’ margin for error exponentially this season.
“It’s been inconsistent, and it is what it is,” McDermott said of his team’s defense. “There’s only so much you can do without rim protection. I don’t like to play a lot of zone; we played some against Providence to try to get ourselves back in the game and keep them out of the paint, so we may have to do a little bit more of that at times. When you’re lacking rim protection, your ability to guard the paint is really challenging. We’ve gotten better. I think individual pieces have gotten better, but just the team part of our defensive schemes, there are still too many breakdowns. In basketball, when you one guy makes a mistake, you’re going to play for it.”
The Bluejays had four days off to rest and break down their own film after the Providence game, and they’ll get another four after Wednesday’s home game against Xavier to do the same. The lighter slate follows a stretch of five games in 12 days, three of which were on the road.
“They need a little time off after Wednesday, so we’ll take Thursday, Friday off and then get back at it on Saturday,” McDermott said of his approach to this week. “It’s an opportunity to work on ourselves, and we were able to do that on Sunday as well this week. Generally, you don’t get many of those opportunities this time of year, so we needed that, and we’ll take advantage of it again on Saturday of next week.”
After watching the film, McDermott said the Bluejays had some breakdowns in transition defense and ball screen coverage, but their offense also set their defense up to fail with some bad turnovers. Creighton can’t afford that on Wednesday when the Bluejays face a Xavier team that lives in transition. The Musketeers have the 15th-shortest average time of possession (15.8 seconds) and are 64th in adjusted tempo.
The first meeting with Xavier in Cincinnati back on Dec. 17 is the game that sparked Creighton’s turnaround. The Bluejays blew out the Musketeers (8-3 at the time) 98-57 in Austin Swartz’s coming-out party. The sophomore went off for 27 points, the most ever by a Bluejay in his Big East debut.
Xavier pulled out a three-point win against Georgetown in its next game then dropped three straight — to UConn, DePaul and Marquette. Since then, the Musketeers have beaten Butler and Providence, hanging 186 points on the board in the process.
“I think we caught them at the right time,” McDermott said of their first meeting. “They were playing really well, kind of coming off that Cincinnati game. We were able to make some shots early and get some stops and create some separation. They’re playing much better than they were then. Their transition game was concerning to us the first time around, and we held them to 11 transition points, which is, I think the last two games against Butler and Providence, they had 64 transition points. So we’re going to have to do a good job in that regard once again.”
The Musketeers have four players averaging double figures with a fifth just shy. Tre Carrol leads the way at 16.7 points, 5.8 rebounds, 2.9 assists and 1.2 blocks, though Creighton held him to seven points on 3-of-7 shooting in the first meeting.
Malik Moore (fourth in scoring at 10.7 per game and second in assists at 4.0 per game on the season) has become more offensive-minded in conference play, leading the team at 16.9 points per game while shooting 41.3% on 6.6 3-point attempts per game. Roddie Anderson is averaging 12.8 points while 6-foot-10 forward Jovan Milicevic is contributing 11.1 points while shooting 42.7% from 3. Point forward Filip Borovicanin leads the team with 4.4 assists and 7.8 rebounds per game while adding 9.8 points per game.
Xavier is one of the best in the country at taking care of the ball (ninth-lowest assist rate) and sharing it (second-highest assist rate), and it’s a solid 3-point shooting team (35.8%, 80th), but the Musketeers don’t attack the offensive glass (10th in the conference in offensive rebounding rate, ahead of only Creighton) and they struggle mightily inside the arc (47.9%, 293rd).
An emotional (and perhaps rotational) boost could be on the way as Josh Townley-Thomas continues to work his way back from surgery for an injury suffered after Creighton’s season opener against South Dakota. The 6-foot-10 walk-on out of Creighton Prep has been cleared for noncontact work and was in a practice jersey on Tuesday.
“Just noncontact stuff right now, but it’s been great to see him back in a practice uniform,” McDermott said. “Obviously, he’s really worked hard during this rehab process. He was really important to our team early. It was too bad that he got hurt, because not just the fact that he played some minutes, but what he brought to the practice for every day, his energy, his enthusiasm to put on that jersey and compete every single day, you don’t understand how important that is until he’s gone.”
Tipoff at CHI Health Center Omaha Wednesday is set for 6 p.m. on FS1 with Jason Ross Jr. and Nick Bahe on the call.
