Creighton men’s locked in and dominated the second half to open the season with a 76-61 win over Kansas City Monday night.
The Bluejays had to rally from an eight-point deficit inside CHI health Center Omaha to give Alan Huss his first official win as the head coach of his alma mater.
“If you’d have told me in 2001 on my senior night that I’d be back being able to being able to represent Creighton again, I don’t know what I would have said. This place meant so much to me as a player, as a person. Clearly, I wasn’t going to be an NBA basketball player, and I knew my career was coming to an end, and it was crushing that I wasn’t going to get to put that Creighton jersey on ever again. This isn’t as good as that — nothing is — but this is about as close as you can get.”
Here are three takeaways from the win.
Finding a Defensive Identity
Way back before Creighton’s exhibitions, Huss said his biggest question about the team is what its defensive identity was going to be. He and his staff spent the whole offseason installing a new, more aggressive scheme, but for it to work required total buy-in from the players, something Huss was uncertain about even a few days before the opener.
With one game down, that identity appears to be a bit bipolar at the moment.
Huss called Kansas City the aggressors in the first half. Creighton got off to a decent start with a 10-4 lead early, but then things bogged down for the Jays while Kansas City got comfortable. The Jays forced a handful of turnovers early, but when they didn’t, the Roos scored without too much resistance.
Kansas City shot 55.2% from the field and 7-for-16 from 3 in the first half to take a 39-33 edge into the locker room after leading by as much as eight.
“I think we were in the right places,” Huss said. “We got a little stretched out, and we did it without force. The key to our defense is being aggressive in the right spots, and I thought we were fake aggressive in the first half. We were way too extended. We want to be in our full-court pressure, but once they enter the basketball to kind of the first receiver, we want to be back in our gaps and provide support for our teammates.
“I thought we got way overextended. We gave them some easy looks. We allowed them to use and reject some ball screens where we made catastrophic mistakes we couldn’t recover from. More than anything, we just did everything without force, and I think that’s the difference.”
A different team came out of the locker room for the second half. The aggression was real and on point far more often, resulting in a 22-point half on 39.1% shooting with 12 turnovers.
Jackson McAndrew dives for the ball during the second half against Kansas City. Photo by Brandon Tiedemann.
“It’s easy to bounce around and play defense when you’re playing well on offense,” Huss said. “Tonight we found out you have to do it all the time, and unfortunately for us, it took us digging ourselves a bit of a hole, but our guys rebounded, and the second half I thought our energy was better, our discipline got better, and we wore into them a little bit with our pressure defensively.”
If you want to see that defensive pressure in action, watch the game from the 17:51 mark to the 9:50 mark of the second half. You won’t see a single point from the Roos. Creighton went on a 17-0 run and held Kansas City scoreless for eight full minutes to turn a 44-38 deficit into a 55-44 lead.
That run featured a stretch of seven straight Kansas City turnovers, including back-to-back steals — the first leading to a Hudson Greer layup, the second to an Austin Swartz 3 — to give Creighton its first lead since 19-18.
“We didn’t play our basketball in the first half at all,” Enis said. “We got stops, and that’s what led our offense to kind of get going. In the first half, we couldn’t get going because it was always versus set defense. They kept hitting shots, hitting shots, and we kind of shut their water off in the second half and got our offense going …
“I think we got on the floor like five times in the second half alone. I don’t think we dove on the floor one time in the first half. Just making all the little things, like we’ve been talking about this whole week — our standard, just energy, effort and our attitude. I think in the second half, that’s what all led us to the outcome of today. I don’t think we did that in the first half.”
That 17-0 run featured three triples and four buckets in the paint as defense led to offense. In all, Creighton forced 22 turnovers that led to 21 points on the other end — after forcing 20 turnovers against Minnesota as well. It took just one game for this group to blow away last year’s high for forced turnovers (18). Fifteen of those turnovers were steals, the most for a Creighton team since taking the ball away 19 times against Georgetown in February of 2021. Seven different Jays had at least one steal, with BJ Davis’ four leading the pack.
“If we’re going to play this crazy style defensively, we’ve got to force turnovers, because we’re going to give up some easy baskets from time to time,” Huss said. “We were far from perfect defensively tonight. Like I said, the integrity of our shell got violated several times, which is disappointing because we’ve worked tirelessly at trying to make sure that thing stays intact. But it’ll give us some good film.
“As far as what it’s supposed to look like, I don’t think we know yet. We’ve got a basic concept, but everyone that plays this style of defense, I think, finds their own identity in it, and I think ours is yet to be fully written.”
Enis Embodies “Let it Fly” Mantra
Huss promised the “Let it Fly” motto would live on, and Wes Enis is determined to follow through on his new coach’s statement.
The flamethrower from South Florida caught fire in the second half en route to a 25-point performance, the most in a Creighton debut since Cyril Baptiste in 1969.
Enis attempted 13 3-pointers by himself, making five of them, and shot 7-of-18 overall. He also went 6-for-8 at the foul line in a team-high 33 minutes.
The 6-foot-2 guard scored Creighton’s first eight points in the second half and poured in 17 overall in the period, just five short of what the Roos managed as a team. Enis was just 2-for-7 from the field in the first half, but one thing Creighton fans will learn about him quickly is that he’s aways thinking about the next one.
Wes Enis shoots a 3-pointer against Kansas City. Photo by Brandon Tiedemann.
Enis has played two games in front of fans at CHI Health Center Omaha so far, including the exhibition against Minnesota, and it hasn’t always been smooth sailing. He’s shown a bit of tunnel vision and has pressed the issue a bit too much at times. On the other side of the coin, he’s shown what he’s capable of with the 3-pointer to send the Minnesota game to double-overtime and the second half against the Roos.
“He’s got to find that balance,” Huss said of Enis’ shot selection. “Part of it is we’ve got to get better at executing some set offense to where he doesn’t have to get into one-on-one stuff so often, but we want him to be aggressive. A lot of the ones he missed tonight, those transition ones for us, that’s what this program’s been built on under Coach Mac for so many years, and we probably had eight or 10 of those plays tonight where we just we just missed them, those types of shots that we’ve been making.”
As a team, Creighton finished 9-for-28 from 3-point range, just 32.1%. That followed a 10-for-38 outing against the Golden Gophers. However, Creighton also caught fire in the second half on Monday to outscore the Roos 21-0 from the arc with a 7-for-16 showing.
“Part of it is we’ve been so banged up; a lot of these guys haven’t been able to get their extra work in, and you can tell we’re just struggling to shoot the ball a little bit right now,” Huss said. “We’ll get back after it and we’ll figure out a way to make some of those shots and get the crowd in it a little earlier.”
The only other double-digit scorer for the Jays was another transfer guard in Davis, who got to cooking late in the game and finished with 13 points on 3-for-5 from the field and 5-for-6 from the line.
Davis only shot 1-for-5 from 3-point range in the two exhibitions, but Huss said he had been the team’s best shooter throughout the offseason in practice. He went 2-for-2 against Kansas City, including a pull-up to beat the shot clocker buzzer and give season-ticket holders free Godfather’s pizza with 15 seconds to play.
Digging Deep, Finding a Gem
Huss started the same group he did in both exhibitions but went 10 deep in the first five and a half minutes, then extending that to 12 within the first seven. Nine of the 12 played double-digit minutes and all nine of them found the scoring column.
Hudson Greer, Katrelle harmon and Jasen Green all had their moments, but the star off the bench was Trevon Carter-Givens. The 6-foot-10, 190-pounds freshman led the trio of centers (starter Oswin Erhunmwunse and back-up Fredrick King being the other two) in total minutes while making some of the loudest plays of the game.
He finished with six points on 3-of-4 shooting, four blocks, a steal and a rebound in just over 15 minutes of action. The Jays outscored the Roos by 20 with the freshman on the floor, largely because he was one of the players fueling that 17-0 run.
Trevon Carter-Givens throws down one of his three dunks against Kansas City. Photo by Brandon Tiedemann.
“Especially given the matchup tonight, I just thought Tre gave us a little bit more energy,” Huss said. “He really got from action to action on offense. He blocked some shots defensively; he was more active on that end. I was just really impressed with his energy, and I think it just happened to be that he was the guy off the bench that brought it. We needed a spark off the bench, and we had several guys have an opportunity to be that guy, and Tre stepped up and filled that void.
“There are going to be other nights where it’s Fred, there are going to be nights where it’s Oswin, and I think really the answer is we’re going to have kind of a three-headed attack at that thing for a while.”
Shortly after Carter-Givens checked in for the first time, Creighton’s other freshman in Harmon found him for an alley-oop off a pick-and-roll. Shortly after that, he ran back after a turnover and swatted a transition 3-point attempt from behind.
In his first second-half stint, he had a sequence where he denied a shot at the rim then ran the rim to receive another lob from Harmon. A defender actually tipped the pass upward, but the freshman used his 7-foot-5 wingspan to corral it anyway and throw it down. On the ensuing defensive possession, he swatted a pull-up jumper out of bounds. He later put an exclamation point on his performance with a one-handed tip-slam off a missed 3-pointer from a teammate.
“It just ignited our whole team, just the energy he shows,” Enis said. “I don’t think I’ve seen a freshman play like that in his first game ever in all the time I’ve played basketball. He just did all the right things today, and it was really cool to see, as a freshman, him do that …
“He’s going to play hard at all times. He never takes a play off. In the paint, he thinks, ‘It’s my paint, no one’s getting a shot up; I’m sending everything out of bounds,’ and then getting in and out of rolls, just his lob threats, he just plays with a chip on his shoulder, and he’s just a dog.”
Carter-Givens showed that he’s capable of making an impact this season with his length and athleticism as well as his intelligence, which Huss praised. The key for him will be whether or not he’s able to hold his own defensively and, perhaps more importantly, on the glass as Creighton faces bigger, more physical front lines in the Big East.
