Creighton men’s basketball went 2-0 during the first week of the regular season with an average margin of victory of 21.5 points, but head coach Alan Huss exited the week more frustrated than pleased.
For Creighton’s new head coach, it’s process over results, and he didn’t see his team stick to the game plan in the second half of Thursday’s 83-55 win over Le Moyne. The jays led 54-17 at halftime then proceeded to shoot 27.6% from the field, turn the ball over 10 times and lose by 11 in the second half.
“We try to honor the game by being completely process-driven,” Huss said after the Le Moyne win. “We deviated from process in the second half; that’s been this team’s M.O. thus far. Clearly, that’s something I’m doing wrong. I’ll eat this one. We’ll get back to work tomorrow, and we’ll have a spirited workout tomorrow to try to get ourselves ready for next week.”
Including the exhibitions, Creighton has yet to lose a game this season. The Jays also have yet to play a complete game. Against Iowa State and Minnesota in the preseason, Creighton blew big leads. In the opener against Kansas City, it trailed at halftime.
Against Le Moyne, BJ Davis said the Jays got caught playing the scoreboard. When they let their intensity drop, they had a hard time ratcheting back up once Le Moyne began to fight back.
“If we can get past that, we’re going to work diligently at it to just be more engaged, just more disciplined, and if we can make that jump and get over that, then I think we’ll be in a good spot,” Davis said.
In the first half, the Bluejays held the Dolphins to 5-of-21 from the field with just one bucket in the lane and forced 16 turnovers. After halftime, Le Moyne cut the turnovers to three and scored 18 points in the paint. Huss called the game a perfect example of what their defense is at this stage.
“If we give maximum effort, we can be very disruptive, we can be hard to play against, we can use our effort and our communication to overcome some of our breakdowns because we’re still new to this,” Huss said. “Then the second half, when we when we deviated from process, we thought it was going to be cute, easy, and soft, we were chasing ghosts. We didn’t defend very well, and instead of having solid traps, they end up being reaches, grabs. We commit seven fouls right away, all just soft ticky-tack fouls. We turn it over, all those things. They’re all related. It’s all soft-related, and if we don’t give maximum effort the way we’re playing now, we’re in trouble.”
More often than not, Davis is the one at the point of attack when he’s on the court, trying to heat up opposing ball-handlers and disrupt what the opposition is trying to do. He had two steals and a block in the first half against the Dolphins and wants to be the one setting the tone to replicate what the Bluejays did in the first 20 minutes consistently.
“That’s just got to be our standard,” Davis said. “We’ve got to make that our identity, and it starts with me being on the ball, so I have to do a better job in my role, showing up every day, and that’s something I’m going to do.”
As poorly as the second half went, perhaps the sequence that had Huss the most fired up during the game was in the first half, when the Jays gave up a 3, then had a bad possession on offense that ended in a clumsy post-up from Oswin Erhunmwunse and a kick-out for a difficult 3 late in the clock, then gave up another 3. Huss immediately called a timeout and lit into Erhunmwunse and the whole team. At that point, the score was 42-15.
“It’s always about the standard,” Huss said. “I struggle to make it about anything else, and it’s cute to get a couple wins, nice, but that’s not what it’s about. It’s about us getting ready for, like I just told the guys, for the next month. We’re going to play as difficult a stretch as anyone in college basketball, and as I reminded them, we didn’t shy away from it. That’s what we told them in the recruiting process. They were all excited about playing in it, playing that level of schedule.
“That being said, it comes with a responsibility to the name on the front of the jersey, to the people that come support us financially, support us by coming to the games. They have a responsibility. We have a responsibility as a staff to have these guys ready to compete in this stretch because we’re not going out there for participation trophies. We’re going out to try to win games, and we’re trying to get better. When you deviate from process, you don’t get yourself ready to play the stretch we’re getting ready to start.”
The stretch starts with the team’s first official road game at Kansas State on Tuesday night. Under new head coach Casey Alexander, the Wildcats lost their season opener to South Dakota State, 68-66, before bouncing back with a 95-78 win over Cal State Northridge. Kansas State is 119th in KenPom.
Brandon Rechsteiner, a 6-foot-1 transfer from Colorado State, led the way for the Wildcats in the first two games by averaging 21.0 points, 5.0 rebounds and 4.0 assists while shooting 38.5% from 3 on 13.0 attempts per game. Jaden Schutt, a 6-foot-5 transfer from Virginia Tech, is another dangerous shooter who went 5-for-12 from deep and didn’t attempt a 2-pointer in the first two games.
Locating Rechtseiner and Schutt as the Bluejays scramble around will be a big key as Kansas State ranks 10th nationally in 3-point rate in the early going, largely because of those two. Georgetown transfer Isaiah Abraham (a 6-foot-7 wing) and Xavier transfer center Pape N’Diaye (a 7-footer) both averaged double figures in the first two as well.
Creighton is expecting to have forward Jasen Green back in the lineup on Tuesday after he sat out Thursday’s win over Le Moyne, largely for precautionary reasons and with an eye on getting him closer to full health.
“You miss him just being in the right spot, knowing the right things to do, having the right message to one of these young kids when they’re a little soft,” Huss said. “Jasen’s another one who doesn’t say a ton of words, but when he does, he’s got a lot of credit with these guys. They know that if he’s bothering to tell him something, it means something, and for us to be the team we need to be, Jasen’s got to be out there for us.”
Tipoff on Tuesday at Bramlage Coliseum is set for 8 p.m. CT on FS1 with Jack Kizer and Donny Marshall on the call.
