Creighton women’s basketball snapped a three-game losing streak Tuesday with an 82-64 win over Xavier at D.J. Sokol Arena.
The Bluejays (8-11, 4-6 Big East) never trailed and spent much of the game with a double-digit lead, though the Musketeers (10-9, 3-7) made several pushes to keep it interesting until the fourth quarter.
After Xavier cut what was once a 14-point lead in half, the Jays outscored the Musketeers 17-6 in the final six minutes. Creighton nearly won by 20 despite registering one of the team’s worst 3-point shooting performances of the season.
“I think it’s great that we scored 82 points going 8-for-33 from the 3,” Coach Jim Flanery said. “That’s a big jump as a team. Probably our two best shooters, Neleigh [Gessert] and Kennedy [Townsend], are 4-for-18, and we still got to 82, so I think that’s a reflection of we did a lot of other things well … I thought we had a lot of people play well.
“I just thought, start to finish, it was one of our better games without even making the number of 3s that a Creighton team normally would make.”
Here are three takeaways from the win.
Winning in Other Ways
As Flanery said, Creighton couldn’t rely on its 3-point prowess to win the game Tuesday night. The Bluejays generated plenty of good looks for their best shooters early, but they weren’t falling.
Six Bluejays ended in double figures, but the best player on the floor was undoubtedly senior Grace Boffeli.
The fifth-year forward finished with 18 points (her most as a Bluejay) on 8-of-10 shooting, 15 total rebounds (her most as a Bluejay and tied for the third-most in her career), two assists, one block and no turnovers in 26 minutes. Eight of those rebounds were offensive, a new career high.
“I just really enjoy getting extra possessions for my teammates,” Boffeli said. “Whatever it will take, if I need to dive on the ground, I just like to be physical. I’ll do anything for my teammates.”
As a team, Creighton corralled a season-high 18 offensive rebounds, converting them into 21 second-chance points — 10 more than the Musketeers scored.
Creighton took a 34-28 lead into halftime despite shooting 4-for-19 from 3. In the third quarter, the Bluejays only attempted four 3-pointers, making two, while scoring 16 points in the paint. They shot 10-of-13 inside the arc while making a concerted effort to attack the basket in multiple ways.
“That was the message, but it doesn’t always translate,” Flanery said. “That was one of the messages was, ‘Hey, we’ve got to play a little bit more inside-out, we’ve got to throw the ball inside a little bit more.’ They were staying on screens, so we talked about curling to the basket. It wasn’t just Grace and Kendall post-up touches, which were effective … I thought we were better at just putting pressure on the basket with the cut in that third quarter.”
The 3-point rate spiked again in the fourth and the lid returned (2-for-10 in the period), but Creighton closed out the game with its defense. After allowing its previous three opponents to shoot 50% or better from the field, the Bluejays held the Musketeers to 5-of-16 from the field in the final period and 36.5% shooting overall.
McGee on the Rise
Flanery mentioned Kendall McGee’s post-up and offensive rebounding prowess, but Tuesday might have been the best all-around performance of the freshman guard’s season thus far.
She tied her career high with 15 points, shooting 6-of-10 from the field (2-of-4 from 3) and 1-of-2 from the free-throw line while chipping in five rebounds and two assists in 27 minutes off the bench.
Kendall McGee surveys the court against Xavier. Photo by Jackson Luethje.
“She’s coming,” Flanery said. “I think some of it maybe had to do with Ava [Zediker] being out. But I also think, without Kiani [Lockett], we’ve had more practice time with Kendall as a primary ball handler on one of the teams, or even just as a primary ball handler in practice. The more I see some of the plays that she can make as a primary ball handler, the more impressed I am. I think she’s put in the work too. She’s doing a good job of putting in extra work. She goes in on off days, and she’s in before practice. I think she’s definitely more comfortable.
“I thought she had a really good practice yesterday. That doesn’t always mean that you’re going to have a — but I think her decision making has gotten better, which is usually the case when you get two and a half months into the season and the speed of the game isn’t quite what it was, maybe, in November, because you’re able to slow down … She’s doing a really good job, and she’s a power guard. It’s not unusual for her to get us three extra shots, or five, six total rebounds.”
Creighton has been without its starting point guard in Lockett for most of the season, and she’ll miss the rest of the year as well. That has pushed Zediker, the freshman, into the starting point guard role. However, when Zediker missed a pair of games recently, responsibility fell on Norah Gessert and McGee to pick up much of the ball-handling and playmaking slack.
In the two games Zediker missed plus her first game back in which she played a season-low 22 minutes, McGee recorded three straight double-figure performances, averaging 14.3 points, 3.7 assists and 1.7 steals while shooting 47.2% from the field, including 3-of-8 from 3.
McGee said the expanded role helped her develop “tremendously,” but it’s the support of her team more than anything that has led to her recent success.
“Just the amount of support that I get from my coaches and my teammates to keep pushing and the play to my strengths, and sometimes I’ll hear them yelling if I’m not doing enough on offense and not posting up and things like that,” McGee said. “Just that confidence has continuously been poured into me has been very, very helpful. Then when Ava came back on the court, it just made it even better, as she’s a great person to play with.”
Allison All Over
While Boffeli and McGee were the stars of the game, Allison Heathcock was the one who tied the performance together. The junior wing stuffed the stat sheet with 14 points on 4-of-8 from the field (1-of-2 from 3) and 5-of-5 from the line, eight rebounds, five assists and three steals in 34 minutes, second behind only Zediker’s 35.
Creighton’s Allison Heathcock follows through after firing up a 3-pointer over Xavier’s Mariyah Noel. Photo by Jackson Luethje.
“Her hustle was great,” McGee said. “She was out there getting steals, deflections, taking charges, and that’s the kind of stuff that we need. I know that we get very, very hyped for 3-pointers, but those types of things we know we have to be hyped for as well as those are the things that take a lot of grit and take a lot of effort. I think that she really, really helped us push in that game and extend our lead, and even just maintain our lead at times as well.”
There was a point in the second quarter when Heathcock stole the ball and took it the other way for a three-point play, then on the next possession she stole it again and threw it ahead to Boffeli for her own and-one to give the Bluejays a double-digit lead at 27-16. Later, she ran back in transition and sacrificed her body to draw a charge, taking a pretty good shot in the process. She was slow to get up and spent some time with the trainer but later returned to the game.
In addition to box score production and energy-generating forced turnovers, Flanery also credited Heathcock for her work defending Xavier’s top scorer, Mariyah Noel. The junior guard hit her scoring average nearly on the dot with 16 points, but she did so while shooting 6-for-20 from the field.
Up next for the Bluejays is a trip to Chicago to face DePaul on Sunday. Tipoff is set for 2 p.m. CT, streaming on ESPN+.
