Creighton head coach Greg McDermott wasn’t joking when he said last week that the Creighton men’s basketball team was going to have to get physical and learn something from the imperfect performance at South Dakota if it was going to have a shot at challenging No. 19 Gonzaga in hostile Bulldog territory.
Knowing this, the first half Bluejay team played with the physicality and offensive efficiency that McDermott was drilling into his players. The second half told the opposite story.
By the end of the 40 minute battle on Nov. 11, the Bulldogs ran away with a 90-63 victory over the visiting No. 23 Bluejays, delivering a second-half surge that erased everything Creighton had established early.
The dichotomy between the halves revealed both what Creighton is capable of — and how far they still have to go to reach it.
With “The Kennel” rocking and the energy electric, the Bluejays took to the floor hoping they learned enough in six days of practice to challenge a national title contender team so early in the young squad’s season.
Off to the races, it was Gonzaga who struck first, the offensive fittingly ignited by graduate Graham Ike, whose 20 point, 10 rebound performance began with a triple less than two minutes in the game.
A jump shot from sophomore guard Blake Harper opened the scoring account for the Bluejays, but Gonzaga wasted no time giving the ball back to Ike once again to drain a three.
The graduate would get his shot one more time in that three minute span, delivering another punch to the gut for the visiting Bluejay defense. That final triple pushed Gonzaga’s lead to four, 11-7, minimizing the impact of junior center Owen Freeman’s only successful shot of the night that put the Bluejays within one, 8-7.
Despite Gonzaga’s early shooting success, the Bluejays were able to stay step-in-step with the No. 19 team in the country. In fact, Creighton kept the deficit between zero and seven the entire half, even taking its first — if shot lived — lead, 20-19, with 12:32 remaining in the half with a triple from junior forward Jasen Green.
The Bulldogs tied the game 30 seconds later and regained the lead two minutes after that, but all things considered, by halftime — with Harper leading the charge with eight points and Gonzaga only reaping the benefits of one point for six offensive rebounds — McDermott said the defensive effort was well-executed in the first 20 minutes. At the break, the score sat at 44-38 in favor of the home team.
“Even with those three threes that he [Graham Ike] made in the first half, I liked what we did defensively. I thought we kept them off balance with some double teams and rotated out of them pretty well,” he said.
The same, however, could not be said for the second half. It was, as McDermott described it, “just a nightmare.”
The Bluejays opened the second half 0-for-6 from the field, providing the Bulldogs a perfect path to a 52-40 lead in just under four minutes. Creighton did not score a bucket until over four minutes into the half with a jumper from transfer guard Nik Graves.
After that shot, Creighton’s scoring became completely lifeless. Falling to a 21 point disadvantage with 11:29 remaining, the Bluejays never saw a deficit in the teens for the rest of the game. Instead, the gap continued to climb.
Helping widen the margin was a 21-0 Gonzaga run in just over six minutes; by 7:39, the lead was 76-45 before a layup from Graves finally put a stop to the double-digit run. Meanwhile, the Bluejays scored a total of nine points in about 13 minutes.
“We were soft offensively and then that carried over to what we were doing on the defensive end of the floor,” McDermott said.
Adding to the Bluejays’ woes and fueling the home crowd was the accumulation of 12 of the team’s 18 total turnovers just in the second half. Of those 12 second half turnovers, 11 were steals and seven were plain giveaways, yielding a costly total of 27 points for Gonzaga by game’s end.
Notably, between 13 minutes and eight minutes left in the game, Creighton turned the ball over seven times. Four different Bulldogs notched a steal in that time, including Jalen Warley and Mario Saint-Supery, who each grabbed three by the end of the night.
The Bluejays had no way to make up the deficit. Outscored 46-25 in the second half, the Bluejays fell 9-63 to No. 19 Gonzaga and moved to 1-1 on the season.
Sinking from a 45.83% field percentage in the first half to just 28% by the end of the game, the Bluejays only saw two players make it out of single digit scoring for the night, as Graves and Harper both notched 12 points. As a team, Gonzaga over doubled Creighton’s paint point output, 48-20, and pocketed a 41-33 edge in rebounds.
Yet, a difficult night on the road doesn’t allow much room to dwell, as the Bluejays return home to face Maryland Eastern Shore tonight at 7 p.m. In hindsight, even in a lopsided loss, Gonzaga left Creighton with no shortage of teaching moments — lessons McDermott is intent on capitalizing on.
“When you come into an environment like this, you’re going to get exposed, one way or the other, and while I don’t like the result of the game, it’s going to be some great teaching opportunities for us,” he said.