Do you think Butler has had enough of Creighton?
Five days after the Bluejays closed out the regular season with a convincing 20-point win over the Bulldogs last Saturday, the basketball gods brought the two programs together again for a quarterfinal matchup in the BIG EAST Tournament. And well, the outcome got no better for Butler.
Creighton took the fight right to the Bulldogs again, scoring the game’s first seven points and building first-half leads as large as 18 points before keeping Butler well at bay in the second half as the Bluejays overwhelmed Butler, 87-56, at Madison Square Garden Thursday night. It was the Bluejays’ seventh victory of 20 points or better this season.
The second-seeded Bluejays, who won their first BIG EAST Tournament game since 2017, will face the winner of DePaul-UConn in the semifinals Friday night at 9 p.m.
“I’m just really proud of our guys,” said head coach Greg McDermott. “Their preparation was really good this week. They obviously were well connected tonight on both ends of the floor and they were sharing the basketball with 22 assists. This is a special group of guys and they’ve had a lot of success the last two years in this league and I really wanted them to enjoy tonight and enjoy March. March was taken away from them except for a half of basketball at the Garden (against St. John’s in the quarterfinals) last year so the fact that they got this opportunity to get back out there tonight and advance, I couldn’t be more proud.”
If you were one of those who had any trepidation as to how well Creighton would perform in McDermott’s return from his one-game suspension, you learned almost right from the start that it was clearly going to be business as usual for the Bluejays. And that itself spoke volumes as to how the Bluejays’ program has handled the situation in which McDermott was suspended for one game for making insensitive comments after a late-season loss to Xavier.
“Obviously we’ve had a lot of conversations over the course of the last 10 days and I think we know each other better than we ever have,” said McDermott, whose Bluejays will be making their third appearance in the tournament semifinals. “There’s been a lot of emotions but I’m proud that they funneled those emotions in the right way tonight.”
Creighton opened the game with a 23-7 run and eventually built a 39-21 cushion before cruising into halftime toting a 42-26 lead into the locker room. Creighton continued to put on a clinic as soon as the second half commenced with Marcus Zegarowski doing the bulk of the early damage. Zegarowski opened the second stanza with a long three-ball for a 45-26 cushion before the Bluejays really started having some fun.
Zegarowski added another three-pointer before feeding Christian Bishop for a perfect alley-opp jam on the next possession. Then he added a layup before back-to-back three-balls by Shereef Mitchell and, who else? - Zegarowski - gave Creighton a 58-35 advantage.
But Creighton refused to take its foot off the gas pedal and when Ryan Kalkbrenner added a pair of layups sandwiched around an Antwaan Jones’ three-pointer, the lead was 65-35 and the rout was on.
“We just have a lot of unselfish guys who just make the simple, easy read and that’s what we did tonight and that’s what we need to do moving forward,” Zegarowski said.
After pouring in 32 points in that last Saturday’s victory over Butler, Zegarowski’s encore performance included 18 points and five assists. Damien Jefferson, who had 11 points in the first half when he shot 5-of-6 from the field, logged 14 points with Bishop chipping in with 10 points.
The lead grew as high as 32 points (74-42) with 6:36 to play after a bucket by Bishop before McDermott began clearing his bench and giving his reserves a chance to make some BIG EAST Tournament memories.
The Bluejays now stand just one win away from making their third trip to the BIG EAST Tournament championship game. Creighton reached the title tilt in both 2014 and again in 2017 but are still in search of their first championship hardware.
Their next step toward that goal will come against either UConn or DePaul on Friday night. Another chance for the Bluejays program to get back to normal and do what it does best - pile up points and victories.
“We’ve had some conversations obviously over the course of the last 10 days, especially in New York, more one-one one with me,” McDermott said. “Just continuing to work through this process. But the message I left all of them with is you have to enjoy this. Life’s too short and you got a great opportunity in front of you. We’re at our best when we’re hootin’ and hollerin’ and smiling and laughing. That’s when this team functions best and I think you saw a lot of that tonight. Both how the bench reacted when the starters were on the floor and then you saw how our starters reacted when some of our walk-ons were on the floor at the end of the game when they were making plays. We’ve built this program on culture and to have good culture you have to have good people and I have good people. And that’s why we’ve been able to get ourselves through a very difficult situation.”