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Creighton women’s basketball celebrated the start of the new year with a victory, topping Butler 68-64 at D.J. Sokol Arena on Wednesday afternoon.
The Bluejays led by as much as 19 before letting the Bulldogs back in the game, but Creighton did enough to secure the victory and improve to 3-0 in Big East play and 11-3 overall.
“You listen to [Greg McDermott] after the game yesterday, he’s like ‘sometimes it’s just not your day,’ I heard him say on the on the postgame on my drive home, but you’ve got to find a way to win,” Coach Jim Flanery said. “And that’s kind of what we did. We weren’t as clean and sharp as we’re going to need to be. But you have to win three or four or five games a year like this. To go from a pretty good year to a really good year, or a really good year to a great year, you have to win when you don’t have your best stuff.
“I don’t want to discredit what they did, but we’ll have to be a little better going forward.”
Here are three takeaways from the game.
While the game goes down as a victory, Flanery and the Jays came out of it with plenty to clean up moving forward.
Butler was without its leading scorer in Caroline Strande after losing its first two Big East games by a combined 43 points (with Strande only logging 11 minutes in the two games because of an injury). The Jays looked to be headed for a blowout, building the 19-point lead in the second quarter, but mistakes on both ends opened the door for a comeback and the Bulldogs turned it into a grinder Creighton needed to win in the fourth quarter.
“We’re going to have to be quite a bit better than we were,” Flanery said. “Defensively, they scored 40 points in the second half, shot almost 64% from the field and got to the line 13 times. We just had way too many mistakes and breakdowns for a veteran team, and when you when you make the mistakes that we made for a veteran team, you kind of give them enough easy baskets to keep their confidence up. I thought that was a big piece of why they kept staying in the game … I’m glad we won, credit to Butler, but we’re going to have to be quite a bit better to achieve the goals that we want to achieve.”
A shining example of the lack of focus Flanery was upset about came 43 seconds into the second half. Creighton gave up an uncontested layup on a back screen play, leading to a frustration timeout from the head coach.
“If you ask my wife, I’m really good at being repetitive, and I was repetitive about the particular play that they got layups on in the first half,” Flanery said. “I dressed it during two different time outs, I addressed it again at halftime, and then it might have been the second play of the second half and they got a layup with just no awareness. We start four fifth-year seniors and a third-year junior. I wasn’t irate. I just said, ‘Look, we can’t be a great team and have that breakdown 40 seconds into the second half.’”
Creighton is 3-0 in league play, but the victories have come against the only three teams still searching for their first conference win. The schedule will toughen up soon, and the team’s leadership knows they’ll have to elevate their game moving forward.
“I said to the team at the end of the game, way to pull out the win, but if we want to be at that level that we all think that we can be at and beat those really good teams that are in our conference, that stuff that we just did on the court isn’t going to fly,” senior Jayme Horan said. “We won and everything, but I think a lot of us are kind of boiling right now. We didn’t play the best and yes, we won, but at the end of the day, we have very high expectations for ourselves, so we just have to kind of figure out what we need to do to take that next step when we do play UConn and all those teams that are down the road.”
The first half included three Creighton scoring droughts that lasted longer than three minutes (3:03, 3:43 and 4:29). The Jays didn’t make a shot from the field in the last 5:23 of the first half.
The first 20 minutes also included a 14-4 Creighton run that saw the Jays score on six straight possessions to take the lead midway through the first and an 18-6 run to extend the lead to 19 midway through the second.
“I feel like I felt that lead grow when we got out in transition and just made simple plays,” Morgan Maly said. “They wanted to slow the game down and I feel like they did that kind of with their pressure and continuing into the second half.”
The second half saw more of the same as a 3:59 Creighton scoring drought allowed the Bulldogs to trim the lead to five, but the Jays made enough plays to stretch it back out to 15 midway through the fourth and then held on against a final Butler push.
Flanery he said he went deeper into his bench to get some reserves playing time early in the game and he thought that had an impact on the stop-and-start nature of their offense, but the Jays also got a little careless with the ball at times (13 turnovers) and didn’t shoot a terribly high percentage for the game (41% overall, 34.6% from 3).
“Looking back, I thought it kind of compromised the rhythm that we had through the first probably, 12,” Flanery said. “We were up 19 and then at half, it’s 12, and then you can’t play as big a rotation, necessarily, in the second half. As a coach, you second guess things like that. But at the same time, you have kids who work hard if you can get them two or three minutes…
“But it wasn’t just that. We missed some shots. I was not displeased all that much with how we played offense. It was more just I felt like we had too many turnovers. We had a couple moving screens, and we’ve got to get away from that a little bit.”
Early in the second quarter, Maly and Lauren Jensen were both outscoring the Bulldogs on their own. Maly poured in 15 points in the first 13 minutes before cooling off to finish with 17 on 7-for-19 shooting, though she also corralled 10 rebounds and recorded two blocks.
Jensen led everyone with 22 points on 8-of-18 from the field (3-of-8 from 3) plus five assists and four rebounds, but she also missed her last three shots before fouling out with 2:56 to go in the game.
“Morgan made everything early,” Flanery said. “I think she made five of her first seven and one of her next eight. Well, that’s basketball. Maybe she’s got to move it a little bit during that 1-for-8 stretch, but she got mostly good shots. Lauren, same thing. Lauren missed a couple of wide open 3s, and if she makes maybe one more…”
Jensen and Maly combined for 39 points, but the other three starters totaled just 11 on 14 shooting possessions between them. Creighton needed a spark off the bench, and that’s what Horan and junior Kennedy Townsend provided.
Horan scored nine points on 4-of-7 shooting with a 3-pointer, grabbed six rebounds including three on the offensive end and nabbed two steals. Creighton outscored the Bulldogs by nine in her 22 minutes on the court.
“I thought Jayme was great; 21 minutes is a lot for her, but I felt like we needed her out there today, because she was doing things at both ends, and she’s a great communicator,” Flanery said.
Townsend matched her with nine points, shooting 3-of-5 from deep with some timely makes and grabbing an offensive rebound of her own, part of Creighton’s 10-6 advantage in o-boards and 9-2 edge in second-chance points against the top offensive rebounding team in the Big East.
“Kennedy and I know our roles on this team, and when it comes down to those things, we’re going to go to the offensive boards, all that kind of stuff,” Horan said. “You can sense it, when things are starting to not go our way and when you need to make that little extra play, and even if you’re tired, find it in your tank to put it out there for them. I thought Kennedy did really well in the third and fourth quarter of doing that, and it kind of set an example for the rest of the team to get some o-boards.”
Townsend and Horan both stepped up in a big way when Creighton needed to turn the tide in the third quarter. After the Bulldogs had trimmed the lead to five, Townsend knocked down a 3 after a Mallory Brake offensive rebound to end Creighton’s drought from the field, then Horan followed it up with a put-back through a foul after Molly Mogensen forced a turnover but came up short on her transition layup attempt.
“I think that was really huge,” Horan said. “They were in a flow, so it kind of put a stop to that, but also gave us the confidence, like, ‘yeah, we still have this in the bag’ kind of a thing. We’ve just got to trust what we prepared and all the preparation we’ve done in the past few months.”
Creighton will once again hit the road for its next match, traveling to Providence on Saturday for a 1 p.m. CT tipoff.
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Creighton women’s basketball caught fire in the fourth quarter to take down No. 21 Nebraska 80-74 at D.J. Sokol Arena on Friday afternoon. The Bluejays (2-2) have now won eight of the past nine games in the series. Nebraska (5-1) outscored Creighton 50 to 26 in the…
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