The Bluejay Underground: A Creighton Sports Message Board

#17 Bluejays open homestand Tuesday night vs. Xavier

https://gocreighton.com/news/2024/1/22/ ... avier.aspx

Xavier is better than their record suggests. Blitzed Seton Hall by 20. Narrowly lost to UConn, Nova, and Houston. They like to play fast (fastest in the BE). Just hit shots at a normal clip, secure defensive boards, and keep this winning streak going.

Their big man is 6’10”. Perhaps we should keep looking for Kalk on offense? Please don’t let us go back to 5 shots for Kalk in a game.

SeattleJay wrote:Their big man is 6’10”. Perhaps we should keep looking for Kalk on offense? Please don’t let us go back to 5 shots for Kalk in a game.

+1 I wish we had a like button for things like this. Kalk played one of his best games ever at Seton Hall.

The line is Jays -8.5

Xavier is a bit tough to figure out, frankly.

They have played some really good teams really well -- beat St. Mary's, hung with Houston, battled at Nova, hung with UConn. They smacked Seton Hall badly in Cincy, too.

But like a lot of teams in the Big East, their overall results seem to be pretty different at home vs. on the road. The only road game they have won so far was at Providence. On the one hand, that's impressive because that's historically a really tough place to play -- and they smacked the Friars by 20. But outside of that, they lost at Purdue, at St. John's, at Nova.

So hanging with UConn, smacking Seton Hall, hanging with Houston, beating St. Mary's -- all at home. St. John's beat them by 15 in NY. Purdue ended up beating them by double digits.

So the Musketeers of Cincy may not be quite the same on the road. Then again, they barely survived Georgetown in Cincy in their last game with a one point win. So who really knows?

Our guys' legs will be the biggest question mark for me. If our guys are up for it tonight, I can see a close first half track meet that we pull away with stingier defense in the second half.

Probably a crazy thought considering how many minutes Mac plays the starters, but I have to believe after a 3 OT win against SH on Saturday, Mac's going to try to find ways as much as possible, and without sacrificing offense/defense production, to strategically use the bench to keep the starter's legs as fresh as possible. We will see...

And agreed that Xavier's hard to figure out. 8.5 spread seems large.

Here's hoping we can jump out to a big lead to accommodate more player rotations and keep as fresh as possible the starter's legs.

Going to be a dog fight tonight - hope the crowd is ready to bring it

jaysfor3 wrote:Probably a crazy thought considering how many minutes Mac plays the starters, but I have to believe after a 3 OT win against SH on Saturday, Mac's going to try to find ways as much as possible, and without sacrificing offense/defense production, to strategically use the bench to keep the starter's legs as fresh as possible. We will see...

And agreed that Xavier's hard to figure out. 8.5 spread seems large.

Here's hoping we can jump out to a big lead to accommodate more player rotations and keep as fresh as possible the starter's legs.

I think we just need to get over the fact that our bench is non existent. We will be lucky to get 5 decent minutes per game out of Traudt or King the rest of the way. It is going to be the starters and Bello playing heavy minutes every night that we don't play DePaul. We aren't playing at a super fast pace, TV timeouts are every 4 minutes and we only play twice per week so it is not a huge deal.

It would be nice to have another Wing or Guard off the bench to keep people fresh but we whiffed this offseason on bringing someone in that can play at a high enough level. Playing Fred more hurts our defense because he's not good enough/doesn't have the length to cover for everyone else in drop coverage.

Interesting analysis from XU perspective:

https://www.bannersontheparkway.com/202 ... basketball

They talk about digging on Kalk to try to stop him, as any rational person would. Plus, their starting big plays barely over 20 minutes a game.