Louisville Game Thread

[cujaysfan]

ESPN gives zero shits about non properties. They're the worst

[drbluejay]

Neal wins my standout player of the game, my MVP, and my choice as the best player on the court by far. I never dreamed that Neal would be this good on offense when he signed with the jays. He seems to always get the ball with only 6 seconds left on the shot clock and comes through most of the time. Neal is amazing in the open court and his one on one play. I wish we had him another year.

[drbluejay]

The entire starting lineup played awesome and each and everyone of them stood out. Fedor had the best pass of the game while he also contributed.

[BBfan]

For the coaching experts on here, why do you think Louisville did not use on-ball pressure defense in the first half? Heavy on-ball pressure is our weakness and the talk was that one of their strengths was guard defenders. Strange they let our guards roam free so much in the first half. I know they were worried about Kalk, but other teams address that by having their pressure prevent getting the ball to Kalk. Thanks.

[WBR Tom]

Here's a giant edition of WBR's Morning After with all the key stats, highlights, quotes and more. What a time for Neal to have his best game (so far) as a Bluejay!

https://whiteandbluereview.com/morning- ... und-of-32/

A couple of my favorite snippets from today's MA:

Neal is the first Creighton player to lead the team in points, rebounds and assists in an NCAA Tournament game since assists became an official stat in the early 1980s. Only two others have even led them in points and rebounds (without counting assists) — Arthur Kaluma vs. Kansas (24 & 12 in 2022) and Mitch Ballock vs. Kansas State (16 & 8 in 2018).

But it’s not just rarified air among Bluejays. Neal is the first player for ANY team with at least 25 points, 10 rebounds, and 5 assists while making 65% or more of their shots in an NCAA Tournament game since Marquette’s Dwyane Wade in the 2003 Elite Eight. That’s the kind of performance we’re talking about here — if legends are made in March, Neal cemented his status in Bluejay lore with this one.

[Chicagojayfan]

https://www.cardchronicle.com/2025/3/20 ... ghton-loss

transcript of the coach and some players. Louisville coach had some nice and insightful things to say after as well

[JaysLifer]

For the coaching experts on here, why do you think Louisville did not use on-ball pressure defense in the first half? Heavy on-ball pressure is our weakness and the talk was that one of their strengths was guard defenders. Strange they let our guards roam free so much in the first half. I know they were worried about Kalk, but other teams address that by having their pressure prevent getting the ball to Kalk. Thanks.

I'm not the expert you're looking for, but my guess is that it has a lot to do with their lack of depth and the energy it would have required to pressure the ball. Chucky is still apparently dealing with a lingering groin injury, and he had to spend 39 minutes chasing Ashworth around on the court. Kelsey said something in his postgame about how Ashworth is in perpetual motion and it took a lot out of Chucky to just have to defend him in the halfcourt. Then when their sharpshooter went down, their guard depth took an even bigger hit. I think you could see that their strategy was to actually slow the game down, as exhibited by the fact that their guys were still walking the ball up the court even with a double-digit deficit for most of the game.

[Angry Dan]

Heckuva game from the starters and some solid minutes by Traudt and Fedor.

We just rolled a team that was pretty solid on the road. That's the kenpom 21 ranked defense and other than some turnovers, it was a dominant offensive performance.

When this team is on they really can beat anyone.

what stood out to me was just how many of those 3 PT shots were wide open. They had no answer for Kalkbrenner in the paint, and our passing was too good for them to be able to stop him and cover people on the outside. Add in Neal's consistent scoring in one on one matchups and we have a really nice balanced offense that will be really difficult for teams to cover in the Tourney

And re: the "kenpom 21 ranked defense", With the way the conferences have aligned and are scheduling OOC games now, I think we'll see a lot of rankings like this one (and overall rankings) that just look strange and don't hold up when the NCAA tourney comes around

Louisville was atop of a lot of predictive metrics that you see with national champions.

[wildjays]

Creighton men's basketball took it to Louisville in the first round of the NCAA Tournament on Thursday & advanced.

Matt DeMarinis & Jacob Padilla break it all down and more in the Bluejay Beat podcast.

For Patreon subscribers:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/bluejay-b ... =join_link

[Chicagojayfan]

Heckuva game from the starters and some solid minutes by Traudt and Fedor.

We just rolled a team that was pretty solid on the road. That's the kenpom 21 ranked defense and other than some turnovers, it was a dominant offensive performance.

When this team is on they really can beat anyone.

what stood out to me was just how many of those 3 PT shots were wide open. They had no answer for Kalkbrenner in the paint, and our passing was too good for them to be able to stop him and cover people on the outside. Add in Neal's consistent scoring in one on one matchups and we have a really nice balanced offense that will be really difficult for teams to cover in the Tourney

And re: the "kenpom 21 ranked defense", With the way the conferences have aligned and are scheduling OOC games now, I think we'll see a lot of rankings like this one (and overall rankings) that just look strange and don't hold up when the NCAA tourney comes around

Louisville was atop of a lot of predictive metrics that you see with national champions.

In general, I think the idea of the predictive metrics make a lot of sense. You don't get to make deep runs in the Tournament if you only play great offense and don't play great defense, but those metrics only work if you have faith in the underlying data.

Bartorvik loved Louisville - 28th ranked offense, 21st ranked defense, but does anyone think they'd be ranked that highly if they'd played our schedule in the Big East? I certainly don't

Additionally, something I look at is how did Creighton perform in terms of offensive and defensive efficiency versus the other teams on the opponent's schedule. For instance, I thought our D was pretty good yesterday, but not as sharp as we've been in the past.

We held them to a rating of 106.6 on BBall reference. That was the 11th worst performance for their offense this year, but looking at the others that held them and you see a pattern of non conference teams - Tennessee, Ole Miss, Winthrop (what?), Oklahoma and Us. In Conference Duke did it twice, then GA Tech, VA Tech, Stanford, and Clemson 1x each

Offensive performance is also interesting. We had the second highest offensive rank versus them this year at 126.4 (only a game at Kentucky was worse). If you look at games for 114 and higher against them, it was Tennessee, Kentucky, Ole Miss and Us. In Conference it was only Duke

To me, looking at the comparable performances, the Bartorvik data/predictive metrics look like they were broken. I think the data people are going to have to figure out some ways to get a closer to accurate measurement in seasons where conferences like the SEC/B10 can ride a couple of good OOC wins to an unrealistically high ranking in the analytics