Greg McDermott & the Bluejays look to restart after significant departures from last year’s Top 10 team. Can McDermott continue Creighton’s best stretch of success in program history?
by Jordan Beckley
The clock struck midnight on the 2023-24 Creighton Basketball season after an enduring 82-75 loss to Tennessee in the Sweet 16 at Detroit’s Little Caesar’s Arena.
Greg McDermott’s team was spent and was able to finally breathe. The game concluded a frenetic season for the Bluejays that had many ups and downs but was always played with the gas pedal touching the floor.
Upperclassmen leaders Trey Alexander and Baylor Scheierman had logged nearly 1300 minutes each across those 35 games and their exhaustion was evident. Creighton made the Sweet Sixteen for the 3rd time in four years after clawing out a win in double overtime against Oregon in the round prior. Alexander was a hero in that game but was his tank was on empty against the Vols turning in one of his worst performances of the season going just 3-12 from the field.
Unfortunately for Alexander it was his last game in the Creighton Blue. Other players exhausting their eligibilty included McDermott’s 1st Team All Big East Performer Baylor Scheierman and the team’s most reliable bench player of the past few seasons in Francisco Farabello.
There are 200 minutes in a College Basketball game to split between your 13 scholarship players. Alexander, Scheiermann and Farabello leave 94 of those minutes vacant for Greg McDermott heading into next season.
Nobody in the Big East and maybe in the country has leaned on his starters quite like McDermott has the past few seasons. Now with essentially half of his production gone, Creighton and Coach McDermott get to hit reset.
The Book of Greg
The end of the Scheierman and Alexander era of Creighton closes one chapter for Creighton Basketball, but it’s a book that is probably longer than you might think. The parts authored by Greg McDermott have had wide ranges of outcomes, but have become increasingly captivating.
Creighton somehow has only had two coaches the past three decades with McDermott succeeding the Dana Altman run. There were some bright spots and origin stories before the two, but for the most part the story of Creighton Basketball has been written by those two coaches. As much as Dana Altman made the Bluejays a Missouri Valley Conference power, it’s been Greg McDermott’s work that has pushed Creighton to new heights.
When Altman left Omaha for Oregon, McDermott was finishing up a middling tenure as the Iowa State coach. Coach McDermott had spent four seasons in Ames and was unsuccessful in his attempt to go above .500 falling a few games short each season. Perhaps reading the writing on the wall, McDermott left Iowa State & the Big 12 to take the Creighton job in the MVC.
Coincidentally, Coach McDermott left for Nebraska right as his son Doug was graduating High School. Greg unsurprisingly convinced his son to decommit from Northern Iowa and follow him to Creighton. It was a decision that would shape the start of Coach McDermott’s success at his new home.
Arguably the Doug McBuckets & Dad era is the most well remembered era of Coach McDermott’s time at Creighton. Some people might remember Doug for playing at Creighton for what seemed like 7 seasons. Many others might be like “Oh yeah that one awesome year Duggie McBuckets played at Creighton. I remember that!” In reality, Doug played for four seasons in Omaha being an All-American his last three seasons and winning the Wooden Award in his senior season at Creighton.
Greg McDermott rode his son to the 2012-13 MVC Regular season Championship, multiple MVC Tournament Titles and eventually a no.3 seed in Doug’s senior year. Doug became Creighton’s All-Time leading scorer (over 1,000 points higher than second place) and his final three seasons were the three highest scoring seasons in program history.
Meanwhile, Greg used the Bluejays’ prominence to promote Creighton from the MVC to the Big East. After the 2013 wave of realignment removed stalwarts like Syracuse, Pitt, Louisville, Notre Dame, UConn, & Cincinnati it left the old Big East’s table empty and the McDermott family capitalized.
Would Creighton be a program similar in stature to Drake in the MVC had Greg & Doug not moved from Iowa to Omaha?
We can’t say, but Doug playing his final season (his Wooden Award Season) in Creighton’s inaugural season in the Big East also went along way to cement Creighton as a player in their new playground.
The years that followed the Doug McDermott teams were lean. For a few seasons Coach McDermott was once again fighting to make the NCAA tournament and failing before the Justin Patton & Khyri Thomas teams earned a pair of bids in 2017 & 2018. Both of which resulted in first round exits. However, it proved McDermott could develop NBA players beyond ones he shared DNA with.
Ultimately, Coach McDermott had to find himself in this period after Doug left. The one constant was always threes. His team consistently launched the deep ball at a rate reminiscent of the three point revolution happening in the NBA.
Coach McDermott seemingly stumbled upon this foundational philosophy through his seasons with his son as he intentionally built that team to have shooting around his star forward (who by the way also shot a ton of threes). In his last season at Iowa State, McDermott’s team shot 16.9 threes a game which was good for 216th nationally. By Doug’s senior year, the Bluejays were 11th nationally at 24.5 attempts a game and the no.1 3pt shooting team by percentage at 41.4% and lead the country in made three pointers.
McDermott must have seen the opportunity in the equalizing aura of the 3 point line as his teams from then on out (both good and bad) became built around the three. It took experimenting but by the 2019-20 season, gunners like Marcus Zegarowski, Ty-Shon Alexander and Mitchell Ballock were jacking threes on their way to earn Creighton’s first (and only) Big East Championship.
Unfortunately, that team would have their NCAA Tournament taken from them due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The Bluejays may not have had their opportunity for National recognition in 2020, but it did kick off the best 5 year stretch in Creighton history and eventually earn them National recognition.
Just Keep Winning
Creighton has always had a proud program even if the Bluejays aren’t Nationally celebrated.
The Bluejays gave legendary coach Eddie Sutton his first D1 coaching job. In between NBA coaching gigs, legendary Knicks center Willis Reed coached Creighton in the 1980s. Despite being a school with approximately 4,500 undergrad students that has been mainly an Independent or MVC member, they’ve made 25 NCAA Tournaments. Despite being out of the MVC for over a decade now, they still have the most MVC Tournament Titles (12 in total) by more than double the second place teams (5 for Northern Iowa & Southern Illinois).
The program has 0 Final Fours and therefore obviously no National Titles and in a “rings or bust” culture people may not recognize the job Greg McDermott has done in Omaha.
In the past 5 seasons, McDermott has gone 118-41 (74.21 win%) and finished 4th or better in the Big East each year. In the 10 NCAA tournaments that have actually happened since Creighton joined the Big East, he’s lead them to 7 of them (and would’ve been 8 in 2020). McDermott has 5 of the 6 highest March Madness seeds in program history and all of the top 3. McDermott is the only coach to guide the Bluejays to a Top 10 appearance in the AP Poll and he’s done it in 6 different seasons. McDermott has unquestionably become one of the Nation’s best coaches.
Creighton loses two guys in Trey Alexander and Baylor Scheierman who were critical to the Bluejays’ success, but they aren’t the first players to leave.
McDermott rewired the team on the fly last summer after the surprise departure of Ryan Nembhard. McDermott found productive guards after Marcus Zegarowski left. He’s grabbed productive players out of the portal like Alex O’Connell, Steven Ashworth and of course Scheierman. He’s also developed recruits like Marcus Zegarowski, Doug McDermott, Trey Alexander, and the backbone of next year’s team Ryan Kalkbrenner.
Creighton will be fine without **insert graduated or transferred player here** because McDermott has proven that he is a winning head coach. Next year will be a challenge, but I’m sure it’s one he’s excited to tackle.
New in Blue
So, just how good can the 2024-25 Creighton team be?
I already mentioned three time Big East Defensive Player of the Year Ryan Kalkbrenner will return at center. He averaged 17.3ppg, 7.6rpg, and 3.1 blocks per game last year in 34.7 mpg and will enter his super senior season looking to become Creighton’s All-Time leader in blocks as he is 105 behind Benoit Benjamin.
Side note, Benjamin accumulated 411 blocks in just three seasons at Creighton. Maybe there should be an asterisk next to Kalkbrenner’s name if he beats that after 160+ games and Benjamin did it in just 89 total games.
Anyways, Kalkbrenner will bring an identity to next year’s team and his defensive presence will set a floor for the roster.
Joining him as a lead contributor will be Steven Ashworth as he enters his second season in the Creighton Blue. The second year bump for transfers is a real thing as they get more comfortable with their coach & teammates and vice versa. Ashworth played better the back half of the season scoring in double figures in 12 of the final 15 competitions compared to just 10 times in the first 20 games. With more room in the backcourt, Ashworth likely will shoot even more than 6 threes a game and if he returns to the shooter he was for three seasons at Utah State, he might average 10 points from just behind the arc alone.
Alexander & Scheierman’s absence also signals a call to younger players whose minutes had been chewed up by the upper classmen. McDermott has a litany of forwards to play in that gap.
Mason Miller started 33 games last year and split the 5th slot on the court pretty evenly with Farabello. A jump in minutes is fair to expect, but what is the former four star recruit capable of?
Isaac Traudt is a player that McDermott hopes to see a second year transfer bump from. Traudt red-shirted his first year out of high school for Virginia and struggled to find his role on Creighton last season. The 6’10” forward was a Top-50 recruit out of high school and despite two years of workouts in College only mustered 12 shots inside the arc last season. There’s got to be more to him this year.
Jasen Green is an intriguing rising sophomore forward who will jump at minutes if anyone in front of him falters.
However, one big name to know is Freshman Jackson McAndrew. The 6’9″ forward is known for his shooting touch (over 45 3pt% in AAU). A shooting big like him will be a versatile weapon for McDermott to deploy in unique ways. McAndrew was also the highest rated recruit to sign with Creighton in the recruiting ranking era until 4-Star Hudson Greer committed last Friday.
With that talent itching for opportunities and Kalkbrenner a lock for 36 minutes a game, the Bluejays could play a lot of bigger lineups this season. But who will fill out the backcourt with Ashworth?
I would say it is a lock that Texas Tech transfer Pop Isaacs starts next to Ashworth. The 6’2 scoring guard had a contentious if not climactic season in Lubbock last year earning 3rd Team All-Big 12 but likely burned bridges with teammates in the process. Isaacs is a gunner and will happily pick up the missing shooting slack. Pop shot a whopping 7.3 3pt attempts a game last year despite just a 29.% from distance. Hopefully with the shooting that will surround him at Creighton, Isaacs can bump up his efficiency.
Jamiya Neal is another transfer that will get significant minutes this season. The Arizona State transfer started 31 games last season averaging 11ppg on bad shooting numbers. McDermott probably is banking on those improving as Neal moves to a better environment too.
McDermott also pulled a second 4-Star recruit in 6’4″ guard Larry Johnson. It will be interesting to see if he can crack the rotation with three upperclassmen in front of him. My guess given McDermott’s history is that he will maybe earn a few minutes here and there.
Finally, one of the biggest mysteries for next year’s team is Fedor Žugić from Montenegro. The only details on Creighton’s website about the 6’6″ wing is that he, “was a member of the Montenegro U20 team that won a bronze medal at the FIBA U20 European Championships, averaging 18 points, 3.1 rebounds and 3.0 assists per game to land a spot on the All-Tournament Team.” That was two years ago. Based on his highlights from last year, he could be the slashing and shooting wing that could bridge the gap between some of these forward heavy lineups or small ball lineups.
There could be another high seeded tournament team here for Coach McDermott to piece together. Any team with Kalkbrenner will have a pretty high floor. There will be tons of shooting to surround Kalkbrenner and whoever he is setting screens for. The Bluejays have a tough nosed group of seasoned guards in Ashworth, Neal, and Isaacs. How well can this team rebound with the teams best rebounder Scheierman gone? Will the new players be able to defend without fouling like last year’s rotation did? Will one or more of Traudt, Miller, or McAndrew be a good to great player?
Coach McDermott will have to experiment to find out the answers to the questions that come with a roster reset like this, but if he’s lucky Creighton might be able to make another run this year.
Creighton has been unlucky.
The 2019-2020 team starring Marcus Zegarowski and Ty-Shon Alexander didn’t even get a chance to rumble their way to a Final Four. A bad draw in 2020-21 saw Zegarowski have to go up against the undefeated Gonzaga team in the Sweet 16. Maybe they make the Final Four in an easier bracket that year. The next season the Bluejays were poised for a deep run before stud freshman Ryan Nembhard had a season ending wrist injury. Still, Creighton almost upset eventual National Champion Kansas in the Round of 32 that season. The next year Nembhard’s other hand prevented Creighton their first Final Four after the refs called a touch foul to give San Diego State the go-ahead free throw with no time left.
At some point the Tournament luck shows up in your favor. You get the right draw, your team stays healthy at the right time, the bracket breaks right, the refs call it your way, whatever.
You have to be both good and lucky to make a Final Four.
McDermott has now sustained his success through multiple roster schematics. This season he will pass Dana Altman (327 wins) for the most wins All Time at Creighton (McDermott sits two behind at 325 wins).
The Bluejays will reset this year and look towards a younger core. Who knows, maybe this is the year Creighton finds their luck in March and McDermott & Creighton get the National stamp of approval they haven’t been asking for.