Offensive woes costly in loss to Jays

By Brian Rosenthal / Huskers.com

Tim Miles hoped to give a capacity crowd of 15,902 fans at Pinnacle Bank Arena an entertaining, back-and-forth game, with Nebraska landing a haymaker blow at the end to knock out No. 10 Creighton.

Instead, the Huskers couldn’t pick themselves up off the mat after absorbing the second of two big blows.

Nebraska withstood the first – an 18-4 Creighton run to begin the game – but didn’t survive a poor start to the second half, and the Bluejays eased to a 77-62 victory on Wednesday night, their sixth straight in the annual intrastate series.

“I give Creighton a lot of credit,” Miles said. “They did an excellent job, especially at the start of the game and in the second half, about five minutes in, when they made their run.

“They’re an extremely talented team, they’re well coached, and they beat us tonight. It makes me, obviously, disappointed and sick to my stomach that we couldn’t foster a better fight.”

It won’t ease Miles, either, to see that Creighton, ranked among the nation’s top five teams in scoring, shooting and three-point shooting, went 12-of-23 on free throws, an ordinary 5-of-15 on three-pointers, committed as many turnovers as Nebraska – and still won by 15 points.

The problem for Nebraska (5-4) was mostly offense, or a lack thereof.

Tai Webster scored 20 points on 6-of-17 shooting, but the rest of the Huskers shot 29.6 percent, and Nebraska shot just 3-of-22 on three-pointers.

“We usually don’t shoot that many, but some of them were readily available,” Miles said. “I thought we took too many early in that very first run when they hopped us 14-2. We were just amped, as you could see. Glynn (Watson) threw up a floater and it hit the backboard, like, hard, and you could see, in him, how amped up he was.”

Numerous times, Nebraska missed open players inside, most notably Ed Morrow and Michael Jacobson. Miles said a failure to connect under the hoop was a result of playing with a lack of poise on offense.

“Poise is, you catch the ball, there’s pressure there but your eyes are up under the rim,” Miles said. “Well, when you’re excited, you’re either looking for your next pass, or you’re looking to see what’s coming at you. So you’re racing.

“We just didn’t play with enough mental poise that way. You can’t play basketball well without great offensive poise.”

Nebraska scored on only two of its first 15 possessions to begin the game but rallied from a 14-point deficit to tie the game twice.

Creighton led 31-30 at halftime, and again Nebraska sputtered to begin a half, this team scoring on only three of its first 16 possessions after halftime.

“I thought we were in good shape until Tai picked up his fourth (foul) and then we went on a long, long drought that we cannot allow to happen,” Miles said. “I know we don’t have a lot of leadership, but at the same time we have guys who can make those plays.”

Defensively, the Huskers held a running Creighton team to a season-low 12 fast-break points, kept 7-foot-1 center Justin Patton in check with nine points and held a 44.6 percent three-point shooting team on the season to five makes.

All of that, though, helped opened the lane for point guard Maurice Watson, who scored a game-high 25 points on 10-of-20 shooting. He also had eight assists.

Creighton coach Greg McDermott said he sensed early Nebraska was intent on not letting Patton get loose for dunks – he entered with 21 this season.

“We saw early that they committed to that,” McDermott said, “and we told Maurice, ‘They’re not going to leave the shooter and they’re not going to leave the roll guy — that means you are open going to the rim, and you have to go attack and score until they do something different.’

“That’s what makes us hard to guard when you have a guy like Maurice’s ability that can make those decisions and a guy like Justin’s length and athletic ability attacking the rim. Then you got good shooters surrounding them.” 

 Miles said he didn’t regret his defensive game plan.

 “We forced them to a plan B, at times, and they went extremely small then,” Miles said. “Then we had to go to our plan B, and we didn’t execute it very well. We missed several switches on stuff we’re supposed to be switching that we don’t normally do, but when they played that small, it really made us.”

Bottom line, Miles said, Nebraska was “too inept” on offense and didn’t play with enough offensive poise.

“They did a good job,” Webster said of Creighton’s defense. “I think they made us shoot a lot of tough ones, and they had a lot of length on their team. They probably tried to make us shoot those tough ones. We were taking too many of those tough ones, to be honest. We are a team that does well when we are on the rim. Coach Miles always says, ‘Love the two, like the three,’ so that’s when we are at our best.”

Nebraska has little time to regroup before facing yet another Top 10 team – at third-ranked Kansas on Saturday. It’s Nebraska’s sixth game in 16 days against teams among the top 51 of this week’s RPI.

“If this doesn’t hurt you, nothing does,” Miles said. “If you’re there tonight and in another 20 minutes you play video games until 1 a.m., you really don’t care. You’ve got to hate losing.

“We’ve got to teach them how to win, too. I think it’s watching tape and meeting with guys and all that fun stuff, and just continually cultivating a relationship of trust and understanding of what good basketball looks like and how we have to do it against top level competition.”

Reach Brian at brosenthal@huskers.com or follow him on Twitter @GBRosenthal.