Arkansas-Little Rock 71, Creighton 69

Turbulence

I’ll say this first and foremost: I didn’t take the Arkansas-Little Rock Trojans lightly as an opponent. If there is one thing Dana Altman’s Jays teams have shown in the past 5 or 6 years, it is panache for the dramatic on the road against non-conference opponents. Vegas agreed with me, making the Jays no more than a 3-point favorite before the game.

Jays fans who tuned into the Big Show on Big Sports 590 AM shortly before the pregame radio show got a boost of good news; Justin Carter, who went down hard after a foul in the Oral Roberts game, was cleared to play and even regain his spot in the starting lineup. Good news.

Bad news. One of his fellow starters wouldn’t be joining him. As I dialed up KM3 on my television and settled in for the night with some Sam & Louie’s Pizza and Old Style Light (I’m watching my figure), I saw Cavel Witter taking the floor instead of P’Allen Stinnett. That was the first sign of trouble; Witter is a solid player, a guy who adds instant offense and an increasingly affective defense mindset. No, it was the absence of the sometimes manic Stinnett that signaled a problem. Fans hadn’t heard anything about an injury, so many armchair coaches were left to fret about any number of problems P’Allen might have caused.

The size mismatches were a bit evident all night
(photo from Omaha World-Herald)

Then the game started, and the good news picked right back up again. Kenny Lawson slammed home a dunk, got a layup to go, and popped a jump shot for his own little 6-point run, putting the Jays ahead 6-2 with 16-plus minutes to play in the first half. It looked like Lawson would be the focal point of the offense, despite the size advantage UALR had at almost every position.

He didn’t attempt another shot in the first half. That’s bad news.

Good news, though, seemed everywhere else other than in the paint. The sharpshooting Jays were out in full force, especially from long range. Of their 33 field goal attempts, 17 were from 3-point range. They made 7 3-pointers (half of their made field goals), led by Booker Woodfox (2-6 for the half) and Kaleb Korver (2-3). Bad news: Korver, effective in his 5 first-half minutes, wouldn’t see the floor in the second stanza.

P’Allen even got involved, although his efforts in the first half were mostly spent hoisting off-balanced shots. After not starting, he played 10 minutes.

The good news: CU went to the locker room with a 7-point lead. The bad news? They had a 16-point lead at the 5-minute mark. The Trojans recorded 7 steals in the first half. They also out-rebounded Creighton by 4.

The news didn’t get much better during the second half. From the 13:30 mark to the 8:30 mark in the half, Kenny Lawson was an offensive force yet again. During those 7 minutes Lawson scored all of Creighton’s 9 points. However, the Jays lost 1 point of their lead during that time and continued to accrue a negative number in the rebounding battle with Arkansas-Little Rock. Lawson finished with a team-high 15 points (on 7-9 shooting) but didn’t get to the free throw line more than one time and failed to get shots in clutch situations.

Lawson's offense was fine (15 points) but he only grabbed 4 boards

And in a scene reminiscent of so many Jays road games in the past few years, Creighton finally coughed up its double-digit lead as its opponent chipped away and chipped away until there was nothing more than a few points separating the two squads. With just under 3 minutes to play, Stinnett had the ball on the wing and the shot clock winding down. He made a nice move to juke his defender and had a clear path to the basket. He had a highlight-reel dunk in his sights, no doubt, but did what he does so often; he took off too early.

He missed the layup that would have given CU a 3-point lead with about 2 minutes to play. UALR got a few offensive rebounds on the other end following missed layups (CU lost the battle of the boards 46-26) and finally jumped ahead for the first time in a long time with a 1-point lead and 2 minutes to play.

You can guess how the rest of the game went. Jays went 2-4 from the free throw line (Witter and Josh Dotzler both made one and missed one on back-to-back trips). They failed to grab rebounds when they needed them most.

But Booker Woodfox saved the day, albeit temporarily, with yet another clutch 3-point basket. For as poorly as CU had played defensively and on the glass, Woodfox drained a shot coming off a down screen toward the top of the key to tie the game at 69-all with 40 seconds left.

The Jays needed a defensive stop. Good news is they got it. Bad news? They didn’t get the rebound, and they lost on an offensive put-back with 7 seconds to play. A Witter running jumper fell short as the buzzer rang, and the Jays left the court in Little Rock losers for the first time this season.

---

After the game, Altman and the Jays rushed off the court and immediately started addressing the “bad news” aspects of that game (and the season, for that matter). When asked why P’Allen didn’t start, Altman told Steve Pivovar “he did not take care of some responsibilities that we asked him to do.”

Piv gave P’Allen the opportunity to share exactly what those requests were, but Stinnett said, “when he tells me what those are, then ... as you can tell, it's a touchy subject."

Forget touchy. This team doesn’t have time to be touchy. They need to be tough. Other than Southern Illinois and maybe Missouri State, no Valley team has as tough a non-conference schedule top to bottom that Creighton. Booker Woodfox recognized the need to get physical, telling Piv:

“We've got to toughen up. We all got to get on the same page. We've got guys going different ways, and everybody has to do just one thing, and that's win. We got to start hitting people out there, we have to be more physical. We have to start being animals out there, crushing people when they go to boards or we're not going to win many games."

A few days after the loss, the focus turned again to physicality and rebounding in practice. Altman met with each Bluejay individually, no doubt discussing what exactly their play has been like during this early stretch of the season.

Altman even took a page out of Tom Izzo’s playbook, filling the practice court with football helmets and pads on Thanksgiving evening as a closed practice was about to begin.

Here’s hoping Justin Carter, former football player at Compton College and a second-team all-area running back at Watkins Mill in Maryland, taught his teammates a thing or two about hitting people in the mouth and bringing a physical presence to the court.

They’ll need it in conference play, and they’ll need it during the next month of non-conference action. With all of the turbulence from Tuesday night, the good news is the Jays were still in the game and had multiple chances to win. But if they don't get tough soon, there might be more bad news than good news for the foreseeable future.