Boasting the preseason Big East Player of the Year in Zuby Ejiofor, defending regular season and tournament champ St. John’s was picked to win the league again in the preseason coaches poll. But like Creighton, they took a while to find themselves against a tough non-conference slate and lost to KenPom #2 Iowa State, #14 Alabama, #30 Kentucky and #38 Auburn. Unlike Creighton, they did pick up wins over #34 Baylor and #70 Ole Miss, so their non-con wasn’t a complete washout.
And now that league play has began, both teams look a lot closer to what everyone expected them to. Creighton is 4-1 in the league and one second away from being 5-0. St. John’s is 3-1 and two minutes away from being 4-0, blowing a big second half lead against Providence.
The Red Storm are physically imposing, relentless on the offensive glass and aggressive in passing lanes. Their adjusted defensive efficiency is 97.4, ranking 21st in D1. They’ve held opponents to a 47.1% effective field goal percentage (44th), 31.0% from three-point range (74th) and 47.3% from two (54th). They run teams off the perimeter (allowing just 33.8% of opponent’s shots to come from three), but it’s also hard to score if you get the ball inside as they’ve blocked 13.9% of opponent’s shots (29th). And then you have to factor in that one-fifth of the time opponents don’t get a shot at all: they’ve also turned teams over on 21.1% of possessions (25th) and stolen the ball on 11.7% of possessions (59th).
“When you play against us it has to be everybody handling the basketball, not just the point guard,” coach Rick Pitino said after they broke down Butler on Tuesday. “Our desire with every point guard is to wear them out physically so that in the last five, seven, minutes of the game, he makes mistakes. Just wear them out, wear them out. … Hit the body so the head will fall late in the game.”
Butler committed 21 turnovers, including on three straight possessions midway through the second half where St. John’s doubled their lead from seven to 14. A minute later, the Bulldogs failed to inbound the ball on two straight possessions under their own basket.
St. John’s had to be giddy with excitement when they watched the film of the second half of Creighton’s loss at Seton Hall. The Pirates turned the game into a bruising boxing match where they spent the early rounds landing body blows, counting on the Jays to make mental mistakes late in the game because of the accumulated stress from battling their pressure. And they did.
Creighton started the second half 7-of-9 from the floor in building their 16-point lead. Through the first 25 minutes of the game, they had committed just four turnovers. But over the final 15 minutes, they shot 3-of-18 and had seven turnovers. Granted, through the halfway point of the season Seton Hall has been better defensively than St. John’s in just about every category, and they’ve certainly been more consistent, but on paper St. John’s is even more tenacious. And their stated goal is to do exactly what Seton Hall did to Creighton a week ago: wear their opponent down while keeping the game relatively close, then pounce when fatigue sets in.
“Obviously there’s a lot of problems that that you face when you play St. John’s and it starts with their length and physicality and athleticism at the rim,” Greg McDermott said on Thursday. “Their ability to offensive rebound and protect the rim on the other end of the floor, too. It’s going to be important that they’re all ready to play and ready to play well.”
Nik Graves said one of the things that jumped out to him in film study was that St. John’s doesn’t let opponents inbound the ball easily. “Obviously we had some struggles against Seton Hall with that. So we have to clean up a couple things in that area and get ready to deal with their athleticism.”
Offensively, their best shot often comes after an offensive rebound. You can see the result of that in the stat sheet: the three players with the most assists are all forwards who crash the offensive glass, not their guards. Zuby Ejiofor leads the team with 44, Bryce Hopkins is second with 37, and 6’8” forward Dillon Mitchell is third with 35.
Ejiofor, as you’d expect from the league’s preseason Player of the Year, has been terrific. He’s averaging 16.1 points, 7.7 rebounds and 2.3 blocks per game, and is coming off a monster week. In the loss to Providence, he stuffed the stat sheet in a way you rarely see, logging crooked numbers in every single column. He had 33 points on 5-of-10 shooting inside the arc and 3-of-6 on threes, plus 14-of-23 from the line. He had 15 rebounds (11 offensive), three blocks, two steals and two assists. He also had seven turnovers and committed four fouls. And he drew 16 — SIXTEEN! — fouls on Providence defenders. Good grief.
Though that number is extreme, Ejiofor has been tough for anyone to defend without fouling. He averages nearly eight drawn fouls per 40 minutes (7.7 to be exact, 12th most in college hoops) and he’s very nearly taken more free throws (124) than shot attempts (138).
6’7” graduate senior Bryce Hopkins, who joined the Red Storm after transferring from Providence, is averaging 13.4 points and 5.0 rebounds. Limited by injury to just 17 games in 2023-24 and 2024-25, Hopkins was a first team All-Big East performer in 2022-23 and has returned to that form this year. He’s coming off a 17 point game against Butler where he scored 15 in the second half, and played only four first-half minutes due to foul trouble.
“Bryce is three years older so he’s probably even better than he was last time we played him,” McDermott joked on Thursday. “He’s a terrific player and you know, his ability to score inside out, and what he can do defensively has been pretty impressive. Together with Zuby, it’s a hard matchup. Obviously they’re both extremely physical and, you know, Zuby is one of my favorite players in the league. He just he gets so much out of his size and ability. He maximizes what he is as a player and he plays hard for 40 minutes every single night.”
Adding a wrinkle is that Hopkins’ foul trouble forced them to try playing Ejiofor and his backup, 6’11” Ruben Prey, together. Prey had his best game of the season, scoring 10 points along with two steals and a block, and that giant frontline presented problems for Butler.
Dillon Mitchell has been their sparkplug off the bench, an athletic forward who isn’t a great shooter (and has only attempted five 3’s all year, making zero), but can cut to the rim at an elite level and has grabbed an offensive rebound on 11.0% of the missed shots when he’s been on the floor. The easy putbacks and dunks he gets off those boards is a big reason he’s made 54-of-83 (65.1%) on two-pointers.
Bronx native Ian Jackson is third in scoring at 11.1 points per game, and has picked up where he left off as a freshman at North Carolina a year ago. A very talented scorer who attacks the rim violently, if he gets downhill, he is hard to stop. He’s made the most threes on the team with 26, and had scored in double figures in five straight games prior to this week; he had six against Providence (on 0-of-6 shooting from three) and seven against Butler (shooting 1-of-5 inside the arc and 1-of-3 outside).
His starting backcourt mate is senior Oziyah Sellers, who averages 10.6 points, 3.2 rebounds and 2.1 assists per game. A prolific scorer at Stanford a year ago, Sellers has played a more complementary role for the Red Storm while maintaining the same high shooting percentages (39.3% from three, 47.0% on twos).
By percentage, 6’5” guard Joson Sanon has been their top three-point shooter (22-of-54, 40.7%). A former consensus top-25 high school recruit who averaged 11.9 points per game last season at Arizona State, Sanon also struggled last week and scored nine combined points in two games. He made 1-of-9 from two (including a ghastly 0-of-7 against Providence) and 2-of-8 from three.
As it has been the last two years when Pitino has brought St. John’s to Omaha, this will be a stylistic battle between Creighton’s structured pace-and-space offense and the Red Storm’s chaotic physicality. As great as they are defensively, St. John’s has been prone to long droughts offensively and in all five of their losses, they had a lead in the second half before folding. Much like it was a week ago in Newark, Creighton’s key to winning is to limit turnovers, defend second-chance baskets as well as they do the first shot (if not keep them off the offensive glass in the first place) and hit open threes when they get them.
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sports_basketball Scouting the Opponent
In addition to Zuby Ejiofor being named Preseason Player of the Year, Bryce Hopkins earned a place on the Preseason All-Big East First Team and Ian Jackson found a spot on the second team. Joson Sanon and Dillon Mitchell were named to the Preseason All-Big East Third Team. This is believed to be the first time in league history that five players from the same program were named to Preseason All-Big East Teams.
Creighton is the only Big East program that Rick Pitino did not defeat at least once on the road in his first two seasons as the coach at St. John’s.
St. John’s remains strong in several key predictive metrics despite owning five losses. As of Thursday morning, the Red Storm ranks 31st in the NET, 23rd in KenPom, 23rd in T-Rank and 18th in BPI.
ravenravenraven Three Birds
The St. John’s game is one of six conference home games that Creighton will have on a Saturday this season. That’s a single-season school-record for CU — regardless of conference affiliation. And it’s notable because Creighton has won its last 13 Saturday home games in Big East play.
Ty Davis had six rebounds, one assist and one steal in 24:40 of work on Wednesday at Villanova. Four of his rebounds came in the final 10:24, and his lone points were two free throws with 21 seconds left to ice the victory. Davis is the fifth different Bluejay under Greg McDermott to play 24 minutes or more in a game without attempting a field goal. The others? Mason Miller at UConn last January, Francisco Farabello vs Alabama in 2023, Mitch Ballock vs UMKC in 2018 and Kaleb Korver at Wichita State in 2011.
Believe it or not, Creighton’s 16 games this season have featured just two second half lead changes, both in the last week. The first one came at the worst possible time — with 1.3 seconds left at Seton Hall on Sunday, when a three-point play by Najai Hines helped the Pirates escape with a 56-54 win over CU. The second one came on Wednesday at Villanova, as CU used a 14-2 run to take the lead for good and never looked back in a 76-72 win.
calendar_clock The Last Meeting & Series History
Creighton is 19-13 all-time against St. John’s, and 17-8 in the match-up since joining the Big East. CU is 13-1 in Omaha all-time against the Red Storm, including one-point victories in each of the past two meetings at CHI Health Center Omaha.
Creighton has scored 77+ points in seven of its last nine victories vs. St. John’s and are 14-0 all-time against the Red Storm when scoring 76 points or more.
fast_rewind This Date in Bluejay History
Creighton hasn’t played on January 10 for more than a decade; that was a 68-67 loss to Seton Hall in 2015, in the midst of a nine-game losing streak. Prior to that, you have to go back to 2012 when the Jays beat Northern Iowa 63-60. Three nights earlier, Doug McDermott hung 44 points on Bradley, and UNI coach Ben Jacobson was determined not to see a replay. So they double-teamed McDermott all night, even when he didn’t have the ball, and dared his teammates to beat them. It took a while, but they did just that. Trailing 58-56 with four minutes to play, Grant Gibbs hit two straight buckets to give CU the lead, and then Antoine Young sealed it with a three.
troubleshoot The Bottom Line
KenPom predicts this as literally a coin-flip game, with both teams owning 50% odds of winning and CU getting the nod by one point for being at home. Torvik predicts a one-point St. John’s win with 52% odds. ESPN’s BPI predicts a St. John’s win with 53.3% odds. As for Vegas? St. John’s opened as 1.5 point favorites.
A third straight one-point loss for St. John’s and Rick Pitino in Omaha would be something, wouldn’t it?
Creighton 74, St. John’s 73
