When Maurice Watson Jr. hobbled to the bench early in the second half on Monday, most Creighton fans just assumed the afternoon for their star point guard was finished. That's not the way Watson, a Philly native who grew up dreaming of playing for Villanova in the rough and tumble Big East, operates.
Creighton and Mo Watson were great together. Now the Bluejays must survive without him
What does Creighton do now without point guard Mo Watson? We’re about to find out.
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With his team in a dogfight on the road against No. 22 Xavier, Watson convinced head coach Greg McDermott to send him back into the game to help the Bluejays pick up a key resume win that would enhance their suddenly realistic national title chances. McDermott obliged, and the nation’s leader in assists hobbled back onto the court.
Minutes later Watson was on the ground in pain. He had just converted one of his signature high-arcing left-handed layups, but something had gone wrong when his left leg had come back down to earth. Fans both in the Cintas Center and watching from home now knew that Watson’s afternoon over, they were just hoping for the best for the rest of his season.
Watson wasn’t. He already knew.
“I heard it pop. I’m done.”
Those were the words that one of college basketball’s most impressive performers of the 2016-17 season said to his head coach the moment he arrived to check up on him. Watson was not wrong.
An MRI on Tuesday confirmed the worst: Watson had torn the ACL in his left knee. The college career of the player who had made Creighton a national contender again when he transferred in from Boston University was over.
If Creighton, currently owners of a sparkling 18-1 record and the No. 7 ranking in the latest AP Poll, is able to make a run at a Final Four at a national title, it’ll have to concoct a plan to fill the production void Watson is leaving behind. Such a plan is far from apparent at the moment.
Watson entered Monday’s game averaging 9.1 assists per game, the highest average in the country and a full assist more than the player directly behind him. He was also the team’s third-leading scorer at 12.9 points per game, and was shooting 48.4 percent from beyond the arc. Watson’s play had been so strong that he was just starting to generate some legitimate buzz as a candidate for the Wooden and Naismith Awards.
It shouldn’t come as a shock to hear that there are no other players on Creighton’s roster capable of doing what Watson was doing. Point guards who assist on 44 percent of their team’s field goals and find the perfect balance between apt distributor and capable scorer aren’t floating around all over the place across Division-I. The issue for Creighton is that there isn’t a Bluejay who appears capable of coming close to doing the things that Watson did.
Marcus Foster, Khyri Thomas, and Isaiah Zierden are the three other Creighton guards who have played significant minutes this season, but all three have shown a steady propensity for being shoot-first, pass-third or -fourth guards. That mindset will have to shift going forward for at least one of them if the Bluejays want to have any shot of winning a Big East title or playing deep into March.
The problem is that McDermott has been so reliant on Watson to run his offense that it's going to take a trial and error period for him to accurately determine the best way to proceed. Watson had been on the court for 87.5 percent of his team's available minutes during conference play, easily the highest percentage of any player on the team. Seldom-used bench players Tyler Clement and Davion Mintz both have skill sets more in line with that of a traditional point guard, but neither has played enough to give any indication as to whether or not they're capable of serving as effective floor generals at this level.
Maybe that will change. Something significant will have to if Creighton wants to keep its dream season rolling.
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