Creighton vs. UConn prediction: College basketball picks, odds, bets

Big East basketball is the best.

And two of the Big East’s best teams collide bWednesday night in Storrs as the Creighton Bluejays battle the UConn Huskies.

Creighton bounced back from a 0-2 start to conference play by reeling off four straight wins, even if two came against the league’s laughingstocks in Georgetown and DePaul.

The Jays are back in the regular-season conference title hunt. 

Meanwhile, the Huskies sit atop AP Top-25 Poll despite missing arguably their most important player, Donovan Clingan, who remains sidelined with an ankle injury. 

Clingan likely won’t be available Wednesday but should be back Saturday, so the Huskies will have to battle one last time without him. 

Can UConn piece together a short-handed win one last time? 

I love this matchup because both teams play the same.

Each teams’ offense run a continuity-based motion system predicated on secondary actions to pop open shooters.

Both also have an elite interior scorer to post up with, thus collapsing defenses and further opening the perimeter for more secondary actions and 3-point shooting. 

They also run a drop-coverage defensive scheme, which overplays ball-handlers on the perimeter and wings while dropping the interior defender, forcing ball-screen initiators to peddle in the mid-range for points. 

The way to beat drop coverage is with elite dribble-drive and mid-range shot creation, but neither team has that.

Both squads rank top-50 nationally in 3-point rate, but both defenses rank top-25 in 3-point rate allowed, viciously denying the other’s highly-coveted 3-point opportunities. 

So, these Creighton-UConn games have become like an Army-Navy matchup.

Both teams know how to defend the other, and both offenses don’t have a backup plan to circumnavigate. 

Thus, five consecutive matchups have stayed well Under the closing total, and I expect more of the same Wednesday. 

Of course, the Clingan injury still looms large. The drop-coverage scheme is predicated on an elite rim protector, and the Huskies are missing theirs right now. 

Creighton has surprisingly dominated this head-to-head series, winning six of seven since UConn re-joined the Big East.

With Clingan sidelined, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Bluejays stick it to the Huskies again.

Therefore, I’m betting Creighton keeps it close or wins outright in a low-scoring Big East rock fight.

Creighton +6.5 (-110, BetMGM) | Under 144.5 (-110)