Have to admit, I didn’t recognize that Gonzaga team out there Saturday night against BYU. It was simply a confusing performance.
As much as it was an inspired, all-in effort by BYU, it was also a sluggish, seemingly unfocused -- at least at times -- showing by the Zags, who saw their bid for an unbeaten regular season extinguished, 79-71. They did things like fail to put a body on an offensive rebounder that resulted in a killing basket, and step on the sideline while receiving a routine pass for one of their 16 turnovers.
As good as Gonzaga has been defensively this year, I never got the sense GU was ready to summon the steely resolve to hunker into a stance and get a stop when it was needed. (As T.J. Haws was allowed to dribble out on top in 1-4 sets, I could only wonder how the Zags would possibly deal with
somebody like UCLA’s Lonzo Ball in that same scenario a few weeks from now.)
You can argue that it was just one of those nights, and that’s not irrational. BYU threw in some really deep threes, from places that are hard to guard, and that only made for greater space for big man Eric Mika, who was unstoppable.
The sky isn’t falling, obviously. If the analysis seems harsh, it’s only because Gonzaga’s performance was so far from what we’ve seen virtually all season.
Check the numbers, and it’s no secret why Gonzaga came up short:
-- BYU shot 45.2 percent, hardly blistering, but a better percentage than any GU opponent in the last 15 games. The Cougars also shot better than Florida, Iowa State, or Saint Mary’s (twice) -- all NCAA-bound -- against the Zags.
-- BYU made nine threes. Only Tennessee (10) has made more this year against the Zags.
-- BYU held Gonzaga to a 38-all rebounding standoff, first time anybody has fared that well in 11 games. Tellingly, when the teams met Feb. 2 in Provo, GU had a 47-34 advantage.
-- Gonzaga tied a season low with eight assists. Thus, fewer than one in three GU baskets (26) was assisted.
-- Gonzaga shot a season-worst 3 of 16 (.188) on three-pointers.
-- You have to go back to the Tennessee game Dec. 18 to find one when Gonzaga made more than its 16 turnovers.
Given all that, you could conclude it’s wondrous Gonzaga was a possession or two from winning the thing.
Having said that, I don’t think it’s too bold to add that a performance like this doesn’t get Gonzaga to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament.
Friday on this blog, I wrote about how Senior Night sentimentality can get in the way of performance. But because Gonzaga roared to an 18-2 lead -- probably its best start of the season -- that didn’t seem to be the case.
Did the burden of trying to finish it and go 30-0 become too oppressive?
Could have; going 16 for 29 at the foul line prompts such questions. Once BYU steadied itself and edged back into contention, it may have served as a sobering reminder to the Zags that their night’s work wasn’t done, and seemingly, it became an increasing struggle to accomplish it. That’s probably something only a coach would know.
Other random notions:
-- Mika’s flagrant foul deep into the second half on Przemek Karnowski was his first personal, and it underscored the fact GU didn’t really try to exert foul pressure on Mika, even when his big night was snowballing in the first half. Karnowski, recall, went forever without scoring. Forcing Mika to guard more could have been helpful.
-- BYU’s defense, albeit ranked only No. 65 nationally by KenPom, seems for some reason to trouble Gonzaga with a sort of soft trap on the perimeter -- not necessarily a ball-hawking, turnover-seeking trap, more of an offense-disrupting one that the Zags should handle better. It bothered them in Provo, and to some degree, Saturday night.
-- A rugged night against Mika should tell Zach Collins he plainly needs another year before launching himself on the NBA. But we all know how illogical that process can be.
-- The Zags need Killian Tillie back, to deepen the bench and give them another proficient “big” on the floor. (Injury information around GU seems vastly under-reported, even in general terms, so I can only assume something ESPN’s Andy Katz said recently is on the money -- that the coaches hope to have him back for the WCC tournament, which begins this week.)
-- I’m increasingly of the opinion that the “X” factor for the Zags is guard Jordan Mathews. Against BYU, he had 12 points, but he took just five shots, and he hardly seems a picture of confidence about his stroke, probably the result of a seven-game stretch from Jan. 26 to Feb. 16 when he shot .333 and made seven of 29 threes. If I’m coaching him, I’m telling him to get at least 10 shots a game, because if he’s continually deferring, there’s no point in having him just sort of be . . . out there.
-- What’s the fallout for Gonzaga regarding a No. 1 seed? Tough to say. Joe Lunardi thinks they’re still solid. But they’re possibly vulnerable to whoever wins the Pac-12 tournament, especially if it’s Oregon or UCLA (the Zags would have a good counter if it’s Arizona, which they beat.) In any case, they’ve just added to their nation of skeptics. One of those is CBS’ Steve Lappas, even as he named Mark Few his national coach of the year Sunday on the Louisville-Syracuse broadcast. “Put it this way,” Lappas postulated. “If you were an 8-9 seed, and you had to play a 1 -- Villanova, Kansas, North Carolina or Gonzaga -- which one are you picking? I know which one I’m picking.”
Tough words for a team that just went three and a half months without a loss. For Gonzaga, the test ahead is an old, familiar one: Proving itself.
Saturday night, Brigham Young comes to the Kennel, party to a coronation. At least that’s what the script says. Gonzaga has a chance to become one of college basketball’s rarities, a team negotiating the regular season unbeaten.
(According to my browse through the NCAA record book, there have been 12 Division I teams that finished a complete season unbeaten and another 15 that went undefeated in the regular season but lost in the post-season.)
Indulge me here, Zag fans, with a bit of déjà vu that seems like it couldn’t have been more than, oh, 36 years ago.
What’s that you say? It was.
In writing for three Northwest newspapers over 45 years, I was blessed to cover two different college basketball teams that attained a No. 1 ranking. What are the odds, in this neck of the woods?
The latter was Gonzaga’s 2013 outfit that slipped into the top spot early in March and had it three weeks before Wichita State happened. You know that story.
My first brush with No. 1 was in 1980-81, working for the Eugene Register-Guard and tagging after Ralph Miller’s irresistible, homegrown Oregon State outfit. It rose, improbably, to a No. 1 ranking in January of ’81 and proceeded to hold a piece, or all, of the top spots in either the Associated Press or United Press International (coaches) polls all the way into March -- eight weeks.
I could regale you for hours with Ralph stories. Ralph was just, well, Ralph, a bespectacled, wrinkled larger-than-life guy whose open practices consisted of him sitting on the sideline at mid-court, chain-smoking brown More cigarettes while occasionally barking at his players. He was also somebody who routinely invited the press to his road hotel suite after games, to down a couple of drinks and listen to him tell tales of a long career coaching at Wichita State and Iowa.
Anyway, Ralph had the team of his life that year, a pressing, running group dotted by several Oregonians, including Portland-area guards Mark Radford and Ray Blume and McMinnville’s Charlie Sitton. It blew through the Pac-10, surviving a close game at Arizona State, and it was the toast of the state of Oregon. It’s worth noting that while this was going on, Mark Few’s Creswell High team just south of Eugene was also No. 1 in Oregon’s AA high school rankings, and he has said the Beavers were sort of a collegiate role model for that prep team. (In my Gonzaga book, “Glory Hounds,” Few’s teammate Randy Schott told me they considered themselves the prep version of OSU.)
The Beavers were unbeatable, or so it seemed. The season wound down, and, back in the days before there was a Pac-10 conference tournament, they were 26-0 and on the precipice of going unbeaten in the regular season and into the NCAA tournament. The team earned the nickname “The Orange Express,” and toward the end of their staccato victories, their terrific radio play-by-play man, Darrell Aune, would roar, “The Orange Express is ro-o-o-llin’!”
Came the last Saturday of the regular season, and all OSU had to do was win on Senior Day to complete the perfect year. Surely, at home in front of the adoring crowd at Gill Coliseum, this would be a mere formality.
That’s the afternoon that, for ever after, made me wonder what effect the sweet sentimentality of handing roses to your mom on Senior Day has on the hard business of maintaining the mental edge to compete.
That’s also the day we realized how outrageously talented fifth-ranked Arizona State was -- more than Oregon State. It had Lafayette Lever and Byron Scott at guard, two guys who had lengthy careers in the NBA. It had seven-foot Alton Lister, a future Seattle SuperSonic, at center.
At halftime, it was 40-20, Arizona State. This was back in the days before the three-point shot. The sellout crowd was stunned beyond description. This can’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t be happening.
OSU made a wan charge in the second half, getting the deficit back to 12 as I remember, but the motivated Sun Devils weren’t to be denied. They won by the preposterous score of 87-67 -- I don’t even have to look it up -- and it was such a signal occasion that three and a half decades later, the ASU basketball press guide has the boxscore of the game as a stand-alone item in its historical section.
Worse, that OSU team would never win again. It fell to Kansas State in its first game of the NCAA tournament, still the most devastating loss in school history.
There was a popular motel then in Corvallis, Nendel’s, and that’s where the Sun Devils were staying. I still remember Alton Lister on the dance floor of the hotel bar that night, boogieing at the expense of the Beavers.
To be clear, I don’t see anything like this spoiling Gonzaga’s celebration Saturday night. The Zags are too good, too focused, too hell-bent on history to have BYU mess it up now. Gonzaga has the advantage of the bitter memory of two straight Brigham Young victories in the Kennel in 2015-16 (the first on Senior Night) and this is a lesser Cougar team than those.
And Fat Lever ain’t walking into that BYU locker room, and Byron Scott, who shot 11 for 14 that day, won’t be casting perimeter jumpers.
If there’s a moral, maybe it’s this: Enjoy the ride, and don’t take anything for granted.
Watching Saint Mary’s take apart Brigham Young the other night, I was struck by a strange question:
Is it possible we’re undervaluing Saint Mary’s?
Consider: The Gaels are now 24-3, against what most people feel is a schedule that’s at least a tick more challenging than many they’ve put out over the years. That places Saint Mary’s in position to tie or better Lynn Nance’s 1988-89 team, which went 25-5, for fewest losses in school history.
(I suppose the 2009-10 Saint Mary’s team would be considered the gold standard at the school. It went 28-6 and rolled to the Sweet 16. That Omar Samhan-led club rocked Gonzaga 81-62 in the WCC final after the Zags swept the regular-season series.)
Yet I haven’t seen or heard of any speculation that this could be Randy Bennett’s best Saint Mary’s team. Such is the oppressive effect of Gonzaga’s season, in which the helpless West Coast Conference opposition routinely genuflects by double digits -- including the Gaels.
At Provo, Saint Mary’s led by 11 at halftime and was up by 23 before recording a second 13-point victory over BYU. It was mostly effortless, and in fact, it looked easier than Gonzaga’s victory there Feb. 2, in which the Zags kept sprinting into 15-to-18 point margins, only to see the Cougars routinely whittle it back to single digits.
Go back to a couple of Saint Mary’s earlier games: On Jan. 12, on the road, the Gaels manhandled Portland, 74-33. SMC led 37-9 at halftime. It led 58-14 midway through the second half.
That’s not a blowout, it’s a pistol-whipping.
On Feb. 4 -- again on the road -- Saint Mary’s bludgeoned San Diego, 71-27. Again, it allowed nine points in the first half. With seven minutes left, it was 59-15.
My gut instinct is that the WCC is mostly dreck this year. Yet RealTimeRPI.com has the conference ranked a respectable ninth nationally, one ahead of the Mountain West and three in front of the Missouri Valley.
Tough to say how much the dominance of Gonzaga, and to a lesser extent, Saint Mary’s, sways that ranking, but it must be considerable. (Before Gonzaga met Saint Mary’s for the second time, I entertained a counterintuitive -- admittedly bizarre -- thought: That there would be some value in GU losing to the Gaels, simply to discourage national naysayers from the notion that the WCC is no good.)
At any rate, it’s Saint Mary’s lot to be doing perhaps its best business in a year when Gonzaga is maxing out. The Zags won by 23 when the teams met Jan. 14, albeit a deceivingly big margin, and they repeated by 10 at Saint Mary’s Feb. 11.
Here’s a different way of saying it: Saint Mary’s is holding its WCC opponents other than Gonzaga to .383 field-goal shooting. The Zags are shooting a combined .602 in the two games with the Gaels. (And the fact GU also shot 61.7 in the WCC final last year has to make for some furrowed brows in Moraga.)
So maybe we’re sleeping on the Gaels. And transitively -- who would think it -- on the only undefeated team in the country.
Ray Giacoletti never envisioned a January like this one: Vacationing in Fort Lauderdale, cruising to the Bahamas, Cayman Islands, Cozumel and Key West.
“It was good to get away and decompress a little bit,” he said.
It had to feel strange, taking off in the middle of basketball season. After all, Giacoletti, 54, had been a coach for 32 seasons, an assistant at Washington (1994-97) and Gonzaga (2007-13) and a head man at North Dakota State, Eastern Washington, Utah and Drake. But now he was a free agent, having stepped down from the head coaching position at Drake early in December.
Drake did not go well. Giacoletti left the Zags after their 2013, No. 1-ranked season, having been thrown a lifeline in ’07 by an old friend, GU coach Mark Few. Now he would take one more shot in the captain’s chair.
He knew the pitfalls. Drake is an academically demanding school in the Missouri Valley Conference, one that used to be a respected name in college basketball; it went to the 1969 Final Four. But the Bulldogs have made one NCAA tournament since 1971. One.
Drake is in Des Moines, largest city in Iowa. But a state lightly populated (3.1 million) has vibrant basketball programs at Iowa, Iowa State and Northern Iowa.
Giacoletti got off to a 15-16 start, before the dark clouds circled. Drake then went 9-22 and 7-24. The Bulldogs weren’t athletic enough.
But there was a glint of hope. Giacoletti had recruited a Polish big man, seven-foot Dominik Olejniczak -- from Przemek Karnowski’s hometown of Torun. The freshman started the final nine games and averaged 10.3 points in that stretch. If Drake was going to be revived, Olejniczak would be the key force.
And then he was gone, transferred to Mississippi, the details of which Giacoletti doesn’t want to share publicly.
Drake finished eighth in the Great Alaska Shootout in November. Then it led DePaul by 15 midway through the second half Nov. 30, and lost. Three days later, after the Bulldogs dropped an overtime decision to Fresno State to fall to 1-7, Giacoletti met with Drake athletic director Sandy Hatfield-Clubb and said he’d had enough.
“She tried to talk me out of it for two days,” Giacoletti told me recently. “You hear people say it all the time: I just felt deep down in my gut, they needed a new voice for them to take another step.
“I honestly was going to probably finish the year and then retire. As long as that was in the back of my mind, it was, ‘We need to find a way to make it the best we can be and salvage it some way.’ ”
Hatfield-Clubb turned the job over to assistant coach Jeff Rutter on an interim basis, and the Bulldogs showed a spark in January, edging up to 5-4 in the MVC. But now they’ve lost six straight and the defeat to Evansville Tuesday night was Drake’s 20th.
What might Giacoletti have done differently? Find a way, he says, to have recruited more athleticism. He would have orchestrated more Skyping sessions with Olejniczak and his parents to keep them connected.
“I didn’t get it done,” he says. “It’s on me, it isn’t on anybody else.
“In these jobs, you need to get lucky with some things. It’s not for lack of effort or work. You’ve got to get fortunate. At Washington, we got lucky with Todd MacCulloch (the seven-foot Canadian who led the Huskies to two NCAA tournaments in 1998-99). Todd MacCulloch got us over the hump. That guy got you to another place.”
Giacoletti’s routine these days includes a morning workout, breakfast, and the realization that he doesn’t want to be done with basketball. So he’s targeted two possibilities: Broadcasting and scouting.
He has spent some time job-shadowing color analysts. When we talked, he had one such appointment lined up with ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla. He has a friend in NBA scouting, who advised him, “Go to every D-League game and write a report up.”
“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing for 32 years,” Giacoletti says. “But those are pretty good jobs. Those jobs don’t just open up.”
Perhaps some of Giacoletti’s influence at Gonzaga remains. He was in charge of defense in his six seasons, and during that time the Zags defended better, and now they’re at a top-five level nationally according to KenPom.com.
Giacoletti pondered the notion of Gonzaga having been No. 1 in 2013, then turned over the entire roster -- save for a freshman Karnowski who averaged a modest 11 minutes -- to become top-ranked again.
“It’s mind-boggling,” he said.
Caught up with Gonzaga coach Mark Few in an early-February conversation this week, and he addressed a wide range of topics, mostly on his roster.
The top-ranked Zags are now 24-0, and as of Wednesday, that means that in Few’s 18 years as head coach, they’ve now gone 56 days longer -- eight weeks -- than the 2008-09 team did to open a season. That squad lost to Arizona on Dec. 14 and until this one, was the longest not to experience defeat under Few.
So I asked him: Does it feel any different to be undefeated?
“Not to me,” he said. “It just feels like the next game: ‘Hey, we’ve got to get going on this next one. There are conference-championship ramifications on the line this week.’
“People talk about it, but it’s not even that focused (at GU) on it. We’re just trying to get through the next week. We’ve got to get better this week than we just were, whether it’s one percent improvement or whatever, whether it’s rebounding, taking care of the ball, or something else.”
More observations from Few:
-- On Nigel Williams-Goss and his increasingly exceptional play: “He’s a very, very eager learner and student of the game. He’s really hard on himself. He wants to get 100 percent on every quiz, or anything that comes up, practice or games. I think there was a point when he really began to trust us as a staff. The more you get to know him, you understand how competitive and tough he is. The other thing is, he’s a ferocious defender now. It’s based more on preparation and attention to detail and innate toughness.”
-- On Przemek Karnowski and his improvement this year: “Especially this last month or so, he’s really been moving and handling himself around the basket. He’s got a little bit more of an arsenal down there. Finally, after five years, we’ve convinced him he can be successful using his right hand and going over his left shoulder.”
-- On Johnathan Williams III: “We don’t really know what clicks. When he decides to come out and be really assertive and play with some emotion is when we’re at our best, at both ends. He’s kind of a low-key guy, so pulling that out of him sometimes has been hard.”
-- On Zach Collins: “He’s a talent; he’s going to be very, very good. He really helped us down the stretch at BYU, protecting the rim and rebounding. His next jump, hopefully, will be to get him passing and handling the ball a little bit, kind of like (Kelly) Olynyk.”
-- On Killian Tillie, the freshman forward, and his quick return from an ankle sprain suffered in Portland Jan. 23: “He’s a tough kid. He responds pretty quickly. He wants to play. He’s just kind of an energizer.”
Elsewhere, a few morsels from around the state and college hoops:
-- Saturday marks not only ESPN College GameDay’s first appearance at Saint Mary’s -- where Gonzaga plays that evening -- but the NCAA basketball committee’s inaugural rollout of its top 16 seeds for the 2017 tournament. Most are forecasting Gonzaga to be the No. 1 overall seed. But given the fluid nature of the sport and the number of games played, those projections could see upheaval by nightfall. So it’s likely to be more of an exercise in describing how the process works.
-- The futility of Washington, now 9-14 with uber-freshman Markelle Fultz, underscores how individual talent hasn’t always been an asset on Montlake. I researched the past 10 NBA drafts this week, and the numbers are fairly startling: Fultz would be the seventh Husky in that period not to play in the NCAA tournament in the same year he was drafted in the first round, joining Spencer Hawes (2007), Terrence Ross and Tony Wroten (2012); C.J. Wilcox (2014); Marquese Chriss and Dejounte Murray (2016). (Ross and Wilcox played in the 2011 tournament, last one to include the Huskies.) The mind-bending part is that no other NCAA school has had more than two such players.
-- What are the odds? Washington State visits Utah Thursday night, and chances are, anything would be an improvement for WSU over its last two games with the Utes. The Cougars lost both -- improbably, by the same score, 88-47, last February in Salt Lake City and Jan. 18 in Pullman.
-- When asked, Few sought to correct an eyebrow-raising assertion by multiple TV analysts that he earlier named Williams-Goss "the best leader" he's ever had. While conceding that he could have misstated his feelings, Few, noting that GU has had some powerful leaders like Kevin Pangos, says, "What I've said is, we've had some great leaders and he's certainly right up there with the best of them. What he does better, he can really communicate around the floor. He does so much talking (to teammates)."
- If you are a bloguru member, please login.
Login
- If you are not a bloguru member, you may request a free account here:
Request Account
