Perhaps it’s the incessant drip and gray of winter that seems to underscore the downside. Or maybe it’s the inevitable, lingering hangover from a golden season when Gonzaga barged all the way to college basketball’s championship game.
Maybe they've just set a very high bar. They could be their neighbors to the south, Washington State, flailing to establish some sort of identity in the fourth year of a coaching regime.
Something doesn’t seem completely in sync with the Zags, even as they’re ranked 14th in the country, which is roughly where a lot of people pegged them in October. Even as they’re 19-4, which surely isn’t far from what their most beatific forecasters would have projected.
It’s been a fits-and-starts, herky-jerky season, the kind of year when a seemingly solid, nine-point second-half lead against Saint Mary's dissolves into defeat at home.
Let’s say up front that it all may be understandable, when several key pieces from that memorable ’16-17 campaign are no longer around, starting with rim-protector Przemek Karnowski and the engine room of the ship, Nigel Williams-Goss.
It’s just that this outfit has produced more head-scratching moments, more non sequiturs, than you might have expected. Consider:
-- The Zags held their three PK80 tournament opponents, Ohio State, Florida and Texas, to a combined .402 shooting percentage (all three are in the RPI top 50). Yet San Francisco comes to town the other night and shoots 51 percent. Villanova broke the Zags’ 64-game streak, dating back almost two years, of not allowing an opponent to shoot 50 percent from the floor, and now three more teams have done it -- including North Dakota. That North Dakota outfit, which had the Zags on the ropes in a December game in the Kennel, is now 7-14 and tied for 10th in the Big Sky.
-- If there was going to be a newcomer casting his name in lights, it was going to be Corey Kispert, the freshman from little King’s High in north Seattle. Instead, partly because Kispert dealt with a December ankle injury, that shining newcomer has been redshirt freshman Zach Norvell, who is scoring 12 points a game but more surprising, has a 63-to-31 assist-turnover ratio.
-- Jacob Larsen, the seven-foot freshman, played 24 minutes against powerful Villanova Dec. 5 and had 10 points and five rebounds. For some reason, he has played only 21 minutes in the last five games. It says here that if March is going to be remembered at all fondly around GU, he needs to be coaxed back into prominence.
-- Even the advanced metrics are at war over this team. KenPom has Gonzaga No. 7 (sixth in adjusted offense, 37th on defense), while GU is No. 57 in the RPI. ESPN’s BPI argues the Zags are No. 8, while KPI Sports -- one of the new metrics to be used by the NCAA selection committee -- has GU No. 55.
Coach Mark Few has bemoaned his team’s lack of consistency. At times, it seems a matter of focus, of good judgment, almost of common sense. In the last minutes of a nervous win over USF, guard Josh Perkins chooses to throw a backhand, wrap-around pass to 6-10 Killian Tillie on the perimeter, and puts the ball at Tillie’s ankles.
It’s not as though the sky is falling. The Zags boast the rarity of six players averaging double figures and in stretches are a sight to behold offensively. Step it up in February and early March, and there's a good chance Gonzaga will like its position in the bracket on Selection Sunday.
But numbers like .376 -- opponent three-point percentage (as opposed to .290 a year ago) -- are a screaming alarm that this team, on the wrong day in March, could be the first in a decade at Gonzaga to lose a first-round NCAA game. That three-point defense is statistically poorer than any in the 19-year streak of NCAA appearances.
Today, it’s still pretty much a blank canvas for the Zags, 2017-18. That could be both a good and bad thing.
If ever Saint Mary’s might be spoiling for a fight with Gonzaga, you’d think it would be Thursday night in Spokane, when the two WCC unbeatens renew unpleasantries. As steady as the Gaels have been under Randy Bennett, there’s always Gonzaga looming out there, ready to back-burner Saint Mary’s out of the national consciousness.
Not that Gael frustration with Gonzaga is a recent phenomenon, but consider what’s happened in just the past four years:
2014: Gonzaga beats Saint Mary’s, 70-54, in the WCC tournament final, sending SMC to the NIT.
2016: Got to think this might have been the apex of exasperation for Saint Mary’s, which for the first time since 1995 sweeps the home-and-home series against a Gonzaga team trying to find itself. Well, the Zags do indeed do that, and their 85-75 win in the WCC tournament wins them another NCAA berth and again shunts the Gaels to the NIT for a third straight year.
2017: Saint Mary’s pieces together a marvelous 29-5 season, winning a game in the NCAA tournament and giving Arizona all it can handle in the round of 32. But any acclaim due Moraga is drowned out as the Zags mount their first run to the Final Four, and all Saint Mary’s gets out of it is the check Gonzaga annually earns for the rest of the WCC.
It seems staggering to think that Bennett and Mark Few have jousted 43 times in 16 seasons as head coaches -- and who can forget Bennett's blow-by handshake after a game not long ago -- with Few having a 34-9 edge. But the games pile up when virtually annually, you’re playing three times.
Not to say the Gaels haven’t had their moments. They had a court-storming 89-81 victory in Adam Morrison’s sophomore year of 2005, Bennett’s first win over Few. Omar Samhan led them to an 81-62 victory in the WCC tournament final of 2010, the rare year that Saint Mary’s went farther in the NCAA tournament (Sweet 16) than Gonzaga (round of 32). There was Mickey McConnell’s runner in Spokane near the buzzer of a 73-71 SMC win in ’11, followed by an 83-62 rout fueled by Matt Dellavedova in 2012.
Funny, but it strikes me the wins by the Gaels seem to stand out more, which may be a way of saying as much as this is a rivalry, Gonzaga has mostly dominated. When the Zags win, it’s business as usual.
Now, Gonzaga’s profile has receded (some, anyway), and the Gaels have rebounded from a crummy November. So they have to believe they have a puncher’s chance in Spokane.
A handful of numbers tell us why:
52.4 -- Saint Mary’s leads the nation in field-goal percentage. Its floor spacing is tough to guard, and the Zags struggled at times at San Francisco to keep the Dons’ guards away from the basket.
1.85 -- The Gaels’ assist-turnover ratio is No. 2 in the nation. They commit only 9.6 turnovers a game. On the other hand, playing at a methodical tempo ranked 343rd nationally by KenPom, they create only 10.5 turnovers.
.777 -- Don’t foul them; they rank 16th at the free throw line.
.449 -- Saint Mary’s defensive field-goal percentage doesn’t flatter the team’s profile; it’s 242nd in the country. The Zags shoot .512 themselves -- against a better schedule -- and they’ve tended to shoot well against Saint Mary’s. It’s usually what happens at the other end -- Zags defending the Gaels -- that writes the script in this series, and that’s probably where it’s at Thursday night in the Kennel.
I’ll have to admit, Isaiah Thomas has surprised me before. I never knew how he pulled off those intrepid drives to the basket as a 5-9 guard at Washington. I thought it was a little ballsy when he declared he was ready for the NBA after his junior year. I was floored when he became one of the NBA’s top scorers -- essentially becoming a better pro than a collegian.
Now he’s done it again. Next month, Thomas’ No. 2 jersey will be retired at Washington.
I didn’t see that coming, either.
So what’s a UW episode doing on a Gonzaga-themed blog? Well, it’s a worthy example of how there’s nothing in college sports as jagged, inscrutable and sometimes downright illogical as the process by which numbers are retired.
This is not meant as a knock on Thomas, who has carved out an astonishing career as an undersized player and has done good community work. But if you’re like me, you assess such things -- like the baseball Hall of Fame -- on two levels. You form an immediate gut reaction, yes or no, and then you’re willing to take a hard look at the accomplishments.
With Thomas, who is still in the prime of a pro career, I can’t yet get over the hump. Collegiately, he was a three-time All-Pac-10 selection and a two-time conference tournament MVP. But he was never a conference player of the year, not an All-American, and only once in his three seasons did the Huskies advance as far as the Sweet 16.
Clearly, a pro career of prolific scoring and his two-time appearance in the NBA All-Star game influenced Washington.
Gonzaga has been through this before -- well, a long time before. You wouldn’t retire John Stockton’s number on the basis of his college achievements; he was WCAC player of the year in 1984, yet the Zags were a pedestrian 27-25 in league his four years. But a prodigious NBA career put him over the top, a fact which speaks to the unevenness of how college numbers are retired.
In fact, when Stockton was named to the College Basketball Hall of Fame -- to be differentiated from the Naismith Hall of Fame -- he told the Spokesman-Review in Spokane, “I was surprised to be included, frankly.”
Anyway, Stockton was the last Zag to have a number retired, joining former national scoring leader Frank Burgess as the only two former Gonzaga players so honored. And with Thomas about to see his jersey in the UW rafters, I thought it worthwhile to pick the brain of Zags athletic director Mike Roth on the subject of GU retired numbers.
To sum up, it’s not exactly on the front burner.
“We haven’t even got to that yet,” Roth told me recently. “We’re not spending any energy on it, to be quite honest.”
You’d have to say Gonzaga’s history with retired numbers is like a lot of schools’ -- hit and miss. One of the chief challenges with retired numbers, of course, is that to have a cohesive, common-sense approach requires even-handedness over the generations.
Some schools treat retired numbers like a publicity grab. That’s how a lot of Zag fans look at Saint Mary’s retirement of the jerseys of Patty Mills and Matt Dellavedova. Meanwhile, Washington State football, for instance, shares similarity with GU basketball; it has retired only those jerseys of Mel Hein, a great center of almost nine decades ago; and Jack Thompson of the 1970s, who never led the Cougars to a bowl game but has been more notable in recent years as sort of a father confessor to some prolific WSU quarterbacks.
“It’s been discussed internally, and there will continue to be discussions,” Roth says. “I’m sure we’ll see some other numbers get retired someday.”
As Roth explains it, the Zags got busy with some other stuff.
They had a Gonzaga hall of fame, but he says its last class was in 1995. That’s, uh, a generation ago.
Shortly after came the turmoil that saw an NCAA investigation into GU’s athletic finances, and the demise of Dan Fitzgerald as athletic director. And then, in 1999, the Zags’ unforeseen burst onto the basketball scene with an appearance in the Elite Eight. There came two more Sweet 16 appearances, and soon, a new arena.
“Initially, it was just the circumstances,” Roth said. “And then, we were changing everything about who we were.”
First things first. As at most schools, a hall of fame takes precedence over the concept of retired numbers, which are sort of the crème de la crème. And at GU, there wasn’t really a place to celebrate a hall of fame. So for years, the school has made do with modest wall displays inside the Martin Center.
Soon, there will be an honest-to-goodness “hall of honor” inside the new Volkar Center -- the last feature of the new building housing a practice court, basketball strength-and-conditioning component and student-athlete academic support-services center. Some of those elements' christening are targeted for the return of students from the holiday break, but the hall of honor component probably won’t be ready until sometime in the spring.
(Side note: The celebration of Gonzaga’s rare basketball history in such a setting has been sorely lacking. A visitor from say, Indiana, wandering through campus encounters a McCarthey Athletic Center whose arena is locked and no evidence of what the Zags have pulled off.)
Roth says any serious discussion of retired numbers will come after the particulars of the Zags getting up to speed on their hall of fame. As he points out, “We’ve had a few players come through here since 1995. We’ve got to focus on that first.”
For the hall of fame, Roth refers to a “working group” of present and former staffers, identities of which he doesn’t reveal so as not to impose pressure on them. He said it’s in the range of five people, including an alum. Roth says he’s not a member.
But even this process is in its formative stages. Roth says some criteria for candidacy in the hall of fame must be established, such as time passed since the athlete left. The group, he says, will research best practices elsewhere, with the idea of distilling them into policy.
Retired numbers, then? Whom would you make No. 3 at Gonzaga?
Nobody had a more decorated season at GU than Adam Morrison (2006), but his NBA career doesn’t add much. Ronny Turiaf’s teams had some bad NCAA exits, but he’s probably the most popular Zag in history. Przemek Karnowski was a towering presence on two of Gonzaga’s most successful teams in 2015 (Elite Eight) and 2017 (Final Four). Blake Stepp (2003-04) is Gonzaga’s only two-time WCC player of the year.
Or maybe the Zags would give a shout-out to the student-athlete concept and recognize three who are among a select group in NCAA history of first-team All-Americans both academically and on the floor: Dan Dickau, Kelly Olynyk and Nigel Williams-Goss.
“We don’t want to rush into anything,” Roth said.
But you knew that.
A TV analyst -- I believe it was Sean Farnham -- weighed in on Gonzaga’s post-season prospects on a recent broadcast. He said he thought that, playing well, the Zags were a “second-weekend” NCAA-tournament team, meaning one that could get to the Sweet 16 under those circumstances.
I can’t argue with that.
If, on the other hand, you were to judge GU’s outlook solely on the RPI computer -- the Ratings Percentage Index -- you’d be debating whether the Zags belong in the tournament.
Fortunately for them, a lot more goes into it -- more than ever, in fact.
Wednesday, the RPI has the Zags at No. 66 -- up from 70 earlier in the week, probably because of Florida’s pillaging of Texas A&M Tuesday night -- and if you took only that cold, hard number, Gonzaga would probably be on the outside looking in at the field.
At the risk of rendering the GU faithful apoplectic, we’ll point out here that Washington is No. 56 in the RPI and Saint Mary’s is No. 43 -- no matter that Gonzaga smoked the UW on the road, and that any sane observer would conclude that GU has more wins of quality than Saint Mary’s.
Scheduling is usually cast as tricky business, and the Zags seemingly missed the mark this year as regards their lower-end opponents. They beat two dead-weight, 300-plus RPI teams -- Incarnate Word at 335 and Howard at 331 -- as well as North Dakota (273) and IUPUI (267). (Never mind that No. 273 just about came into the Kennel and beat the Zags a few weeks ago.)
To you and me, playing somebody like Maryland-Baltimore County seems the same as playing Howard. But UMBC is No. 198, while Howard’s lowly ranking has the effect of being one more heavy drag on Gonzaga’s RPI.
In other words, all stiffs are not created equal.
The bad news for the Zags is that the RPI has the West Coast Conference ranked a miserable 14th, immediately behind scofflaws like the Colonial (13), Summit (12) and Mid-American (11). In its better years, the WCC has had a single-digit ranking.
Indeed, that 101-52 win over Santa Clara last weekend came against the RPI’s No. 345 team. This week brings Pepperdine, which is No. 321. All of it seems to say to me that if anything, the Zags’ RPI is apt to worsen, unless Gonzaga does something dynamic -- let’s say, lose only once between now and the end of the WCC tournament.
How important is the RPI? Well, the NCAA basketball committee has steadfastly maintained over the years that it’s only one tool in the selection/seeding process. I think it’s safe to say it’s true that a team’s RPI is only a modest consideration, but on the other hand, we constantly hear quoted a team’s record against the RPI top 50, the top 100, or how many (inconsequential) wins it had against teams 200 or lower.
Fortunately for Gonzaga, the trend is for the committee increasingly to use other metrics. I ran the question by David Worlock, the NCAA’s director of media coordination and statistics, and he responded that the NCAA will use KenPom, Sagarin, KPI (that was a new one on me) and ESPN’s BPI.
In marked contrast to the RPI, both KenPom and the BPI have Gonzaga at No. 9.
Meanwhile, as it concerns the RPI, the committee will use an altered formula starting this year. Instead of assessing a flat number of top-50 or top-100 wins, it will assign value to any game result and put it in one of four quadrants. Quoting directly from Worlock’s e-mail:
“We have altered the team sheets that the committee uses to help evaluate the teams, and those place a greater emphasis on winning away from home. Whereas in the past, each team’s schedule was divided into four quadrants sorted solely by the RPI (1-50, 51-100, 101-200, 201-351), now they are sorted by the game location and the RPI. The new quadrants are as follows:
“Quadrant 1: Home games against 1-30, Neutral games against 1-50 and Road games against 1-75.
“Quadrant 2: Home games against 31-75, Neutral games against 51-100 and Road games against 76-135.
“Quadrant 3: Home games against 76-160, Neutral games against 101-200 and Road games against 136-240.
“Quadrant 4: Home games against 161-351, Neutral games against 201-351 and Road games against 241-351.
“In other words, a road win over a team ranked 73rd in the RPI is in the same quadrant as a home win over 28. In the past, that road win would have been in quadrant 2 even though statistically it is just as hard to beat 73 on the road as it is a team ranked 28th at home.”
By my reckoning, Gonzaga is 2-2 in Quadrant 1, 2-1 in Quadrant 2, 0-0 in Quadrant 3 and 8-0 in Quadrant 4.
What’s it all mean for the Zags? There’s no doubt it’s a good thing respected metrics like KenPom are in use. The more of them that tie a good number to Gonzaga, the more it might cast the RPI as an outlier. In that vein, Sagarin has the Zags at No. 10.
On the other hand, the fact the committee is refining the way it looks at any result, but still relying on the RPI to inform those quadrants, shows that the RPI is still alive and kicking. And that 8-0 in Quadrant 4 could be a concern for Gonzaga, especially as the number prospectively balloons in the soft WCC.
As always, it’s about winning games. For the Zags, anything that keeps them away from seeds like 8 and 9 is a good thing.
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