Zagacious

The Zags lost badly last Monday night to a Stanford team that, as predicted, fielded a wall of intensely dominating post play and eliminated Gonzaga’s transition game. By shooting the lights out and rebounding better than Robert Downey Jr.’s career, the Cardinal erased all semblance of the usual rhythm and precision that Courtney Vandersloot’s distribution scheme runs on.

Also, the Zags shot something like -13%.

With the year officially over, and tons of apropos season-summative comments already in the books, we’d like to explore an area that we couldn’t fully investigate during the season.

Who the hell is women’s head coach Kelly Graves?

Kelly Graves...Derek Raivio's father? Engoldened haberdasher? Or mere purveyor of weird friends?

We’ve surmised a few Grave(s) details from afar: The team he inherited in his first year at Gonzaga went 0-14 in conference. This year’s team went 14-0. He’s oddly comfortable looking like Courtney Vandersloot’s sidekick, or subordinate, instead of the other way around.

But even in our own backyard, one of the few where women’s basketball can thrive economically and socially, an environment where there should exist the fewest obstacles to transparency, there is little transparency. You think Mark Few is a stonewalling enigma? Try finding hard-hitting reporting on Graves. Sure, fans know his smiling demeanor, his de facto perma-calm, and his resplendent dome. But he’s been here 11 years and all we really know is that whomever is buying his dress shirts needs to remeasure his neck size.

It is amidst this relative unknown that Graves, formerly rumored to be inspecting the monetarily greener pastures at the University of Washington, has signed a new ten year contract that keeps him in Spokane until 2021.

Taking care of the guy this well means Mike Roth is banking on the idea Graves will not only return the Zags back to the limelight, but to more publicly charted and fiscally refulgent waters. And it is precisely this team’s first brief shove into the public eye that made possible the following quote, perhaps the most subtly insightful one yet, into Graves’ coaching attitude.

In reference to the team’s Elite Eight loss to Stanford, Graves told S-R’s Dave Trimmer:

‘They’re just a better team than us,’ he said. ‘We’re not there yet. We would have had to play a perfect game. It’s not to say that on any given night we couldn’t play with a team like that but they would have to be a little off.’

Not only will Graves not be pulling a Dan Monson – he’s now officially cast in the role of athletic department savior.

Graves was just hand-delivered a launch pad on which to continue to build a women’s program, a launch pad that is eerily similar to the one the men’s program built itself on. He could, if he so chooses, captain the greatest do-over in the university’s history: he could usher in years, perhaps even a decade of sustained success, and all within the purer, chaster, and frankly more tenacious vehicle of GU women’s basketball, a vehicle that can hopefully sidestep a large chunk of the bullshit (consistent under performance in big games, six player exodus, recruiting disasters) that’s come with all the good the men’s side has offered us.

Thus, the question surrounding his contract renewal is not whether we’re the right program-on-the-rise for him, but if he’s the right coach for our specific program-on-the-rise.

Amidst a wide-open west coast basketball landscape (outside of the Cardinal, of course) his recruiting draw, alone, might be powerful enough to make the answer to that question a ‘yes.’

Nonetheless, his omnipresence in the weeks leading up to the Elite Eight game across nearly every local media source still seemed to paradoxically enshroud his character instead of reveal it. As Dennis Patchin and company lobbed softball after softball to the guy, an eager fan base simply heard a bunch of cheerful pleonasms and baseless banalities. Imagine if Brick Tamland from Anchorman and Scooby Doo had a love child. Said child’s were the type of responses we were getting to permeating 60 Minutes Style questions like, “Have you had to pay for a cup of coffee this post-season?” “What are your thoughts on the word ‘Lady?’” And “How long does it take to drive from your house to The Arena?”

The question about the climate that supported Graves’ post-season vapidity is whether or not it’s the same one that supports the Mark Few kind. The explicitly non-constructive kind instead of the harmlessly annoying one. The kind where, perhaps to his discredit, you know there’s a bunch of details percolating in his head and behind the scenes that could explain so much about the team we all obsess over, but will forever remain frustratingly confined by a firmly clasped “gee-shucks” chastity belt of expression.

Graves’ quote is an important step in confirming the answer to this question is ‘no.’

His comment speaks to us for no other reason than its blunt honesty in the face of a hug fest. Indeed, it’s more than ‘OK’ to say what Coach Graves said. It’s his obligation as a coach to, in instances where we are completely out-classed, out-played and out-all other things, level as he did with his fan base.

If Stanford hadn’t beaten the Zags by 23, if the team hadn’t swept WCC play, if they hadn’t fallen perfectly within the alignment of stars that gave them a post-season home stay, if they hadn’t made their deepest tournament run ever, and if it hadn’t been made at the moment Zagnation was blinded with tears of appreciation, these comments would’ve been deemed harsh. If it wasn’t the Zags’ coach talking, they would’ve been deemed to harsh. And if anyone would’ve uttered them about the deified men’s side, all flavors of message board hell would’ve broken loose, and the whole mess would’ve been idiotic and vain.

But fortunately, this wasn’t the case. And so saying that Stanford is in a more elite college basketball class than Gonzaga marked an important step toward relating with fans, and toward fans learning more about the man. He was direct, honest, yet graceful. A far less battle tested coach than Few, Graves very easily could’ve let himself get swept away by the sentimental ebullience of the moment, and waxed boilerplate on everything that we already knew made this March a special one. Isn’t that what sideline quotes are known for?

Hopefully, this can be the moment that kickstarts our understanding of Kelly Graves, and more importantly, kickstarts the permanent stationing of the Zag Women’s ship in high-major waters.

It plays to both our and our readers’ psychological advantage to abstain from writing about the men’s team for a few more days. Quite fortuitously, there happens to be this other team on campus that’s radicalizing the basketball landscape, captivating new fans who wouldn’t otherwise watch the sport, and deserves more of this site’s attention than it currently receives.

You have to love women’s college basketball coverage if for no other reason than no one in the country outside of Dave Trimmer seems to be mentioning at all the still mind-bogglingly advantageous occurrence of the Spokane sub-regional being placed inside the Spokane regional. An ESPN blog by Michelle Voepel recently mentioned how Gonzaga’s home court advantage was aiding their tournament run, and yet didn’t mention that it would actually be continuing. For an 11 seed. In the rounds of 16 and 8. For the first time in the history of the women’s tournament.

The faces of #Winning

Ah, the shroud of anonymity — and the lowered stakes — surrounding womens’ collegiate sports coverage.

Speaking of coverage, in case you missed its in-broadcast mention every 90 seconds or so, Courtney Vandersloot passed the incredible 2,000-1,000 milestone on Monday, which she thankfully had one extra post-season game to reach. She now has yet another post-season game in which she can destroy the single-season assist record, which frankly is a mark no one thought even she would hit. Congratulations, Courtney. You run and pass like a gazelle. A record-setting gazelle. And you’ve converted a men’s-only basketball watcher to a co-ed one.

In contrast to what we saw in the first four minutes of the second half on Saturday in Denver, said gazelle and her equally-talented offensive ingenue Kayla Standish helped the Gonzaga women’s team neutralize their halftime deficit, and play toe-to-toe with UCLA the rest of the way. They were rarely perfect — the Zags’ zone is often porous and even the invincible VDS turns the ball over sometimes — but they were nearly always entertaining, intense and effective.

And then after the game, they got lucky again.

It’s no secret that upsets aren’t a frequent occurrence in women’s basketball. When Xavier, up nine on Louisville with under ten minutes to play and benefitting form a huge size advantage in 6’6″ Ta’Shia Phillips and 6’5″ Amber Harris, completely imploded on their home floor, we were surprised. And pleasantly so. Trying to simultaneously guard two ferocious bigs and two deadly three point threats like Tyeasha Moss and Katie Rutan for the second sweet sixteen in a row didn’t seem to aid our chances of winning, regardless of where we were playing.

Standish, for whose scoring alacrity we may as well refer to as Samantha Dower, can clearly out-physical people on offense. But while Louisville is much smaller than Xavier they still play physical interior basketball. If UCLA was imposing enough to expose passing and scoring lanes left open by bigs Standish, Katelan Redmon and Kelly Bowen, Louisville will be, too. Clearly, the Louisville matchup will be a track meet. We have a strong shot to win any track meet we enter. But the key to success against the Cardinal will be dominating the possessions that slow down into a half-court set, by eliminating easy scoring angles inside and playing a more alert zone.

The total confluence of events remains a huge break for the Zags in a post-season where good fortune continues to be mysteriously consummate with good skill. We recently learned the hard way, however, that an event doesn’t necessarily occur just because the circumstances surrounding the event increase the likelihood of it occurring.

But we’re suckers. And we think the Zags are gonna do it this Saturday.

One week ago we wrote that if the men’s team somehow advanced to the Elite 8, and the women beat UCLA, that this coming Saturday would be the biggest day in the history of Gonzaga University athletics. With superior guard play, shooting ability, tempo control, and the momentum of 12,000 screaming Zag fans trying to will their team to yet another home game and their best post-season result in program history, it still could be.

This was the face we made for most of the second half, too

This is really tough to write. We’re shocked. We don’t think anyone in our fan base thought this would happen, and if they did, they didn’t think it would happen this shamefully. And yet, part-time cynics that we are, should we be surprised that the Zags of not-so-old resurfaced 48 hours after one of the most uplifting victories in program history?

We’re not sure if the fact that this team of streaks and extremes failed to be even a mere shade of what they were two nights ago is a reflection of how desperate we were for a significant tournament run, or how gullible we are as a fan base. Either way, we all just got punked. This site, especially, fell hook, line and sinker for a strong showing, if not a win.

Firstly and foremostly, BYU made shots tonight. They made 53% from the floor. We shot an unusually low 42%. This doesn’t account for the entirety of a 22 point blow out, but it does account for a lot.

The Cougars are clearly comprised of more components than Jimmer. A number of Cougars stepped up around the perimeter and hit shots. Several of those went in because they have several talented perimeter shooters. Several other BYU threes fell because we are, as we have holistically been this year, an incompetent perimeter defense team. Respect to them on their overall performance, but it is not entirely to BYU’s credit that they went an unseemly 14-28 from three tonight.

Stat lines aside, this may have been Rob and Steven’s worst combined game ever, and certainly their worst against a Top 25 opponent. If I’m Steven, I am pretty pissed that I spent my last Zag game throwing dainty, vulnerable lob passes and taking ill advised second half shots instead of having a positive impact. Rob can be as physical as a Mack truck, but none of that matters if he can’t hold the ball in his hands, double-teamed or not.

On a positive note, we want to thank Elias for showing up tonight. We’ve said all year long that he is infinitely better when he cuts to the basket. He’s also infinitely better when he plays like he wants to physically kill our opponent. He played his ass off on every possession this evening, but 18 points and seven boards doesn’t seem to reward the level of physicality and toughness that he brought, and that we wish others would have brought. He also got screwed a number of times by bad breaks and bad calls. We hope he doesn’t just spend the off-season motivating himself with the embarrassment of this loss. We hope he spends his off-season remembering how he came to play in the last two games of this year, and that he makes a point of permanently adopting this ruthless style. Because the Elias we saw tonight would have annihilated the Elias we saw against Kansas St. or SDSU or Washington State.

It was a tale of two halves: the contest started out as an unfortunate cocktail of zebras, bad luck and poor play, and through it all we weathered a seven point deficit. But the night ended with a straight shot of self-inflicted lethargy, indecision, and other bad adjectives that you’re probably inserting under your breath right now.

The difference maker in the first half was the surprising amount of tactical energy BYU started the game with. Just as we looked one step ahead of St. J’s two nights ago, BYU looked one step ahead of us right out of the gate. Our ultimate inability to match their energy allowed BYU to dictate the tone and tempo of the game – fast and furious, and perimeter oriented. For us, frenetic pacing bordered several times on out-of-control pacing, and BYU’s ostensibly mediocre post defense morphed into a front with a surprising amount of tenacity, usually made possible by a persistent BYU double-team.

Because we weren’t in control of the tempo in the first half, we weren’t in control of our game plan of dominating the post and geting guys in foul trouble. Of course, our unique ability to cough up the ball at the mere sniff of a potential BYU double-team probably screwed up our post efforts even more. Pokeaways came back and threatened to make an appearance on nearly every possession, especially down low with Rob. Tonight there existed, in the interior, the diametric opposite of the post-dominance we experienced in the St. John’s game. One strong possession would be followed by a tentative, rattled one or a ramshackle-paced one.

As the first half drew on, there was a stretch of five minutes or so that Rob held on to the ball. In this stretch we finally started to draw more fouls off of post feeds. Largely to Rob’s credit, we were able to carve out enough interior space that guys like Anderson, Hartsock, Magnusson and Abouo were forced to hack us. This is where Dave Rose, probably best known for getting out of the way of his star player, should be commended for the chess piece positioning of his players. He did an excellent job of subbing in his five interior men, ensuring that everyone accumulated fouls evenly. The four aforementioned players had 4, 3, 4 and 3 fouls respectively. Despite drawing 14 fouls on their post players, none of them ever felt in danger of fouling out.

While losing the scoring battle in the first half was aided considerably by the combination of dubious officiating, BYU having great luck, and us continuously allowing ourselves to be stripped of the ball, the second half was purely our fault. After the adversity that we had faced in the first 20, we needed to come out and reaffirm our dominance in the post.

Check out this play-by-play coming out of the second half:

That’s a turd sandwich, folks, that we whipped up at the most critical juncture of the game. In our first seven possessions we turned the ball over four times, missed two five footers, and made one shot.

This is the stretch of play in which we had to save our season by turning the tenor of the game around – by refocusing our interior presence, protecting the ball, slowing the game down, and drawing more fouls.

Instead, we did none of those things, and as a result this was the stretch where our season ended.

We’ll write again in a few days. For us, personally, it might be beneficial to sit back and re-examine exactly why were so confident that our team would perform at a high level this evening. This was really the year that we weren’t going to go down UNC style or Syracuse style. We could feel it.

We felt wrong.

Jimmer's all alone on this court, kind of like how he is when he plays with his own team.

Popular sports cliches posit that it’s stupid for a team to look beyond their next immediate matchup, and that they instead should take one game at a time. Make no mistake, the Zags next matchup is a six-lettered freak who should’ve garnered Ammo comparisons much earlier than this January, and he needs to be taken very seriously. As we wrote earlier, Zags v. Jimmer is in some ways a matchup from hell; we get to defend a perimeter shooting threat that has never met a shooting space he couldn’t enlarge, and never met a spot on the floor that he didn’t like to shoot from. While the Zags of December and their perimeter defense failures are locked in the rear-view mirror, this is still a shudder-worthy assignment for a sub-250 perimeter defense team.

It is equally important to note, however, that this is an incredibly beatable BYU team whose stock is dropping worse than the skin underneath Rick Pitino’s eyes. Their interior presence is dwindling, and they had a hard time out-rebounding lowly Wofford. Our interior presence on Thursday downright bullied a Big Bad East team into complete submission. Their team revolves around one epic player and ten role players. Our team revolves around six or seven strong players. In other words, it is a team.

This realization of BYU’s vulnerability, assuming that we do in fact realize it, can only further our confidence level, which is ten games closer to being sky high than it was on February 5th. But when you factor in the context of this particular 2011 tournament, adequate ascertainment of BYU’s weaknesses should make us more than confident – it should make us wring our hands with anticipation because of what we can achieve beyond BYU. (On a side note, our women’s team, faced with the insanely awesome and unprecedented gift of continuous home court advantage until the Final Four, should also be wringing their hands themselves. Their first home game tips at 1:00pm PST on ESPN2, and serves as an excellent enthusiasm builder for the men’s game).

Let’s put today’s matchup in a different perspective. Say we had gotten leveled with the dreaded nine seed instead of the eleven. Say that we weren’t in the region with the most vulnerable number one seed. And say Brandon Davies had been suspended in December and BYU’s stock had dropped all the way to an eight seed, and they were facing us in the first round. We would have pride to play for, but we would also have a second round matchup with Ohio State to play for. A team’s tourney success is measured in 2011 by the depth of the runs it has, not a valiant or not-so-valiant second round effort, and facing OSU or Duke in the second round would more than likely spell the end of a tournament run.

Our current scenario is insanely more advantageous. The winner of our matchup faces the winner of a 2-7 matchup. The 2 seed is simply an over-seeded team, and the 7, well, see below.

It is for this reason why “looking ahead” should serve a small but valuable purpose – when the “getting” for the winner of today’s game is this good, how can you not be a little more excited to play, to capture the best opportunity you might ever have to make a deep tournament run?

Local radio announcer Dennis Patchin, a voice we usually only turn to for grunts, groans and whining emphaticisms, pulled out a gem yesterday on air. He asked if after all that this team has been through, if through the unassailable woes of the lowest Zag lows the MZE has possibly ever seen, wouldn’t it be funny if this group of guys came out the other end as the team?

Many feel that the 2006 NCAA Tournament team was the team, and that the team blew it in an unforgivable, 17-point, sweet-sixteen-meltdown-to-UCLA type of way. If UCLA knocks off Florida today, which is by no means out of the realm of possibility, then we have the opportunity to win our way to redemption, and a do over at taking out UCLA in the Round of 16. For what it’s worth, when we ran game simulations against 20 different potential first round opponents before the draw was announced, the opponent whom we had the most favorable scoring margin against of all was the Bruins.

Are we salivating, yet?

I love this time of year, and I love this type of Zag team. You know there will be BYU fans crawling all over the Pepsi Center today. But there will also be a ton of Zag fans, and even more Zag momentum.

It’s time to go out and slaughter the Cougars the way we slaughtered St. John’s. Because this is one winnable opportunity we simply can’t pass up.