West Coast dominates — Zags, Ducks move on to Final Four
Zags make first Final Four; Ducks end 78-year drought
SAN JOSE — With 33.2 seconds left in Saturday’s game, Xavier cleared the bench. The result was decided. Gonzaga was going to the Final Four for the first time ever.
And the ensuing scene was ... shall we say, notable. This was a big Zaggy deal. As you could tell by the way Gonzaga’s coach, Mark Few, hugged every man, woman and life form inside SAP Center after the final horn.
”I mean, he’s at a small Jesuit school,” said Xavier coach Chris Mack of Few. “And it’s in a league that gets one or two teams to the NCAA tournament. That’s why I took so long in the handshake line. He’s a friend of mine. I’m happy for him.”
All of us in the Pacific Time Zone should be happy for Few. Happy for his team, too. By winning the West Regional at SAP Center on Saturday in an 83-59 romp , the talented and tenacious Bulldogs became the first team from the West to reach the Final Four since 2008 when UCLA did it. Gonzaga is also the first team from the West Coast Conference to reach the Final Four since the University of San Francisco in 1957. That’s right. Sixty years ago.
You might also say the Zags are spearheading a grand 2017 revival of Left Coast basketball, as was proved later Saturday when Oregon defeated Kansas in the Midwest Regional title game. This marks the first time since 1998 (with Stanford and Utah) that the West has sent two teams to the Final Four in the same year.
After Oregon’s victory in Kansas City, Ducks guard Tyler Dorsey pointedly told reporters that too many people have been “sleeping on West Coast” basketball.
“Wake ’em up,” Dorsey said. “Wake up! Wake up!”
That’s not a problem in a certain European country, where basketball fans are staying awake every time Gonzaga plays. Poland is the home nation of 7-foot-1 Bulldogs center Przemek Karnowski, who controls the paint and facilitates the offense for point-producers Johnathan Williams and Nigel Williams-Goss. They’ve all got many followers back in Karnowski’s homeland who postpone their bedtimes to watch his team live on streaming television.
“Today’s game was at 11:10 p.m.,” Karnowski said. “I know a lot of people are watching. They know what the NCAA tournament is. They know what the Final Four is.”
“Polish dogs are served and pretty strong beer,” Few said. “They have a good time at 11 p.m. watching Gonzaga.”
So maybe we can annex Warsaw and Krakow as honorary West Coast cities for the next week.
It definitely does make for an interesting sports bar debate, the idea of West Coast basketball vs. the rest of the country. Once upon a time, during the reign of UCLA as college basketball overlord from 1967-76, the West was totally dominant. Then the region fell into a slump until 1998. Then the West slumped again, with basically just UCLA and Arizona carrying the Pacific Time Zone hoops banner with Gonzaga ascending. Now, you’d have to say the West is definitely back. But is it by happenstance? Or by plan?
“I don’t know, I think it’s just cyclical,” Few said in pondering the trend. “We’ve certainly been good enough that time to get there and we just didn’t get it done. And these guys did.”
Then he nodded toward his players. Few has had the Zags close so many times before, with five previous trips to the Sweet Sixteen and one to the Elite Eight as recently two years ago. In reflection, Few spoke about how in certain years, a raft of players can leave college early for the NBA draft in other parts of the country but not in the west, and vice versa.
“So it’s luck and breaks and matchups and then just if it’s not your night,” Few said. “The cool thing about our guys, though, is that sometimes we’ve made it our night when it wasn’t.”
Saturday, it was. It definitely was. Let’s not minimize one iota the accomplishment of the Zags in this particular year. To reach the Final Four, they completed a virtual geographic sweep by vanquishing teams from the Summit League (South Dakota State), the Big Ten (Northwestern), the Big 12 (West Virginia) and the Big East (Xavier).
Of these, Saturday’s victory over the Musketeers was easily the most impressive. There were several pregame subplots afoot before tipoff. One was the close friendship of the two head coaches, as Mack mentioned. Another was the fact that Gonzaga and Xavier are private Catholic Jesuit universities with multi-level connections. Xavier’s president, Father Michael Graham, is even on the Gonzaga board of trustees.
But the basketball matchup was the most salient and riveting plot entering Saturday’s game. Gonzaga was the heavy favorite with just one loss on its resume. Xavier with its 13 defeats had been the scrappy underdog that had way overachieved as a No. 11 seed in the West, capped by Thursday night’s big upset of Arizona.
Against Gonzaga, however, the Musketeers never got traction. They threw Mack’s usual grabbag (or mishmash, if you prefer) of zone defenses at the Bulldogs in hopes of slowing down their offense. Nope. Didn’t happen. As Mack noted, it’s a chore to get an inside-out game going against the Zags. When an opponent drives the lane against them, each of Gonzaga’s big men can protect the middle on his own, with no double-team help from perimeter defenders -which in this case meant that any driving Musketeer could kick out the ball to open teammates out on the three-point line because those teammates were being guarded, too. Xavier only scored 20 points in the second half.
“I don’t think we played our best,” said Xavier’s Mack. “But had we played our best, it still would have been a tough out. They’re really, really good. Sometimes you just lose to a better team. They’ve proven it all year long. They lost one game. They play an incredible schedule. Their record’s their record for a reason.”
Just as the West is best for a reason in 2017. There are good teams out here. The way the bracket shapes up, two of them could meet in the championship game a week from Monday. Don’t be stunned if it happens.