Perkins rewriting his story by lifting Gonzaga
SPOKANE, Wash. – When Josh Perkins hit the tying basket in Gonzaga’s first-round game against North Carolina-Greensboro last week with 56 seconds to play, he turned and gave a playful smirk to the Bulldogs bench. His message was vintage Perkins: Everyone calm down. I got this.
“That’s just Perk,” laughs Gonzaga assistant Brian Michaelson, shaking his head. “He’s got confidence, and he’s not afraid to share it.”
A redshirt junior for the fourth-seeded Zags, who meet ninth-seeded Florida State in the West Region semifinals Thursday, Perkins came to Spokane with a lofty goal: He wants to be remembered as the best point guard in school history.
That sounds virtually impossible, and borderline crazy, when you consider that the most famous Zag of all time is John Stockton, the NBA’s all-time leader in assists and steals. But the list after Stockton is daunting, too. Perkins measures himself against past greats including Matt Santangelo, Dan Dickau, Blake Stepp, Derek Raivio, Jeremy Pargo and David Stockton (son of John), among others.
“Point guard at Gonzaga is a special position, and they dot the record book,” Michaelson says. “There are a lot of comparisons.”
Yet it’s John Stockton, a fixture in the Spokane community and the Bulldogs player everyone is compared to most, who has given Perkins some of the most important advice of his career. Part of being a solid point guard, Stockton has told Perkins, is hitting a lot of singles — don’t feel like every play needs to be a home run. Don’t feel like you need to be a hero.
That’s a message that Gonzaga coach Mark Few has reinforced over threeplus seasons with the 6-3 guard from Park Hill, Colo.
“It’s been a battle his whole career to get him to value winning plays,” Few tells USA TODAY. “He came here a very talented kid who valued things that have nothing to do with winning — nolook passes, going for steals you have no chance it, just crazy stuff. But he’s come a long way.”
Another battle Perkins has overcome: learning how to block out malicious opposing crowds.
In October 2016, Perkins was arrested and cited for physical control of a vehicle while under the influence. After Gonzaga’s annual Kraziness in the Kennel, an intrasquad scrimmage open to the public, Perkins celebrated at his apartment with teammates. Craving alone time, he walked to his car, got in and promptly fell asleep. A police officer woke him up and performed a field sobriety test, which Perkins failed. Then it was off to the Spokane police station, where Perkins took and failed another sobriety test. He was issued a ticket for physical control, a misdemeanor.
Few suspended Perkins for Gonzaga’s first two games of the 2016-17 season. But the fallout from Perkins’ arrest lasted considerably longer.
On campus, students shook their head disapprovingly, calling him an alcoholic and crazy partyer. At road games, opposing student sections chanted “D-U-I!” when Perkins touched the ball. At BYU, an errant pass went sailing into the stands, knocking over a Cougars fan’s peanuts. Perkins went over to help clean up but walked away when the fan quipped there was alcohol in the peanuts and did that mean Perkins wanted some?
His interior monologue was worse. “I was supposed to be a leader on campus, be a leader for my team, and I was the one who got in trouble,” he says. “I felt like a hypocrite. And I wondered, are these people right? For the first time, I felt like I didn’t know who I was.”
The incident, Perkins says, forced him to go on “a quest to find my place again.” He’s open about the reality that he cares, maybe too much, about what other people think and say about him. Usually the goofy, class clown-type, Perkins found himself not as loud or as outgoing last season. He battled wanting to correct people who chanted D-U-I — that’s not even factually correct, he points out, as he never turned on the vehicle, let alone drove — with trying to ignore outsiders’ snide remarks.
“I felt like it was me against the entire world for the first couple months,” he says. “Man, I was torn up.”
He thought the solution was obvious. Rewrite his own story by helping Gonzaga get somewhere it had never been and leave that as his legacy, not some stupid mistake.
“I told myself I needed to play well to find myself again,” Perkins says, “to absolve myself of everything.”
Once a fun Cinderella story that has morphed into a perennial top 15 program. Gonzaga reached its first Final Four last year, losing in the national championship game to blueblood North Carolina. Perkins was crucial to that run, starting 35 of 38 games and averaging 8.1 points and 3.1 assists. But it was usually Nigel Williams-Goss, the Zags transfer from Washington, who got credited for stellar backcourt play.
“I think it was hard that right, wrong or indifferent, everybody thought of the Gonzaga point guard last year as Nigel, even though they basically shared that position,” Few says, adding Gonzaga is at its “most elite” when the Bulldogs have two point guards on the floor, as their best seasons prove.
Perkins has been criticized over the years for his play in big games, particularly his habit of swinging for the fences when getting on base would do just fine. He’s been accused of choking when the stage is biggest. After Gonzaga’s 74-71 loss to Saint Mary’s in Spokane in January, fans took to social media to skewer Perkins, who had gone 1-for-9 from the field against the Gaels.
But he’s been borderline terrific this postseason, totaling 45 points, 32 assists and eight turnovers in five games. He’s embraced distributing the ball instead of feeling like he has to take every big shot himself.
Perkins says leading his team on another deep NCAA tournament run would go a long way in proving to others, but also to himself, that his mistake 18 months ago doesn’t define him. He’s come to embrace the taunts from opposing fans. He likes the pressure that comes with playing point guard at Gonzaga. The doubts he had about himself are mostly gone.
He’s on the cusp of leading Gonzaga back to the Final Four. That’s something no other Gonzaga point guard has done. Take the Zags to San Antonio, he figures, and maybe his goal of being the best to ever play that position won’t sound so crazy after all.