Loss to BYU set stage for Gonzaga’s run in March
GLENDALE, ARIZ . Shortly after his team’s stunning loss to Brigham Young on Feb. 25, Gonzaga assistant coach Tommy Lloyd left the locker room to say hello to his family. He ran into BYU coach Dave Rose and offered both a strange and prophetic greeting as they shook hands. “I thanked him,” Lloyd said. As Gonzaga sits on the precipice of a national title at 37-1, it now seems BYU did the Bulldogs a favor by beating them 79-71 in one of the bigger upsets of the season. Not only did it give the Zags a useful glimpse of their basketball mortality before the one-and-done NCAA tournament, it also removed the potential hindrance of trying to make history as the first undefeated team since Indiana in 1976.
As it is, Gonzaga will have a chance Monday against North Carolina to become the first one-loss champion since North Carolina State in 1974. But for whatever reason, carrying an undefeated record into the NCAA tournament has only resulted in heartbreak, for UNLV in 1991, Wichita State in 2014 and Kentucky in 2015.
In hindsight, it’s a list Gonzaga is glad it didn’t have a chance to join.
“It’s good we have that monkey off our back, so to speak,” Lloyd said. “I remember two years ago when we lost to Duke in the Elite Eight, we were watching Kentucky and that crazy game against Notre Dame, and I was (thinking), man, they’re carrying a burden for sure. Now we can all just focus on where we’re at now and trying to win a game (Monday). We don’t have to have the speculation swirling around us.”
For Gonzaga, which had beaten BYU handily in Provo a few weeks earlier and rolled over the West Coast Conference teams by an average of 26.5 points this season, its lone loss came out of nowhere.
The Zags, in fact, led 18-2 less than six minutes into the game and still had a 12point lead with 13:30 remaining. At that point, it seemed like the only thing that stood between Gonzaga and an undefeated regular season would be some sort of unexpected stumble at the league tournament in Las Vegas.
But with little indication it was coming, BYU reeled off a 15-2 run to take the lead in “The Kennel,” Gonzaga’s vicious home arena, setting the stage for the first close game it had played since beating Iowa State 73-71 on Thanksgiving weekend.
The key sequence occurred with less than a minute remaining. Needing a basket to tie or take the lead, guard Josh Perkins tried to dribble between two defenders but lost the ball. BYU finished off the upset with a jumper at the other end, outscoring Gonzaga 8-0 in the final two minutes.
“Maybe that was a breaking point for us,” Perkins said. “It happened for a reason. I turned the ball over late in the game, and it hurt us. I learned from that. The team learned from that. We know now we have to get the ball in the right spots to get a good shot in that situation.”
Gonzaga’s run through the NCAA tournament would suggest the experience of losing a close game was useful and perhaps even formative. The Bulldogs held off a big second-half run from Northwestern in the Round of 32. It got a clutch three-pointer from Jordan Mathews to take the lead with 59 seconds left, then survived a frenzied finish against West Virginia in the Sweet 16. And in Saturday’s national semifinals, the Zags calmly self-corrected after South Carolina momentarily shocked them with a 16-0 run to take the lead with seven minutes left.
“(The BYU loss) let us know that when we deviate from our process and what we had done the rest of the year, we’re susceptible to losing games,” guard Nigel Williams- Goss said. “More than anything, I just feel like that taste of losing, how we felt in the locker room afterwards, was something we wanted to never feel again. We said, ‘Let’s just learn from it.’ ”
At the time, of course, there was no way to know whether that performance was the start of Gonzaga’s run or the beginning of the end. Though head coach Mark Few didn’t question his team’s ability or commitment, he said a text message the night of the BYU loss from sports psychologist Jon Hammermeister, who is based in Spokane and has worked with Gonzaga, proved to be prescient.
“He said, ‘We’ll find out in a month whether this is good or bad. We’re not going to know today,’ ” Few said. “And he was right. It could have went either way. These guys made it go the right way, and I’m sure it was a factor in helping us get here.”