It is hard to call it a Jekyll and Hyde season for the Zags when it mostly seems like the bad keeps happening over, and over, and over again. Once again, that bad came to bite Gonzaga in the rear end after they fell to the Santa Clara Broncos for the first time in over a decade. At least Steve Nash got to see his alma matter win for once.
The end result, a painful 77-76 loss, doesn’t really move the needle too much for Gonzaga. The Zags have been well into “they need to win the automatic berth for the streak to continue” ever since conference play started.
But the loss does call back to a couple of key issues with this team: impossibly bad three-point shooting and, the more important problem, an impossibly small room for error due to roster limitations.
One can list of the litany of ways things went wrong at Santa Clara last night. The morose defensive rebounding in the first half. Going 0-for-900 from long range in the first 20 minutes. But despite everything, thanks to a beyond herculean effort from Anton Watson, the Zags entered halftime only trailing by six points. It honestly did not make much sense.
In the second half, it seemed like the fortunes were changing. Ryan Nembhard, despite missing the front end of a one-and-one that led to the go-ahead basket in the waning seconds, was a monster in the second half, scoring 15 of his 21 points.
Braden Huff provided a much-needed spark of life when Graham Ike made another long trip to the bench after picking up his fourth foul approximately -17 seconds into the second half. Heart, energy, and emotion were on display as he chipped in nine of his 14.
And we cannot talk about this game and leave out Anton Watson, who was absolutely phenomenal. Seventeen points in the first half and fifteen points in the second half. His five second half TOs were painful, but Watson gets a free pass. Without him, this game isn’t even sniffing a close loss.
Everyone else? One hundred and one minutes on the floor and nine combined points.
And that, right there, is the real problem with this team, and the unflinching painful reality of the year–this rotation is too thin, too inexperienced, and flat out not good enough to allow for the margin of error of previous Gonzaga teams.
So when your leading scorer becomes a ghost in the game due to foul trouble, the Zags just don’t have the dudes capable of replacing that firepower. For previous Gonzaga teams, that has not been an issue. For this team, sadly, it is.
Which means maybe the Zags can push through a 2-for-20 night from three. Or maybe they can push through a night in which they get outrebounded 44-31. Or maybe they can push through a night in which their leading scorer has an off night. But if that total of question marks becomes any higher than one, odds are the team just won’t make it.
It seems really stupid to write all of this, especially considering that if Gonzaga had won 77-76 at the last second, we’d be talking about how the issues are there but the grit showed and they got by with just enough.
A loss is a loss, however. Such is the brutally binary way of sports. You either win, or you lose. As it has been this entire season, the question for the Zags will be how they respond in the next game, because like I said earlier, Gonzaga has been in win the WCC Tournament mode now for longer than any national media member is willing to admit (that is the benefit of the brand).
Is the season any more over than it was before the tip-off at Santa Clara? Absolutely not. Just win the games you need to win, and that NCAA Tournament streak stays alive. Lose any of those games, and the streak, like all good streaks, will come to a sobering end.