In the past two weeks, Gonzaga’s once respectable defense dropped nearly 40 spots in the KenPom ranking–something that gets harder and harder to do later in the season with more data available.
There have been two prominent issues this season: 1) The offense will inexplicably go on quiet stretches for too long, and 2) The defense will suddenly become non-existent. For the most part, problem No. 1 has not been as egregious. It will still occasionally happen, but for the most part, the offense has found its footing and will keep Gonzaga in virtually any game.
Unfortunately, there is the defensive end of the equation. This season, Gonzaga is a remarkably bad defending team, and that is saying something after we came to grips with it for three years during the Drew Timme era.
Gonzaga’s defensive 2P% is the highest in the Mark Few era. This season, per Hoop-Math, teams are making a staggering 76.7 percent of their shots at the rim. For context, last year, it was 55.3 percent and the year before it was 59.0 percent.
CBB Analytics comes in a bit differently, but bad is still bad. Opponents are hitting 66.7 precent of their shots at the rim, which is 4.3 percent above the league average.
The important thing to remember here is that the league average includes all 350-plus teams in college. There are some really bad teams in here. I would gander that if you boiled it down and looked at the defense percentages at the rim of the top 50 teams, Gonzaga would rank at the very bottom.
We’ve seen it happen during games just too many times. Guys get really easy looks at the rim. Who knows where the breakdown in communication happens, but it keeps happening, over and over again.
Per Stathead, Gonzaga owns a team defensive rating of 99.5, which is the second-worst in the Mark Few era. The 2022-23 team owns the distinction, currently, of the worst, but the difference was that team also had the best offense in the nation. To a certain extent, it could cover for the foibles.
But at the end of the day, a bad defense means the offense has to be on ALL THE TIME. So far this season, the Gonzaga offense hasn’t really showcased that it can click for a full 40 minutes. Usually it is around 33-35 minutes.
Which means those five minutes of not a lot of points tend to get blown out of proportion by a defense that is incapable of producing multiple stops in a row. Gonzaga has six losses on the season now, and all six of those losses featured spreads of Gonzaga missing everything and the opponent making everything. This isn’t just bad luck at this point.
Unless the coaching staff is able to drill into this team how to play better on defense, how to communicate better, how to not make sure that opponents aren’t getting the easiest looks at baskets, there are no quick fixes for this issue. Sure, Braden Huff isn’t good at defense. But Braden Huff is not the singular issue. This is a team problem.
Putting Emmanuel Innocenti or Dusty Stromer in more often for defensive stoppers might save you a point or two there, but both come with some hits to the offensive production.
I knew that Anton Watson was the glue that held this team together last season, especially on the defensive end. However, I don’t think many of us were expecting the drop-off to be this steep, especially considering how many faces returned to the mix.
And that is really the crux of the issue that I cannot figure out and what largely worries me the most. Teams that play together year after year tend to get better. Sure, Gonzaga added Khalif Battle and Michael Ajayi to the mix. But this is a team that returned 81.2 percent of its minutes played last season! No questions–they should not be as bad as they are.
The result of which is a remarkably frustrating and rather un-fun team to watch play basketball. After announcing to the world in wins over Baylor and San Diego State that this Gonzaga squad was here to play, the Zags’ stock has absolutely plummeted. And when it can’t seem to get worse, it does, again and again.
There is still a solid month-plus of the season to turn the narrative around. But it is hard to think of this team as remotely dangerous at the moment. Rather, they currently have the vibe of a squad that was placed in the No. 5 seed because of pedigree and is promptly upset by the No. 12 seed.