This time, Zags avoid getting hit
“Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”
—Winston Churchill
OK, we can safely assume that Sir Winston was not referring to college basketball when he uttered those famous words.
Nevertheless, they still might apply.
At least in the non-fatal sense.
For instance, Gonzaga came under a barrage of heavy fire on Tuesday night — and no matter how much the coaching staff might have warned them about Texas-Arlington, you have to assume the Zags were only half-listening.
For one thing, UTA had visited The Kennel just one year earlier and was handed a 34-point beatdown.
Plus...
Although the Mavericks were arriving this time with a 2-2 record, they had just absorbed a 20-point pummeling at Oregon — a nightmare in which UTA rang up the worst field goal percentage in program history.
Conclusion: They can’t shoot, and they don’t do anything else well enough to compete with the No. 8 team in the country.
EXCEPT…
All those shots the Mavs clanked in Eugene seemed to find the net this time.
Texas-Arlington shot a fairly spectacular 11 for 26 from 3-point range — and quite a few of those buckets came from mega-long range, quite often just too deep for anyone to close out on the shooter.
Meanwhile, UTA coach Chris Arnold decided on the only defensive strategy that might give his team a chance.
The Mavericks essentially refused to guard Filip Petrusev, Anton Watson or Ryan Woolridge on the perimeter, thus turning the area around the hoop into something like a multi-car accident at rush hour in Los Angeles.
“If we gave them space inside, we were going to get killed,” Arnold said, “so we took our chances on the guys we thought had the least likely chance of seriously hurting us from outside.”
The Zags staff perhaps saw that strategy coming.
UTA had done the same thing with Woolridge when the new Gonzaga point guard was at North Texas.
They dared him to shoot, and then sent him to the foul line whenever possible.
Woolridge’s 54 percent career free-throw shooting hadn’t been an issue as the Zags zoomed through their first four wins, but now?
Suddenly it mattered.
WITH THE game still not put away down the stretch, the Mavericks kept trying to find Woolridge (who had punished the original defensive strategy by knocking down a trio of 3-pointers), while Gonzaga hustled to get the ball out of his hands.
Wooldridge wound up 2 of 7 from the foul line, but even worse…
The disease seemed to be contagious.
The Zags made only 17 of 30 freebies as a team, the kind of shooting that can (and will) get you beaten on a lot of nights.
The fact that Tuesday didn’t turn out to be one of those disastrous evenings was due, in large part, to the return of Killian Tillie — Gonzaga’s mysterious missing superstar.
Tillie would already be in the NBA, except that over the past two years, he’s been banged up more than a guy standing right in the middle of that smash-up on the L.A. freeway we mentioned earlier.
In fact, at the moment Tillie was introduced with the Zags starters on Tuesday, he had appeared in just 15 of the team’s previous 48 games.
And when he did play last year, Tillie was rehabbing from two separate injuries and never looked like himself.
Yet here’s the amazing part…
When UTA switched defenses — using all sorts of gimmicks and puzzling changes — Tillie often seemed like the only member of the Gonzaga student body who knew what was going on.
AS BOSS Mark Few put it afterward, Tillie “got it” and basically everyone else did not.
That might be a slight overstatement, but what’s not in question is that when the Zags did execute properly against UTA’s smorgasbord of defenses, they couldn’t make shots.
Gonzaga was 5 for 22 from deep, and simple math tells you that with the Mavs hitting 11 bombs, that’s an 18-point differential.
Ironically, Woolridge — who had been dared to shoot from behind the arc — was the only Zag who could find the basket without a GPS and a team of sled dogs.
Would-be sharpshooter Corey Kispert has now put together back-to-back games that total two buckets in 18 attempts, which you’d probably guess he could manage while blindfolded.
Ah, but as Few pointed out — perhaps channeling his inner Sir Winston — the Zags survived this night of being fired upon…
And still won.
“There are a lot of things we can teach from,” Few said.
Indeed.
With just Saturday’s joust against Cal State-Bakersfield left until they head for the Bahamas to face a brutal field of tournament entrants, well…
It might be time to do some cramming.
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Email: scameron@cdapress.com
Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns for The Press appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Steve also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball each Tuesday.