Tillie may have to tough out bad ankle

SPOKANE — Do we have some amateur physicians in the audience today?

Oh, good.

It will be fascinating to hear opinions about Killian Tillie’s left ankle.

The Frenchman, as every Gonzaga fan knows too well, has been struck by every ailment except leprosy during his years here in the wilds of the Inland Northwest.

It’s fair to say that every member of the Zags Nation has been rooting, hoping, even praying that Tillie might stay healthy for a run through the NCAA tournament in his senior season.

The Zags remain a terrific college basketball team without Tillie — which they proved again with that 89-77 victory over Pepperdine in Malibu last Saturday night.

Gonzaga’s big guys, Filip Petrusev and the rapidly developing freshman Drew Timme, overwhelmed the Waves in the paint.

As good as they were, however, don’t even THINK that this team doesn’t take a huge leap forward with Tillie in that rotation up front.

Proof: After sitting out one game because of the ankle sprain, Tillie came back and played like a beast in that 90-60 thrashing of Saint Mary’s in Moraga.

I’M SURE most Zag junkies saw that performance and concluded that Tillie’s ankle had healed enough that it would no longer be a problem going forward.’

If Killian had been rehabbing a knee injury (which he’s already done this year), then it would be fair to measure progress until he might get close to 100 percent.

Unfortunately, that’s not how a sprained ankle works.

Those ligaments are now loose, and yep, some rest relieves the pain and swelling, but as far as I know from years of covering sports at the highest level, a badly sprained ankle never completely heals.

That’s why, odd as it seems, Tillie could do a great imitation of an NBA player down at Saint Mary’s — but then be rested at Pepperdine, a game that Mark Few correctly assumed could be won with just a six-man rotation.

This is strictly my guess, but I suspect that for the immediate future, we’ll see Tillie play in games like BYU — and probably the return match with Saint Mary’s, his last-ever appearance at The Kennel.

But when Mark Few CAN keep Tillie off that ankle, he will.

SO WHAT about the NCAA tournament?

This isn’t what you want to hear, but Tillie’s ankle isn’t likely to really heal until after the tournament.

But can he play?

Maybe Tillie can sit out the first game, against a low-seeded team, but after that, he sure would be an asset.

If you ask Few — and we do — he responds that the decision will come down to the team’s medical people, along with Tillie himself and how the coaching staff views how he’s doing.

If you ask Tillie — which we have — he says he’ll play as much as his body lets him. But you get the feeling that unless he’s actually chained to the bench, there are some games he’ll play unless he can’t even walk.

Tillie already has watched his teammates eliminated from one NCAA tournament (2018) because he had a torso injury that was brutally painful.

“I tried everything to play that year,” he said, “and it was just impossible.”

Last year, Killian endured two injuries and was on the bench when the Zags were knocked out by Texas Tech in an Elite Eight game.

Yes, he’s tired of not being ready for Gonzaga’s biggest games.

He surely suspects that he might have added enough to help the Zags win a national championship a year ago.

AND NOW, here we are again.

Gonzaga has a legitimate shot at the Final Four, and how far this team goes might once again come down to the availability of Killian Tillie.

When you watch sit at his locker after a game, he looks like a mummy getting undressed.

What appears to yards and yards of tape must be peeled off that surgically repaired knee and the area around it.

Then there’s the ankle, taped so tightly that it looks like something you’d see on an ice hockey player.

Once all that tape and gauze and whatever else is stripped off and left in a pile at his feet, Killian gets up and walks away, off to another part of the locker room area because, right then, he doesn’t want to talk about everything that hurts.

And whether or not he’s getting better.

Look, I’m not an elite athlete like Killian Tillie, but I have played various sports at pretty competitive level.

Years ago … no, decades ago, I rolled my right ankle on another player’s foot in a basketball game. That ankle has never been the same.

I wore a cast for a month, but the funny thing is that I played the rest of that game and felt OK. We won, and I was bouncing around with everyone else.

THE NEXT morning, I went to step out of bed and fell straight to the floor. I had to crawl to the phone for help.

Unless Killian Tillie is different from everyone else on the planet, the ligaments are loose in his left ankle, and do not provide the proper support.

But if you warm up the ankle, jog a little, then run — you actually can play at almost normal levels.

The problem for Killian, potential NBA player, will be the same as it was for me. It’s gonna hurt like hell the next day.

The bottom line is that, yes, he probably can play in the tournament.

If the Zags draw a Thursday-Saturday routine, Tillie likely will look like himself on Thursday — but he’ll struggle to play on Saturday.

Having just that one day to rest, get help from the trainers and so forth, it will be really, really difficult.

And painful.

But if I were a betting man (and I am), I would wager that Tillie does not want to sit out another NCAA tournament.

I suspect it’ll hurt, but he’ll play.

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Email: scameron@cdapress.com

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns for The Press appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball each Tuesday.

Steve’s various tales from several decades in sports — “Moments, Memories and Madness” — run on Sundays.