"But how good is Gonzaga, really?" That's been the implied question always bandied about by outsiders over the past few decades as the Gonzaga men's basketball team has gone from a tiny Jesuit school whose name nobody could pronounce to one of the winningest programs in the NCAA.
"Sure, the Zags won a lot of games... but the West Coast Conference is easy."
"Sure, the Zags won a lot of games... but they can't match talent with teams that have future NBA players."
"Sure, the Zags won a lot of games... but they've still never won the Tournament."
The bar always keeps moving to try to diminish the unreal accomplishments that GU head coach Mark Few and his teams have achieved.
But the 2024-25 Gonzaga season has been a bit different. There weren't a slew of major nonconference victories. There have been a handful of brutal choke job losses. Gonzaga wasn't even in contention for the regular season WCC title heading into the final weekend.
As the Bulldogs set to depart for their 26th straight Big Dance, it's still hard to pin down what defines this team. So when that query has been raised this year, it's coming less from the outside world and more from Zags fans who ask the question with no malice behind it.
"Sure, the Zags won a lot of games... but how good is Gonzaga, really?"
The NCAA Tournament Selection Committee's answer to that question was a resounding "not great." And while fans might bemoan the draw, it's hard to fault the NCAA when the Zags only beat three NCAA Tournament teams this year, and none were teams the committee held high: 7-seed St. Mary's, 9-seed Baylor, and play-in game 11-seed San Diego State. The lack of marquee wins means that even if the 8-seed Zags win their opener against a feisty Georgia team, they will almost certainly need to beat the 1-seed Big 12 champion Houston Cougars to keep their streak of nine straight Sweet 16s alive.
Perhaps what the committee saw was as simple as this: It's March and it's still not clear if this Gonzaga team has an identity. This might be the most enigmatic Gonzaga team in Mark Few's entire tenure as head coach.
While pretty much every other fan base would kill to have the 2024-25 Gonzaga season be their "down" year, perhaps the thing that made the season most frustrating is that we saw just how good these Zags could be on opening night. While Baylor ended up not being elite, Gonzaga's trouncing of the Bears 101-63 at Spokane Arena surely had some fans preemptively booking Final Four tickets. We know exactly how good this team can be because we saw the talent fully clicking on night one.
While Ryan Nembhard and Graham Ike have mostly been consistent, everything else around them has sometimes felt like fitting square pegs into round holes. Sometimes Nolan Hickman is a deadeye shooter and lockdown defender, other times he's passive on offense and incredibly lazy on defensive rotations. When he's hot, Khalif Battle is a pure bucket with swag that few Zags ever can match, but when he's off (he has 10 games scoring in single digits) Gonzaga's offense can seem lost. Michael Ajayi was one of the best players in the WCC last year, leading the conference in scoring while grabbing the second-most rebounds, but he's looked lost almost his entire tenure at GU. Ben Gregg can sometimes make defenses pay for ignoring him, but more often than not just feels like a replacement-level big eating up minutes. Dusty Stromer has seen his minutes dwindle, while Emmanuel Innocenti has provided a late season defensive boost, but has yet to find his shot. Braden Huff might be the third-best player on the team as his efficient offense jumps off the screen, but he's been buried behind Ike and Gregg on the depth chart, ranking eighth on the team in minutes.
It's a Zags team that was always in flux, as evidenced by Few's tinkering with his lineup throughout the season — something longtime watchers of the Bulldogs will recognize as a wild anomaly for a coach who almost never mixes up his starters. Heck, it wasn't until the final game before the Big Dance that Few even tried starting his two best big guys — Ike and Huff — together (an obvious move from the start of the season, but, again, Few is often lineup stubborn).
Trying to make sense of this Zags team often felt like a baffling endeavor. The Zags were second in the country in scoring per game (86.6), and advanced analytics still love the Gonzaga offense, but no fans would say they measure up to the best offenses Few has coached in terms of the eye test. They can still score in bunches — especially when point guard Nembhard gets in transition — but they've mostly been terrible shooting from deep (34.4%, 155th in the country). They have Nembhard feeding two of the most efficient post scorers in the country (Ike and Huff), but they somehow often go ice cold with that much talent on the floor (I hand-counted 22 stretches of 3+ minute scoring droughts over 33 games). The defense has also been a rollercoaster: They've made squads like St. Mary's look offensively inept, but they've also absolutely gotten toasted by non-tourney teams like Santa Clara.
Gonzaga's NCAA Tournament hopes will rely on the flashes of greatness showing up during the opening rounds. Gonzaga began its long rise to the top of the college basketball landscape with the Bulldogs the ultimate underdogs. Those turn-of-the-millenium teams overcame talent differences through team basketball centered on grit and heart.
Straight up? This year's Gonzaga team is more talented than those teams of lore. But talent will only take you so far. It's time to get back to that "nobody believes in us" mentality. For their bite to be as vicious as their bark, these Bulldogs need to find that underdog heart.
It's time to see if the Cinderella slipper still fits. ♦
