Zags May Have Gained A New Level

You can make excuses, it seems, or you can make news.

This is sport’s precarious fulcrum - the “fine line,” as Mark Few put it Saturday night, “between great seasons and good seasons, or good and average.”

If what happened to Few’s Gonzaga Bulldogs this week had happened a year ago, for instance, the Zags would be something less than the in-the-household word they have become in college basketball circles. The coach knows this - as surely as he knows that one of these days, Casey Calvary will throw down one of his E=MC squared dunks and the ball will have to be retrieved from a hole bored through The Kennel floor halfway to Madagascar.

What happened, as all Zagophiles know, is that the team’s ascendant point guard, Dan Dickau, fractured a finger in the waning moments of a loss at Arizona on Wednesday night.

The prognosis has him missing games for the next month.

The mass hand-wringing was audible when it wasn’t being drowned out by the grinding in Few’s stomach.

But any conclusion that the Bulldogs would be toast turned out to be extremely premature, as the Zags revealed in an 86-74 schooling of the University of Washington in front of the inevitable 4,000 crazies and the fraction of the free world serviced by Fox.

What the Zags did was hand their fate over to Blake Stepp, an 18-year-old freshman whose first Gonzaga report card is still a few weeks away.

That he handled it like a 28-year-old - or even a certain 38-year-old who sometimes can be seen in this same gym - was perhaps not as surprising as how unflappable his own replacements proved to be.

Yes, yes - not that we should be surprised by anything Zaggish anymore.

“This was a program win,” noted Few. “Just absorbing a key loss and finding something, somebody in the program to shore it up and do it against a quality opponent makes it more special.”

If it sounds like disbelief, so be it - but there is still something a little cockeyed about all of this.

That a Pac-10 team like Bob Bender’s Huskies - and we could name a couple other Pac-10 teams, too - can match up against GU and be outmanned at several spots, to say nothing of up and down the bench, strains some credulity. Few, eternally grateful to his friend’s stunning sense of fair play in even agreeing to perpetuate this series, made sure to acknowledge how the Huskies “always play us tough” and how “people are vastly underrating them” - and we wind up checking our compasses, wondering if we’ve wandered into the wrong interview.

Then again, what do we know? The Huskies haven’t won a basketball game in Spokane since 1945, mostly because some of Bender’s predecessors didn’t have his guts.

In any case, this was a game fraught with some peril for Gonzaga - exacerbated by Dickau’s injury and what it demanded from the new faces thrust into the fire.

For one thing, in tandem with the Arizona game, it sends the Zags off on their toughest stretch until the beginning of West Coast Conference play. After this, there are road games at Montana and Boise State, a quickie cross-country shot to Florida to meet the Gators and a detour back through Wisconsin for a rematch with Green Bay.

It’s a stretch that in March can turn an NCAA bid to an NIT, or an NIT offer to an unringing phone.

The people who might be conceding Florida - insert Al Gore joke here - are probably counting Montana and Boise as gimmes, too. That does not include Few.

“Those two places are, traditionally, as tough as you’re going to find in the Northwest,” he said.

Particularly without your junior point guard.

“Every one of those games is going to have to be a high-emotion game for us,” Few said. “We can’t afford to just go play steady and solid with a guy down. We have to play with high energy, high enthusiasm, tough-minded.”

Sounds like a job for Stepp.

That he made every play he had to Saturday night didn’t particularly surprise Few (“my expectations for him are so high”), but he has to marvel at the numbers: 38 minutes, 17 points, 10 assists, 5 rebounds, 2 turnovers.

No, the erstwhile shooting guard didn’t shoot it very well - just 4 of 15, and 1 of 8 from 3-point range. But he did allow Gonzaga to play as if Dickau wasn’t missing - aggressively up-tempo, as usual.

“That’s more Blake’s forte anyway,” Few said. “You watch us over the course of the year, and he actually pushes it harder than Dan does at times. He loves to get it going and make decisions on the fly.

“I also think it puts less pressure on the point guard not having to set up the halfcourt offense all the time. You saw it some tonight - we’re trying to run some clock and they’re picking him up and working it hard. Whereas if you push it and throw it ahead, he doesn’t get worked as hard.

“Besides, that’s just the way we play.”

Of course, had Stepp’s replacements - Jimmy Tricco at first, but more significantly freshman walk-on Kyle Bankhead and out-of-position forward Anthony Reason off the bench - not played their roles so well, the Zags could have found the final few minutes a bit dicier. But it’s not as if Stepp went into the affair planning on shooting less.

“The point guard in our offense gets as many shots as the two-guard,” he said. “They’re different shots - not coming off screens as much - but there’s just as many chances to score.”

What it underscored was that these Zags are in some respects even better off than the team which preceded them, regardless of what they eventually accomplish.

“It’s called depth,” Few said. “If Matt Santangelo had gone down last year like Dan did this week, I’m not sure we’d have been able to get the ball across half court. I’d pray at night, `Not Matt.’ We didn’t have anybody else.

“The one luxury we have now is that we’re back to that Quentin (Hall)-and-Matt scenario - two point guards in the game at the same time. Heck, Blake’s played it all his life. His adjustment here is playing the two spot.”

Hmm. Apparently everyone should have been worried before. Now he tells us.