Zags a little bit Jekyll, a little bit Hyde

There’s a certain level of buyer’s remorse to pre-Christmas basketball.

Probably 90 percent – maybe more – of the 12,000 customers who crowded into the Spokane Arena on Tuesday night came to watch the Gonzaga team that polished off third-ranked Georgia Tech, their appetites stimulated by all the flying and flinging they saw on national TV.

The problem: that game had already been played.

Instead, the sellout crowd was treated to the Zags who often as not show up against Eastern Washington and the Eagles who always seem to show up against GU. Blended with some rather pot-luck officiating, the 83-70 result was a hard-fought uglython typical of the recent series – but one which will serve, in its own way, as an important building block for both teams, though only Gonzaga gets to count it as a victory.

“I can’t remember when this game has ever been pretty,” admitted Gonzaga coach Mark Few.

Checking our stats, the only record set was for most sponsors squeezed into the game’s official title, which is saying something even for the promoters from Brettworld.

It may be the only game ever that took longer to say than it did to play.

Well, the Major Rubber Retailer got his money’s worth and so did the Home Loan Outfit, what with the third largest basketball crowd in Arena history on hand – or perhaps it was the largest opera crowd, given the dearth of decibels.

“At times I thought it was Mead High School playing Rogers,” said Gonzaga’s Adam Morrison, who has enough of those under his belt for comparison’s sake. “All those people, but there was no life to it.

“But that’s what Eastern does to you – they slow you down and get methodical, and they sure did a good job of it tonight.”

Which is not to say the Eagles’ desire was to suck the life out of the building. Anything but.

For a team that has now lost 19 in a row in this series, the Eagles have a great knack for bringing it all against Gonzaga, and that wasn’t just true for the 11 or so minutes they led Tuesday night but until the bitter end.

They roughed up the Zags a little on the boards and roughed them up even more defensively and sometimes even carved them up offensively, though the game would have been closer longer if a few more surprising end-of-clock layups had gone down.

“I thought they beat us to balls all night,” said Few, “and generally outplayed us.”

And for a team that has been taking some significant lickings, that’s progress.

“We shut the door to our team room (after a loss to Denver on Saturday) and I kind of let them challenge each other,” said EWU coach Mike Burns. “I thought that’s where we were at – and you saw the results.

“There’s a certain toughness that comes with wearing an Eastern Washington basketball jersey and you have to live up to that. Tonight, I thought they took a step in the direction of living up to it.”

With the Zags climbing to 13th in the latest Associated Press poll, there were probably some murmurs out there about them not having lived up to whatever comes with that jersey – except that some nights just have to be about keeping score and not so much about making a favorable impression.

Not that it was an evening without amusements – whether it was Eastern’s Marc Axton strafing four different defenders for 33 points, or Ronny Turiaf’s impossible alley-oop tip or the cameo of slicing and dicing by backup guard Pierre Marie Altidor-Cespedes that pretty much vaporized Eastern’s last real surge.

But this wasn’t going to be an encore of the Georgia Tech game for GU.

“We got enough pats on the back the last couple of days from that one and it took 20 minutes or so to shake that off,” said Few.

“Look, this is a game where we have nothing to win and everything to lose and those games are dangerous. Eastern is always going to come in here loose and flying around and we talked about the stage being set for a pratfall with Georgia Tech and Oklahoma State and Eastern sandwiched between them.”

But a performance like the Zags had against Georgia Tech teases their many loyalists into thinking that this team – no matter what it’s ranking – isn’t a work in progress in all respects.

Sophomore point guard Derek Raivio will have both his breakout nights and his busts, and he’ll have them back-to-back. Fellow sophs Sean Mallon and Morrison will continue to surf the learning curve, as will PMac and Erroll Knight and, well, all of them.

“That’s indicative of a young team or an inexperienced team,” said Few. “We’re still not getting everybody bringing what they’re supposed to bring for the entire time we’re on the floor – whether you’re a scorer or an energy guy or our best defender or our best rebounder. We’re not always getting that for the stretches like we should.

“Now, when it all comes together, you see something like you saw against Georgia Tech. But getting them all to fulfill their roles on this team at even a 90 percent clip is not there right now. We have some, I guess you’d say, attention-span issues. But you’re not going to play aesthetically pleasing basketball every night out – and probably not at all against a team like this.”

But these do seem to be the bottom-line Zags. Out of curiosity, a show of hands – did anyone truly expect a team with one senior who plays any minutes at all to be 9-1 against this schedule?

Perhaps that’s why Few was moved to admit that beating Eastern in this fashion is just as important as beating Georgia Tech in that fashion.

As for the next challenge, well, that’s something else.

Now the Zags must go play the new No. 3, Oklahoma State, which Few views as “a legitimate No. 1, every bit as much as Illinois.” What’s more, rather than getting them on a neutral or at least quasi-neutral court as the Zags have done with many of their marquee opponents in recent years, this one will be played in Oklahoma City – not the Cowboys’ home court, exactly, but only no less than what the Arena would be for GU in the same situation.

“We’ve never taken a team into as difficult a situation as this,” he insisted. “To be honest with you, I thought Indianapolis would be a more neutral environment for the Illinois game and it wasn’t – it was all orange. This will be all orange again against a team that really climbs up into you and defends, with everybody back from a Final Four team and seven seniors or something like that. This is a lion’s den.

“But if we have the same approach we had against Georgia Tech, we’ll be fine. We were in attack mode all night. We weren’t tonight.”

No matter. Now that game’s already been played, too.