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Gonzaga Basketball

San Francisco beats BYU 75-63 to set up WCC Tournament semifinal with Gonzaga

Gonzaga Bulldogs head coach Mark Few and San Francisco Dons head coach Todd Golden chat after the second half of a college basketball game on Thursday, Feb 24, 2022, at War Memorial Gym in San Francisco, Calif. Gonzaga won the game 89-73. (Tyler Tjomsland / The Spokesman-Review)
By Theo Lawson theol@spokesman.com(509) 459-5584

San Francisco solidified its position in the NCAA Tournament and set up a third meeting with Gonzaga by holding off BYU for a 75-63 win in Saturday night’s West Coast Conference Tournament quarterfinal matchup at the Orleans Arena in Las Vegas.

The top-seeded Bulldogs (24-3) and fourth-seeded Dons (24-8) will play at 6 p.m. Monday for a spot in Tuesday’s WCC championship game. The game will air on ESPN.

Saturday’s second WCC quarterfinal between third-seeded Santa Clara and sixth-seeded Portland tipped off at 9:30 p.m. The winner of that game advances to an 8:30 p.m. semifinal against second-seeded Saint Mary’s on Monday.

Recent bracket projections have suggested USF was already on track to break the school’s 24-year NCAA Tournament drought, but Saturday’s quarterfinal victory all but guaranteed the Dons will make the 68-team field for the first time since 1998.

BYU, which dropped to 22-10 with the loss, will learn its NCAA Tournament fate on Selection Sunday. The Cougars were expected to qualify before enduring a four-game losing streak midway through WCC play.

Led all season by the tandem of Jamaree Bouyea and Khalil Shabazz, USF’s guards delivered again Saturday. Shabazz scored a game-high 22 points on 5-of-9 shooting from the 3-point line and Bouyea had 18 points to go with six rebounds and four assists.

All-WCC first-team forward Yauhen Massalski left the game with an apparent injury with 5:05 to play in the second half and returned to the Dons bench. He didn’t re-enter the game with USF nursing a double-digit lead.

The Dons got a boost off the bench from Washington State transfer center Volodymyr Markovetskyy, a Ukraine native who’s been open about the situation his family has endured over the past few weeks in the wake of Russia’s invasion. Markovetskyy played a season-high 15 minutes and was a plus-12 for the Dons while scoring three points to go with four rebounds and one block.

Aside from Saint Mary’s, which handed Gonzaga its lone WCC loss, nobody has given the Bulldogs more of a challenge than USF. Mark Few’s team beat the Dons by 16 points in both meetings, winning 78-62 in Spokane and 89-73 in San Francisco. Excluding games against USF and Saint Mary’s, Gonzaga won WCC contests by an average margin of 29.1 points.

The Zags have made 24 consecutive appearances in the WCC title game dating back to 1997.