‘It’s just been one of those years.’ An in-depth look at Gonzaga’s complicated relationship with luck in 2024-25

Earlier this season, after a three-point setback against UCLA, Mark Few took a seat at the postgame podium and tried to make sense of another frustrating December outcome against a brand-name college basketball program decided by a handful of plays inside the final minutes.

On this particular Saturday, it was UCLA 65, Gonzaga 62.

The Saturday prior: Connecticut 77, Gonzaga 71.

The one before that: Kentucky 90, Gonzaga 89 (OT).

“In the past, fortune smiled on us a little bit,” Gonzaga’s coach said.

Few didn’t specify as much, but anyone with a basic understanding of the recent history between Gonzaga and UCLA could follow along. Name-dropping Jalen Suggs and Julian Strawther wasn’t necessary.

This season, there have been no big breaks or epic endings that Few and the Zags will remember for generations to come. Mostly the polar opposite for a team that entered the preseason with Final Four aspirations and still, 38 games later, has yet to play a game where it’s been completely overmatched, despite eight losses and no AP ranking next to its name.

Entering the NCAA Tournament, the Zags have eight losses and a 0-7 record in “close games,” or, those decided by one or two posessions/in overtime. Gonzaga is one of five teams in the country without a victory in that specific scenario and one of just two, along with Citadel, that’s lost at least seven close games without also winning one.

Gonzaga has a 75-46 record in close games since 2008, when analytics website BartTorvik.com began tracking the statistic. The Zags have won 4.4 close games per season, with at least one win every year until 2024-25.

The other data point with which Gonzaga and its Hall of Fame-bound coach have become uniquely familiar?

“We’ve got a crazy stat going on,” Few told Andy Katz Tuesday night in a postgame interview on the NCAA March Madness X platform. “I think we’re 355th in ‘luck’ on KenPom and it’s true.”

Few and a large portion of Gonzaga’s fanbase have spent the past five months trying to rationalize it, usually coming up blank.

“I’ve been doing this 38 years now and I think 27 as the head coach,” Few said. “… It’s just been one of those years.”

“KenPom” refers to KenPom.com, the popular and heavily trafficked analytics website run by statistician Ken Pomeroy. Gonzaga fans have probably visited the site in the past to see where their team stacks up in KenPom’s overall net rating, or bookmarked Pomeroy’s page to keep up with metrics such as adjusted offensive efficiency – a category where most of Few’s teams have excelled, rarely falling out of the top 10 and often holding the No. 1 spot in the country.

This season, GU fans are more inclined to move a few columns over, where all 364 NCAA Division I basketball teams are sorted by KenPom’s “luck rating.”

Gonzaga sits 23 spots from the bottom at No. 341 – the lowest luck rating by any team that also ranks inside the top 40 in KenPom’s overall ratings. The Zags tumbled down to No. 351 on Feb. 1 after a 62-58 loss at West Coast Conference rival Saint Mary’s.

Pomeroy estimates the luck rating has been on his site since 2004 or 2005 and admits he “borrowed” the concept from Dean Oliver, who the sport’s modern metrics guru considers “one of the godfathers of basketball analytics.”

Predictive metrics like the ones that appear on KenPom.com and BartTorvik.com can be convoluted and hard to digest, but the luck rating is fairly straightforward.

“Basically, it just looks at close game performance and the assumption is that there is not a lot of skill in winning close games,” Pomeroy said in a phone interview earlier this week. “There’s some, but there’s also a lot of things out of a team’s control in a one- or two-possession game. … So if you win a lot of close games, you’re going to be viewed as lucky and you lose a lot of close games, you’d be viewed as unlucky.”

If the Zags aren’t the unluckiest team in school history, they’re building a strong case. Last year’s team laid claim to the lowest luck rating since KenPom’s analytics debuted in 1997. That team finished No. 300, 41 spots higher than the 2024-25 version.

Gonzaga’s highest luck rating of the KenPom era (since 1997) came in 2010, when the Zags were No. 23. Excluding this year, GU’s average luck rating over the past 27 seasons is 154.

“If teams are low in luck, coaches maybe look at it optimistically and you know, think that things might turn around in close games,” Pomeroy said. “The point here is not that close games are entirely determined by luck, there’s obviously things that teams and coaches have control over and can get better at.

“I think coaches in Mark Few’s situation tend to look at it like, we’re actually maybe better than our record because of some just bad things that have happened in close games, but, you know, on the flip side, when teams show up as lucky, coaches rarely look at it like, ‘Yeah, we were lucky.’ They think, “Oh no, actually we were clutch and we deserve all of those wins.’ ”

Another statistician, Will Warren, who manages a Substack website “Stats by Will,” took a deep-dive look into Gonzaga’s case on Feb. 7, breaking down the outlier performances and statistical anomalies that occurred in many of the close losses.

For example, in an 86-78 setback to West Virginia at the Battle 4 Atlantis, the Mountaineers made 23 of 26 shots from the free-throw line – their most efficient performance from the stripe on at least 25 attempts since 2022.

Warren also highlighted Gonzaga’s abnormally bad 3-point shooting against Kentucky – 4 of 20 (20%) on catch-and-shoot opportunities for a team that usually makes those shots at a 36% clip – in a one-point OT loss.

UCLA, a team averaging 7.3 3s per game and a 3-point shooting clip of 35.4%, matched its season high with 12 3s on a 50% clip in a 65-62 win over Gonzaga, while Santa Clara made 18 3-pointers – the third most in school history and most by any team against GU in the history of the Kennel – during a 103-99 WCC upset.

That’s just to name a handful.

Gonzaga’s staff doesn’t track bank-shot 3-pointers, nor does KenPom’s database have a column for that, but Few insists his opponents have racked up an NCAA record this season.

“We’ve had more banked-in 3s on us this year than I remember in my entire career,” Few told Katz. “… So many of those one-possession games, I wish I could pin down what happened, but it was always just something different here and there.”

Nolan Hickman had a costly turnover with five seconds left in regulation against WVU, Ryan Nembhard missed a key free throw late against UCLA, and Gonzaga failed to execute a baseline out-of-bounds play on the final possession at Saint Mary’s.

During a Friday appearance on the Jim Rome Show, Few was asked about the role of luck in GU’s close losses versus playmaking/execution in late-game scenarios.

“That’s a great question and one of life’s great mysteries,” Few said. “… As you preach as a coach, you make your luck and I think you do.”

Gonzaga still has time to manufacture it.

There’s not much precedent for teams with GU’s luck rating to advance to the final weekend of the NCAA Tournament, but it has happened – once in 2023 when UConn (No. 304) won the national champion and also in 2016 when North Carolina (No. 305) made it to the title game.

“We’ve literally played with everybody,” Few said. “… We lost a bunch of games that came down to literally one possession, then you had to foul and you didn’t convert or whatever.

“It could’ve went either way and I think that’s why our analytic numbers are so high, because they reflect that. They reflect that we took everybody right to the wire, we just didn’t win.”