Janitors’ friend starts to clean up
On a warm July evening that is about to morph into a warm July morning, Derek Raivio finds himself bored – and in need of a fix.
So with his summer school assignment long put to bed, he grabs his keys and heads to Martin Centre, where he lets himself in and begins a ritual that has made him Gonzaga University’s latest gym-rat legend.
He picks up a basketball and starts shooting – 50 shots, 75, 100 – until some curious janitor, working the graveyard shift, hears the echoes of the bouncing ball and checks in on the skinny, buzz-headed kid from Vancouver, Wash.
Usually, the janitor will smile, shut the door and dutifully return to buffing floors or scouring toilets. But sometimes he will take a break and become a part of Raivio’s late-night drill, rebounding the basketball for the determined young man who is destined to become the Bulldogs’ next great point guard.
“I’m pretty good friends with the janitors around here,” Raivio admitted recently while looking back on the first summer he spent at GU – before the Zags moved out of the Martin Centre and into their new 6,000-seat McCarthey Athletic Center. “They work late hours and so do I. We goof around and stuff sometimes. It’s fun.”
And productive, as well, it would seem, considering the massive improvement Raivio has made as a college basketball player in the last 18 months.
As a smooth-faced freshman and back-up to two-time West Coast Conference player of the year Blake Stepp last winter, Raivio averaged a modest 11 minutes and 3.1 points per game. He had 31 assists and 19 rebounds in 31 games and gave Zags fans only brief flashes of his potential brilliance.
But after growing a couple of inches and adding some much-needed muscle during the off-season, Raivio has emerged this winter as one of the biggest surprises in the WCC, if not the entire country.
Through GU’s first 19 games, he is averaging 12.8 points per game and leading the WCC in assists (5.0 apg), free-throw percentage (91.0) and 3-point field-goal percentage (48.4). In addition, his 2.26 assist-to-turnover ratio ranks No. 1 in the WCC, and his average number of steals (1.89) ranks No. 2.
Tonight, the 6-foot-3, 170-pounder will make his 20th consecutive start at the point when the 17th-ranked Bulldogs (15-4 overall, 5-2 in the WCC) take on conference-leading Saint Mary’s (19-5, 6-1) in the MAC. Gaels coach Randy Bennett is quick to admit that Raivio has captured his team’s attention.
“I was talking to my staff at lunch earlier this week,” Bennett explained, “and I asked, ‘Do you know who has probably had as unbelievable a year as anyone in our league this year?’ “
Bennett expected to stump his audience.
But one of his assistants quickly offered, “Derek Raivio.”
“And he was right,” Bennett said. “He’s at the top of the league in steals, assists, 3-point percentage, and he leads his team in scoring in conference play (16.0 ppg). All I can say is he’s done an unbelievable job.
“He’s more than just solid. I mean, they’re running plays through him as a sophomore, and that’s the sign of a pretty good player. Early in the year, when he was having some of those good games, I was thinking it was probably because teams were worried about (Ronny) Turiaf and (Adam) Morrison.
“But we’re all worried about Derek Raivio now.”
Bulldogs coach Mark Few claims Raivio is as good a shooter as he has coached at GU.
“And it’s not by accident that he shoots it so well,” Few added. “It never is when you find a great shooter like that. He puts his time in. He’s down here late, late at night and has some of the janitors talked into shooting with him and rebounding for him.”
So where does Raivio rank on GU’s long list of gym rats?
Right up there with Dan Dickau and Matt Santangelo, according to Few, who recently gave his players a couple of days off after a long road trip, only to learn – and not to his surprise – that Raivio had sneaked into the gym on each off day and shot baskets for upward of two hours.
“He’s definitely the biggest gym rat on the team,” teammate Sean Mallon said of Raivio. “He’s always down there.”
Raivio’s father Rick was much the same way and parlayed his passion for the game into an outstanding college career at the University of Portland, where he still ranks as the Pilots’ career rebounding leader and third all-time scorer.
“You either love the game or you don’t,” explained the elder Raivio, who was a 6-5 beast of a player at UP. “And Derek loves the game. He’s always had the passion, and I remember, in high school, growing up with that same passion.”
Following his four years at Portland, Rick Raivio played professionally in Belgium, where Derek and one of his two younger brothers, Nick, were born. Rick remembers he and his wife Chris taking their young sons to practices and games, where they were first introduced to the sport.
When the couple moved back to the states, they eventually got both children involved in a Portland-area basketball warehouse called The Hoop.
“It was the best baby-sitter we ever had,” Rick recalled. “Those kids just lived there. We’d drop them off, sometimes at 8 in the morning, and get a call later in the day from someone on the staff asking us to come get Derek and Nick because they were getting ready to close down.”
Derek went on to become a standout high school player at Mountain View in Vancouver, where he averaged 29.2 points as a senior and played with Nick, a junior at the time, on team that finished 18-7 overall.
He arrived at GU with a reputation as a slick ball-handler and prolific scorer, who – by his father’s admission – “had a little hot dog in him.” In the 18 months since, Raivio has developed into a true point guard who appreciates and understands his new role.
“He’s changed a lot,” Rick Raivio said of his son. “In high school, he had to score 28 or 30 points a game or we weren’t going to win. But now I’ve seen him mature into a real point guard, who can have a great game without scoring a lot of points and, maybe, not having an assist.”
There was a time when some Gonzaga fans were questioning whether Raivio was a worthy successor to the likes of John Stockton, Santangelo, Dickau and Stepp at the point guard spot. But he has proven himself more than capable.
“He was kind of under the gun a little bit, with all of the questions about him,” Few said. “But he never acted like he was really all that concerned about it, which is probably why he’s had such a successful year. He didn’t go like, ‘Jeez, I need to be as good as Dan or Blake.’ One thing he’s always said, even back when we were recruiting him, was that he was different.
“He said, ‘I’m not one of those guys. I’m going to be myself.’ And he’s established himself in a little different way.”
Raivio is flashier than Stepp and less disciplined that Dickau. Unlike his predecessors, he might not know where every one of his teammates should be at any given moment on the offensive end of the floor. But he takes care of the basketball and gets it to people in a position to score.
He has shown a mental and physical toughness that has surprised even Few.
“He’s probably surprised all of us with just how tough a kid he is,” Few said. “That’s what you have to be to hold up here – especially at that guard spot with all of the expectations and all of the attention our program is getting now.
“The toughness has probably always been there. It’s probably handed down from his dad. But he’s surprised everybody with it, and he’s worked on it. And he’s learning there are some leadership responsibilities that come with it, too – that he can’t just break down mentally whenever things aren’t going right.”
It might interest Bulldogs fans to know, as well, that Rick Raivio is convinced his oldest son still has much more to offer.
“He’s had doubters all his life – people who look at this skinny little white kid and wonder, ‘Who’s that?’ ” he explained. “But Derek has a heart the size of his body, and there’s some stuff he can do that people still haven’t seen.
“Right now, he’s just got to run the team and not turn the ball over. That’s all that required of him. But as he matures and is required to do more, I think people will see some things that will make them go, ‘Wow! I didn’t know he could do that.’ “
As for Derek, he seems content to let the learning and maturation processes continue at their natural paces – as long as he can continue to break up those long, boring summer evenings with a late-night trip to the gym.
“As long as I don’t have homework and stuff, and I’ve got the keys to get in, why not?” he said.