John Blanchette: For Zags, a December to remember

Goodbye, November.

Hello, hell.

One of the parlor games tangential to Gonzaga basketball is Toughest Schedule Tarot, in which cardplayers try to gauge the fortunes of the Bulldogs against a slate of opponents that is always regarded as better than that of the previous season.

And what do you know? It is again.

Not that the Zags need to jump in the ring with heavyweight contenders to feel as if they’ve been in a fight. Right now the sparring partners are getting in some good licks, as Portland State did on Thursday evening before falling 69-51 at the McCarthey Athletic Center.

Is there anything more inevitable in sports than a tuxedo team getting all mussed up by a bunch of guys in coveralls?

The Vikings are getting pretty good at this. When they opened the McCarthey two years ago, they had Gonzaga in a street fight until point guard Will Funn was ejected just before halftime – that’s right, no more Funn of any kind. Last year, they held the Zags without a field goal the last six-and-a-half minutes and lost by nine. This one was a seven-point game with five minutes left.

Think it might be time to lose the Vikings’ phone number?

The problem with a performance like the one the Bulldogs gave on Thursday is that it makes what lies ahead that much more daunting. Beginning Saturday, the Zags engage in what coach Mark Few allows is the toughest month of basketball in school history – and there are numbers to back that up.

It starts with the Basketball Hall of Fame Challenge doubleheader in Phoenix, the Zags playing Texas. Then it’s Washington State, Washington, Georgia, Duke, Nevada and Georgia – all in the span of 33 days, with only the Washington game in Spokane.

At the moment, those seven teams are a collective 38-4. Five are ranked in either the Associated Press or ESPN/USA Today Top 25. The four teams they’ve lost to are 18-4 themselves. Of the four teams those teams lost to, three are ranked.

After that, we stopped counting.

Yes, the Zags have had challenging schedules the last three Decembers, but never more than three ranked teams and never with so many on the road.

If it seems the Zags may have overextended themselves – especially in a year after they lost two of maybe the best five or 10 players in their history – think of this as the horse’s head in the bed, the offer they couldn’t refuse.

“There just aren’t that many programs that get a chance to play these games,” said Few. “These are TV-driven – TV has to want you. The Texas thing, there’s maybe 15 or 20 schools who would be in a pool for that. The (preseason) NIT, to get home games, that’s maybe 10 or 12. The Duke game, that might be five or seven. So when you get those opportunities, you have to take them.

“Besides, these are the kinds of games I want to play – and I know our players want to.”

It almost goes without saying.

“It’s a real exciting thing,” agreed junior guard Pierre Marie Altidor-Cespedes. “But it’s also a big challenge, and there’s a lot of risk.”

Ah, risk. The word of the month. But how much risk? Do the Zags, if they stagger, fall out of the Top 25? Do they do any damage to their postseason hedge bet, the at-large berth come the madness of March? Their seeding?

Could they – horrors – come out of the minefield with a sub.-500 record?

That seems the least likely of all – yet Few acknowledged that any of the Magnificent Seven – OK, the Some-Really-Pretty-Good- and-Some-Great Seven – is capable of beating his team, and more than capable if the Zags have too many repeats of Thursday night.

Nonetheless, one neutral observer – PSU coach Ken Bone – feels the Zags are well-equipped.

“I like the balance they have,” he said, “and I like their depth. They keep coming with solid players. You can say what you want about Adam Morrison and how great he was and (J.P.) Batista, but this team has better balance and because of that they can become harder to defend.”

Few’s review, of course, was less of a rave. He harped again on the Zags’ need to move and share the ball, use each other and get “team shots.” He despaired at “these lapses in leadership.” His tone echoed what he’d witnessed during fall practice and not what the Bulldogs had surprised him with during the NIT run.

“But at the end of the day, we’re 7-1,” he said. “We’ve had some good wins and played very well for stretches. We need to harken back to those times and understand why.

“We’re trying to teach them a conviction. They have to have a conviction in what they do. If we want in certain sets to get the ball inside, then there has to be a conviction to do that. If it’s setting a screen and moving the ball, we need to stick with that. But if we don’t have a total understanding of what makes us successful, then we’re going to be in big trouble this next month.”

And he wasn’t reading from Tarot cards or tea leaves, either.