Gonzaga’s path to WCC confetti, 25th straight NCAA bid took Bulldogs ‘through the dirt and the mud’

Over the past decade, Gonzaga has ticked off a number of items on a shrinking checklist.

Between wins over blue-blood programs, national championship appearances and first-round NBA draft picks, it can be challenging at times to keep track of all the streaks, records and accolades.

“Have I been a No. 1 (NCAA Tournament) seed every year?” senior forward Anton Watson posed on a recent episode of The Spokesman Review’s Take 22 Podcast.

The Bulldogs have enjoyed the spoils of success, but they’ve also grappled with the expectations that have been created from it.

Gonzaga’s 2022-23 team is especially proficient in that area.

The Bulldogs had five losses during the regular season – after losing five total the prior three seasons – and will head to the NCAA Tournament next week as something lower than a No. 1 seed for the first time since the 2017-18 season.

“I think for me personally, I took for granted winning,” All-American forward Drew Timme said after Gonzaga dispatched Saint Mary’s 77-51 on Tuesday to win the West Coast Conference Tournament championship. “I’ve won so much in my career, it’s a shock to me not to win and I think early in the year it made me appreciate the little things more. It made me appreciate what it takes to win night in and night out. I think sometimes we kind of assume we were just going to win because we’re Gonzaga.

“I think going through this and how the season’s gone, it’s just kind of made us appreciate the little things more, the journey more.”

Gonzaga may not be a betting favorite to win this year’s NCAA Tournament, but the Bulldogs seem to be part of a larger pool of teams that pundits think has a chance to reach the Final Four. A five-loss regular season hasn’t happened at Gonzaga since 2015-16, but it doesn’t make the Bulldogs an outlier in this college basketball landscape.

Only two AP Top 25 teams, Purdue and Houston, have lost fewer than five games.

“I thought this team felt a lot of flak, especially early, and obviously we have high expectations of ourselves within the program, but we also have belief in ourselves,” head coach Mark Few said. “I just applaud them and owe them big time for just sticking with us, sticking with the plan and not listening – there’s a lot of pressure playing at Gonzaga, there’s a lot of high expectations when you play at Gonzaga.”

The Zags hit their first snag before games counted toward the win-loss column, dropping an exhibition contest to Tennessee 99-80 in Frisco, Texas, not far from where the team’s All-American forward grew up.

Referencing the late-October exhibition earlier this week, Few noted “how much I think some of the younger guys were shocked how much that meant to Tennessee, that scrimmage all the way back then. I think it took everybody a while to know what it meant to play for Gonzaga and the effort and the toughness and energy you had to bring every day.”

A team introducing two new starters and two new players to its bench rotation didn’t learn those lessons immediately. Gonzaga lost 93-74 to Texas in Austin and 84-66 to Purdue approximately one week later in the second round of the Phil Knight Legacy.

“I think it’s something that you can’t just wake up and go, we’re a tough team,” Timme said. “It’s something you have to get through the dirt and the mud.”

Purdue, led by national player of the year front-runner Zach Edey, is playing for a Big Ten championship Sunday, and Texas won its conference, dominating top-seeded Kansas 76-56 on Saturday.

“We played Zach Edey and Purdue on 12 hours of preparation, we played at Texas opening an arena after we drilled them at home the year before,” Few said. “I think they were preparing all summer for us.”

Few alluded to the 2022-23 season as one of his tougher coaching jobs, at least in recent memory.

“That’s what supposedly coaching’s all about, right?” he said. “It’s supposed to be about development, and nobody said it was fun or easy, and I think sometimes I have to remind myself of that and remind the staff of that, too.

“There were numerous days where I was not fun to be around, as a player or as an assistant coach. So I probably owe everybody an apology for that, but I was just trying to hold these guys to the standard that all the other teams have hit.”

From a confetti-drenched floor in Vegas this week, junior wing Julian Strawther recalled one such encounter with GU’s coach on Jan. 19 after Loyola Marymount disrupted one of the most impressive records in college basketball, defeating Gonzaga 68-67 at McCarthey Athletic Center to end a 75-game home winning streak.

“Coach Few, I’d say after the LMU game, he really let me hear it,” Strawther said. “The LMU game in Spokane, he really let me have it. I feel like since then I feel like I had to turn it up a notch, and whether it was making plays on ball, off ball, blocking shots, whatever I could do. I know I’m capable and I feel like coach Few’s doing a good job of getting the best out of me.”

Gonzaga enters March Madness on a nine-game win streak, and players and coaches believe they’re playing their best basketball of the season – no thanks to the various tests and challenges they’ve had along the way.

“It’s been a beast and kind of like I said earlier, just the change of perspective we as a team have gone through this season,” Timme said.

“I think we really appreciate just those nail- biters and those losses and how we’ve been able to rally and just come back even better from it and learn from it and grow as a team.”

Outsiders seem to think the Zags are peaking at the right time, too.

“They’ve improved through the year,” Saint Mary’s coach Randy Bennett said Tuesday. “We played them the first time about four, five weeks ago and if you look at their schedule and who they lost to, it’s pretty impressive.

“I felt like tonight, this is the best we’ve seen Gonzaga. Some of their guys are transfers who are kind of figuring out their role and they’ve just got a lot of ways to get you.”

At the end of a postgame news conference at Orleans Arena, Timme signed off with a movie quote that may serve as an appropriate metaphor for Gonzaga’s topsy-turvy season.

“We just keep going no matter what,” he said. “It’s kind of like the ‘(Finding) Nemo’ movie, you just keep swimming.”