There’s a lot we can ultimately pull about the status of this year’s Gonzaga Bulldogs from their 76-72 loss to Arkansas on Saturday, but I think many Gonzaga fans would just as soon not think about that game much at all.
It was ugly. Instructive, maybe. But ugly, definitely.
Surprisingly, Davis Fogle, who looked like a lottery pick at Kraziness in the Kennel, sat this one out with an unspecified leg injury. But besides him and the still-ineligible Chauncey Wiggins, just about everyone on the roster logged some minutes as the Zags spent 40 minutes trying to figure out how to make things work without their most versatile scoring threat. Unfortunately, due to his absence plus a ton of weird foul trouble, rotation minutes in this one are probably not a great predictor for what we can expect to see once the season kicks off against Purdue.
The lion’s share of this one’s minutes belonged to Braden Huff, Izan Almansa, Nathan De Sousa and Isiah Harwell, who each played 29+ while Massamba Diop, Xaivian Lee, Javon Bennett and Luca Foster accounted for another 16-19 each. Parker Jefferson and Juwan Ekanga-Ehawa each played 4.
Both teams kept it close through most of the first half. Gonzaga shot 15-of-37 from the field to Arkansas’ 12-of-33, and while the Zags went an abysmal 2-for-14 from three, they made up for it inside, outscoring the Razorbacks 24-10 in the paint and turning seven steals into a 10-8 edge in turnovers forced. Arkansas continued to answer relentlessly from the perimeter, hitting 5-of-10 from three and running out for 16 fast-break points to Gonzaga’s six.
With under three minutes left in the half, the wheels really started coming off. Diop and Arkansas’ Miikka Muurinen were both hit with technical fouls after a scuffle under the basket (and, let it be said, it was a scuffle initiated boneheadedly and cheaply by Diop [and, let it be further noted, it wasn’t the only time in the game he would do something boneheaded and cheap]), and although Gonzaga held a 36-26 lead at the 2:14 mark, the Zags didn’t score again before the break. Arkansas closed the half on a 9-0 run while Gonzaga coughed up possessions and couldn’t get a clean look as time expired, and a 10-point lead was down to 36-35 at halftime.
Without Davis Fogle, the backcourt rotation never stabilized. Harwell, De Sousa, Bennett and Lee all took stints at the point or tried to direct traffic from the two, and none of it held. Outside of Harwell’s 4-of-4 start, Gonzaga’s guards shot a combined 4-of-21 in the first half. Diop revealed himself to be an absolutely negligible offensive presence around the rim, so Arkansas focused on keeping Braden Huff away from the basket while the guards tried to figure out how to run an offense without their anchor scorer in Davis Fogle. Huff went into the break with four points on 2-of-5 shooting and 0-of-2 at the line. Izan Almansa gave the Zags phenomenal minutes off the bench, scoring eight points on 3-of-4 shooting, and without him there’s no way Gonzaga goes into halftime with any lead at all.
The second half opened with what might be the worst 10 minutes of basketball I’ve ever seen a Gonzaga team play. Arkansas scored the first nine points of the half to stretch its run to 18-0, and the fouls stacked up fast as the Zags looked for ways to stop the bleeding. The Zags were whistled for 13 fouls in the second half to Arkansas’ five, which put the Razorbacks at the line 21 times, and just about every one of those fouls was dumb, cheap and needless. It’s one thing to rack up fouls contesting shots and an entirely different thing to do it by just playing bad defense. By the final buzzer, Lee, Harwell, De Sousa and Diop had four fouls apiece. Arkansas, meanwhile, looked aggressive and shot lights-out, hitting 6-of-14 from three in the half. It’s genuinely shocking the Zags’ deficit never grew past 11.
Somehow, the Zags clawed their way back into it down the stretch. Braden Huff gave a gutsy performance, scoring 15 of his 19 points after halftime on 5-of-11 shooting and a perfect 4-of-4 at the line. He also finished with 11 rebounds, an extremely encouraging stat for the Gonzaga big man in his first season without Graham Ike gobbling up boards alongside him. Due to some of those extremely ill-advised fouls, Xaivian Lee played only eight minutes in the second half but came in late to direct the comeback, going 2-of-3 from three and directing traffic like the high-IQ veteran floor marshal he was brought to Spokane to be. The Zags eventually cut the lead to just two, but Arkansas kept finding ways to hit big shots and draw fouls.
When the final buzzer sounded, the Zags were left with a 76-72 loss, one that luckily doesn’t count for anything, and a whole lot of gnarly game film to sit through tomorrow.
The Good
Braden Huff was the best player on the floor for Gonzaga, and he was at his best when the Zags needed him most. He finished with 19 points on 7-of-16 shooting, 11 rebounds and three assists in 31 minutes. Every time Arkansas looked ready to pull away, Huff showed the poise and leadership to drag the Zags back within striking distance.
Izan Almansa was also everything he was advertised to be. He has a knack for finding the ball and cleaning up the glass, and he’s an extremely smart player who uses his size in space well. He finished with 14 points on 6-of-9 shooting and six rebounds in 29 minutes, made a string of heady defensive plays, and was called for just one foul all night on a team that committed 23. Based on this game and his showing at Kraziness in the Kennel, I have a strong suspicion the Huff-Diop frontcourt pairing becomes a Huff-Almansa tandem by December. He’s too good to keep on the bench.
Luca Foster also somehow pulled down eight rebounds in just 16 minutes.
Arkansas deserves credit too. That’s an exciting team with good chemistry and a ton of promise, built around a talented young core with plenty of depth and versatility behind it. Five Razorbacks scored off the bench for 32 points, Davion Thompson and five-star freshman JJ Andrews combined for 22 of them, and junior Billy Richmond III ran the show with 17 points and five assists. When that group gets humming, it can hang with anyone in the country.
The Bad
There’s more here than I have space for, but Massamba Diop was horrible. He was a net negative in all his minutes on the floor. In 16 minutes he finished with four points on 2-of-5 shooting, five rebounds, zero assists, three turnovers and four fouls, and he went scoreless in five second-half minutes before his inability to grab a rebound sent him back to the bench. Calling it raw would be generous. He was bad, and he lost his cool more than once in the kind of way you know Few’s going to give him hell for. He picked up a completely warranted technical in the first half trying to trip Miikka Muurinen, and later committed a shoving foul away from the ball that easily could have been called a second one (on an in-bounds play, which… c’mon, dude).
I believe there will come a day when I’m excited to see Diop on the floor. If he keeps playing like this, though, he won’t be seeing much of it in the near future. Thank god for Izan Almansa.
Similarly, Javon Bennett had a couple of impressive downhill runs at the rim, but beyond those his size proved to be as much of a limitation as the worst-case scenario suggested it would be. He couldn’t stay in front of any of Arkansas’ bigger, more athletic guards, he couldn’t fight through screens, he couldn’t shoot over defenders, and despite all the elite-level scoring instincts, he couldn’t get clean looks against an SEC-caliber defense. He finished with two points on 1-of-8 shooting, missed all four of his threes, and played just three minutes after halftime in a game when the team’s starting point guard played only 8 minutes in the second half anyway. Bennett has the skill, but against a team like Arkansas, he doesn’t have the size to use it, and while he may get there eventually, he was a liability on Saturday.
Finally, nobody has ridden harder for Nathan De Sousa this offseason than I have, and he wasn’t egregiously bad in every facet of the game against Arkansas, but there’s no justifying a 2-of-17 shooting night (or 1-of-8 from three). He led the team with 33 minutes and finished with seven points on one more field goal attempt than Huff took. When he wasn’t shooting, De Sousa played solidly on both sides of the floor; the problem is that he just shot the ball a ton and of the 17 he took, maybe nine were clean, good shots.
Final Thoughts
It’s not even Halloween yet and the college basketball season is long. But this year’s Zags clearly have a lot to figure out, from who runs the offense to who plays next to Huff to how a team commits 23 fouls in a game it was supposed to be using to find its rhythm. Even so, Gonzaga played that sloppily, without its best scorer, gave up an 18-0 run to No. 12 Arkansas, which went 11-for-24 from three, and still clawed back to within two points on the road on opening night.. That’s encouraging, or at least it’s something to hold onto.
More than anything, this one made it abundantly clear how badly the Zags need Davis Fogle. Without him, the backcourt had no anchor, the offense had no one to run through, and Arkansas was free to load up on Huff and bully our guards out of position. It’s not certain Fogle will be ready for the season opener against Purdue on Nov. 2 in Las Vegas. If he isn’t, at least now we know what the plan has to be: run the offense through Huff, figure out who’s supposed to be playing point guard, teach Massamba Diop how to play basketball, and hope somebody in the backcourt figures out how to steady things before the Boilermakers make it as obvious as Arkansas did.