Gonzaga has played in every NCAA March Madness tournament since 1999. Dominant in their own league of small schools despite losing a 60-47 shocker in the West Coast Conference final to St. Mary’s on March 12, the “Zags” are certain to secure a top seed in this year’s tournament.
For a private Catholic college in Spokane, Wash., with only 5,000 undergraduate students and without a football team, Gonzaga’s national prominence, especially come March, is astounding.
The school’s program took off after an unexpected run to the Elite Eight in 1999. The next season, Mark Few, who had been on the team’s coaching staff for a decade, was promoted to head coach. Two years ago, Gonzaga won 37 games and secured the top seed in the tournament before losing narrowly to North Carolina in the national championship game. Fans considered the next season a rebuilding year after losing their top four players, yet Gonzaga still went 32-5 and made it to the Sweet 16.
That’s excellence. How do they do it?
The program boasts NBA talent, but its continued success has been the result of steady international recruiting and player development. Unlike other powerhouses such as Duke, North Carolina, and Kentucky, Gonzaga does not attract one-and-done players. Instead, they have a record of taking future EuroLeague talent and sharpening it for NCAA dominance and NBA futures.
While other teams compete for four- and five-star talents, Few and his staff make scholarship offers to underrated players with the future in mind. Current stars Rui Hachimura, Killian Tillie, and Zach Norvell Jr. were riding the pine during the 2017 national championship appearance and two years later have blossomed into college stars.
John Stockton, the first high-profile NBA player from Gonzaga, stayed for four years and was a virtual unknown when the Utah Jazz took him with the 16th pick in the 1984 NBA draft. But he, like future NCAA Co-Player of the Year and NBA draft bust Adam Morrison, was a hometown product.
Few has cultivated a reputation for developing international talent that is paying dividends. Consider the Lithuanian Domantas Sabonis, the Indiana Pacers center who, having grown up in the Pacific Northwest while his father Arvydas Sabonis played center for the Portland Trailblazers, turned down a lucrative professional contract in Spain to play for Few.
Or consider the stream of Canadian talent that has passed through the program: Kyle Wiltjer, former Los Angeles Lakers player Robert Sacre, the Miami Heat’s Kelly Olynyk, and now Gonzaga’s second leading scorer and the West Coast Conference Defensive Player of the Year Brandon Clarke.
Spokane’s proximity to the Canadian border is likely a draw for these players. But Few also attracts top European talent such as the German forward, Elias Harris. And Przemek Karnowski, the Polish giant. And the Frenchman, Ronny Turiaf, a 10-year NBA veteran.
Indeed, Gonzaga’s most exciting players this year are both international recruits. Rui Hachimura is the fifth native Japanese player to play NCAA basketball. Filip Petrusev, the team’s young Serbian center, has also shown flashes of NBA talent. And Killian Tillie, a Frenchman, said he signed with Gonzaga over other colleges due to their success at developing international players.
But Hachimura’s ascent shows particularly well the intense commitment Few and his staff have to player development. Most schools want talented players that can come in and radically change a program, but when Hachimura arrived on campus in 2016, he didn’t understand English. According to an ESPN profile of the 6-feet-8-inch-tall forward, Hachimura struggled not because he wasn’t ready physically, but because he couldn’t learn the Zags’ complex offensive and defensive schemes. Nor could he understand the standard basketball lingo coaches shouted during practice.
As a freshman he averaged 2.6 points per game. Two years later, he is averaging over 20 points and nearly seven rebounds per game. He is the West Coast Conference Player of the Year and is thought to be a likely NBA lottery pick. After three years in Few’s system, Hachimura has become the linchpin of the top offense in college basketball. The Zags average nearly 89 points per game, and their team field goal percentage, at 53 percent, is a notch above everyone else.
Their nonstop rim-running and rotational screens couple with superb half-court spacing to fluster opposing defenses. Voters who determine seeding won’t forget that Gonzaga beat Duke while frustrating their star Zion Williamson and also won 21 games straight during one stretch of the season. The Gonzaga Bulldogs are the real deal, and they have the talent, brought to Spokane from across the globe, to win a championship.
Mark Naida is editorial page fellow at the Detroit News.
