Gonzaga Crowned Co-Champions of West Coast Conference With Santa Clara Victory

Yesterday afternoon, the Bulldogs spoiled Santa Clara’s Senior Night with their 68-61 win, which propelled this Zags squad into the WCC’s first place for the upcoming postseason tournament and co-champion of the WCC’s regular season.

Which begs the question I posited in the sub-header: if the team your sharing the regular season title couldn’t beat you across the campaign, should that opponent deserve to hang a banner declaring them a champion?

How does the WCC, or college basketball in general, not have a tie-breaker system of any kind? Why does it extend to here? For my money, this season will be marked as the Gonzaga Women simply being the three-time champion of the WCC’s regular season. Portland doesn’t deserve to the claim of champion for their inability to beat the Bulldogs, just like the Gonzaga Men’s program didn’t deserve such honor in the ‘15-16 season when they lost to the St. Mary’s twice.

We need to value the regular season champions as much as possible. College Basketball needs to adopt a tie-breaking system to acknowledge the real winners of the conferences within its realm.

Rant aside, yesterday’s scoreline may not look particularly impressive, especially considering the 82-56 beatdown that occurred at in the previous matchup in Spokane, but I actually think it was a fairly good win for the team given Yvonne Ejim’s struggles.

I feel like my comments in yesterday’s article potentially jinxed the Canadian superstar as she broke the 72-game streak with double digits en-route to a season-low 8 points on 2-8 shooting with most of her damage coming from the free throw line (4-6). Part of Vonny’s struggle related to foul trouble, several of which I struggled to truly comprehend given the inconsistency in calls (an officiating crew that assigned a foul to Bree Salenbien in the 4th period…when she wasn’t on the floor), that led to inconsistent minutes, which restricted her ability to break her initial shooting slump to start the match.

However, the team, most notably Allie Turner and Bree Salenbien, stepped up to cover up the deficit from Ejim’s minute restriction and overall game-play struggles. Yvonne, rightfully so, gets a lot of credit for her offensive production as she leads both Gonzaga and the WCC with 20.7 points and 8.7 rebounds per game, but her contribution to this Zags team also extends prominently onto the defensive end. After all, she did take home the WCC Defensive POTY last year.

As such, I was surprised and fairly impressed by the defensive performance from the Bulldogs. It wasn’t perfect, see Hannah Rapp’s 17 points and Kaya Ingram’s 16 points given neither of them average more than 10 per game, but I saw more fight from the players on the floor and the organization to limit the Broncos key players, Olivia Pollerd and Malia Latu that averaged more than 25 points per game combined, to just 14 total points. The defense did allow the Broncos to exceed their season average in three-ball shooting by going 8-12, they were just above 29% entering the match, but the Zags restricted the their 2FG to just 13-35 (37%) which is notably less than their average of 17.7-39 (45.5%).

The offense also looked more engaged, although it really boiled down to freshman Allie Tuner dropping 23 points, tied for her season-high, and Bree Salenbien’s new career-high of 17 points. Those two players combined to shoot 15-18 overall, 8-10 from beyond the arc, while also snagging 6 rebounds, the exact margin to which the Zags won the glass.

Allie Turner in particular looked stunning as she shot 4-4 from two-pont range, 5-6 from three-point range, dished out 3 assists to just 2 turnovers, and registered 2 blocks and 1 steal. Vonny is clearly the heartbeat of this team, but I don’t think it can be argued that the success of this year’s squad could not have been achieved without the true freshman. I think if you remove her from this team and we are likely looking at finishing 4th or 5th in the WCC standings.

As a side note, Turner is now just 5 three pointers away from surpassing Brynna Maxwell’s mark set last year of 96. That number, from Sports-Reference, does include the WCC Conference Tournament and March Madness, which means that this Missouri native will break a record set by one of the greatest shooters in Gonzaga’s history in her freshman year and potentially more impressively, less games. Thats just crazy. What a stud. Definitely WCC Freshman POTY and should get national attention over the off-season.

Ines Bettencourt may have a fairly tame boxscore of 7 points, 4 rebounds, 3 assists, and 2 steals, but I think the Portuguese transfer had a solid and engaged matchup. Heck, even the box +/- agrees as she tied Bree for second with a +7. I thought her defense was generally smart and sticky, which forced tough plays to her Bronco defender that will sometimes be converted. The junior has been inconsistent this year, but hopefully we get to see more games like this in the post-season.

Additionally, the offense did a reasonable job controlling the ball as they only coughed up 15 turnovers, many being dead-ball turnovers as Santa Clara only registered 13 points from those mistakes. And, not to point fingers, but Bree Salenbien was responsible for four turnovers so there’s a possibility that barring one or two of those errors, we’re looking at one of those rare 10-13 turnover games.

Now, it wasn’t a perfect game by any means, Maud Huijbens failed to register a basket with her two points coming from the charity stripe, Claire O’Connor and Tayla Dalton combined to shoot 2-12 from the floor, and the team definitely had their share of breakdowns, most notably midway thru the second quarter, midway thru the third quarter, and the latter end of the fourth quarter.

But this win seemed different than say the 60-53 over St. Mary’s two weeks ago because the Bulldogs did this without their true star player, they did it on the road, and they did it with good team cohesion. So I’ll take it.