The players and coaches at the heart of most sports rivalries are very careful about tiptoeing around the “H” word. Gonzaga-Saint Mary’s isn’t most sports rivalries, hence the lack of any need to be bashful.
The West Coast’s best rivalry is getting back to where it belongs
The last two seasons have seen a significant drop-off in the once red-hot Gonzaga-Saint Mary’s rivalry, but the Thursday night showdown between the WCC powers should feel like old times.
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Gonzaga’s Robert Sacre in 2012:
“Both teams and fans hate each other. I think we have this mutual hate when it comes to a basketball court. I don’t think there’s anything like it in the country. It’s one of those things where we don’t want them to get the championship. We’re Gonzaga. That’s how we think.”
On former Saint Mary’s star Omar Samhan’s relationship with the Gonzaga fan base:
Last year, Samhan replied to one especially inciteful message with a laundry list of all that is wrong with Gonzaga and Spokane. When the Gaels came to town, the Kennel Club responded with chants of “Spo-kane-hates-you.”
Clayton Bigsby would be even prouder than usual.
If the old saying about familiarity breeding contempt is accurate, then it explains why few rivalries have burned as brightly as this one over the past decade. Since 2004, Gonzaga and Saint Mary’s have supplemented their two annual regular season meetings with a showdown in the West Coast Conference championship game on seven separate occasions, including five times in the last six years. Falling in line with their superior national profile, the Zags have won five of those games.
Still, if you feel like you haven’t been hearing as much about this rivalry recently, there’s a reason.
The 2012 WCC championship game was perhaps the best contest the two programs have played to date. Gonzaga rallied from a 5-point deficit with less than 30 seconds to play in regulation to force overtime. Saint Mary's star Matthew Dellavedova, who missed a potential game-winner at the end of the second half, then played hero in the extra frame, salting the championship away with two free-throws in the closing seconds.
It felt like a seminal moment in the rivalry’s history. The Red Sox had finally gotten the better of the Yankees and were ready to enjoy the extended period of success that comes with that breakthrough. Only the exact opposite happened.
Gonzaga and Saint Mary's have played six times since that 2012 championship game, and the Bulldogs have won all six by an average of 17.0 points per game. In the last four meetings, Saint Mary's has been held to an average of 50.8 points and 32.0 percent shooting from the field. The Gaels were still formidable enough to make (and win a game in) the NCAA Tournament in 2013, but 12 losses a season ago relegated them to the NIT and off the national radar.
The college basketball world was expecting more of the same from Saint Mary’s in 2014-15, but Randy Bennett’s team has instead been one of the sport’s most pleasant surprises. They’ll enter tonight’s game in Spokane as winners of nine straight, and owning a 7-0 WCC mark that is identical to their host’s.
That said, the Zags are still a different animal, and the rivalry aspect of the game means there’s no hope of SMC sneaking into The Kennel and catching everyone associated with the program napping. Gonzaga owns the nation’s longest homecourt winning streak at 34, and they’ve won their nine home games this season by an average of 32.8 points. The last time a WCC team came into the McCarthey Athletic Center and won was 1,456 days ago when Saint Mary’s did the trick with a 73-71 upset on Jan. 27, 2011.
Between Gonzaga’s recent run and the addition of a BYU program that was expected to become the Bulldogs’ chief threat in the WCC, it looked like the beginning of the end, or at least a large drop-off, for the rivalry that had headlined the league for the past decade. But the Cougars haven’t been able to answer the bell, and so far this season the conference standings look eerily similar to what the West Coast has become accustomed to seeing.
Despite these two dominating a conference for 11 seasons, and despite the mutual disdain between them, there’s still a faction of the sports world that refuses to buy into this rivalry. Even SB Nation’s Gonzaga site, The Slipper Still Fits, refers to the rivalry series as “our small party” and “everyone else’s loss to miss out.” Part of that is because the games don’t typically start until 11 p.m. on the East Coast, and another part is the Bulldog backlash that has come with the perception that the Zags have become perennial NCAA Tournament underachievers.
Even with those factors at play Thursday night, people will undoubtedly be paying attention.
Gonzaga’s lone loss remains a three-point overtime defeat at Arizona, and Mark Few’s team once again has the college hoops media talking about No. 1 seeds and Final Four potential. But the rest of the nation remains curious if any of that chatter is legitimate this season, and the Zags’ two games against their arch-rivals figure to be the best gauge between now and the Big Dance.
Toss in the homercourt winning streak, an elite showdown in the post between Gonzaga's Przemek Karnowski/Domantas Sabonis combination and Saint Mary's Brad Waldow, sole possession of first place in the WCC, and, oh yeah, the hate, and suddenly it feels like the best rivalry on the West Coast is back where it belongs.
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