Tip-off: Tuesday, 6 pm in the Orleans Arena
TV: ESPN (prime time on the big one)
Line: Torvik: Broncos +4.6, 34% win probability; ESPN: Broncos +7.5, 16% win probability
Over/Under: 157.5
Torvik: Broncos #28, Zags #12
(Broncos #28, Zags #23 over Last 10 Games)
This game tonight may not be as important as last night in terms of getting the Tournament monkey off Santa Clara’s proverbial back.
But I think the emotions are arguably just as high. SCU should be in the Tournament. But this is almost certain to be the last tilt against the Zags for the foreseeable future. They may schedule SMC going forward and run off nostalgia for a few years, but it’s all but certain that the Zags and Broncos will not be meeting as equals for a few years to come. This is the first conference tournament championship appearance in almost a generation, the last coming all the way in 2007 when yours truly entered high school and right around when SCU’s frosh class was born. And this is the game that can turn “really should be in” into “buy the plane tickets now.”
And this: Tonight, if you want to see it, there’s a glimmer of a fight for college sports between where it should be and where it’s headed.
Gonzaga, no longer a Cinderella, is the imperial force standing in the way of one. Gonzaga is a team of highly paid mercenaries: the one-time MWC Preseason POY poached from Wyoming, a PG who logged time in the best pro league in Spain, a 26-year old who, setting real health triumphs aside, is on his fifth college over 7 seasons. Here’s where the teams’ respective players come from:
| GU Player | Prior Schools | SCU Player | Prior Schools |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mario Saint-Supery | Basquet Manresa (Spanish Pro Team) | Elijah Mahi | West Valley CC |
| Braeden Smith | Colgate | Brenton Knapper | None |
| Steele Venters | Eastern Washington | Bukky Oboye | None |
| Adam Miller | Illinois, LSU, Arizona State | “Sash” Gavalyugov | Villanova |
| Tyon Grant-Foster | Indian Hills CC, Kansas, DePaul, Grand Canyon | KJ Cochran | None |
| Ismaila Diagne | None | Thierry Darlan | G-League Ignite / Delaware Blue Coats |
| Davis Fogle | None | Allen Graves | None |
| Emmanuel Innocenti | Tarleton State | Jake Ensminger | None |
| Jalen Warley | Virginia, Florida State | Christian Hammond | None |
| Graham Ike | Wyoming | Francis Chukwudebelu | None |
Now there are no pure avatars in sports ever. Santa Clara spends big money on its program and has gotten some of its biggest recent stars from the transfer portal. Santa Clara has to live in the dog-eat-dog of the college basketball landscape too.
But tonight, if you so choose, you can see a bit of the WCC’s — and really all of college basketball’s — soul up for grabs. Gonzaga is the Anakin-turned-Darth Vader of college basketball, an incredible underdog story that ends (so far) with the protagonist becoming what it was always fighting against. The Zags are a mercenary team built of mercenaries, who spent the last decade extracting more and more from the WCC until finally tossing it to the side in favor of a dalliance with the reanimated corpse of the Conference of Champions. The Zags built a payment structure that suited them, a tournament bracket that suited them, blocked their fellow PNW Jesuit school from joining the conference for 10 years, and then decided to take their talents to Logan, UT anyways.
Santa Clara is not a pure hero, exactly—the Thierry Darlan of it all forecloses that possibility as defensible as his story is versus the other G-League to NCAA examples. But this is our team.
Only three players have played even a minute at other schools: Mahi at a community college 15 minutes from SCU’s campus, Gavalyugov for just a handful of minutes at Villanova before coming West for redemption, and, yes, Darlan who was committed to Santa Clara before being pushed to a now-defunct pro development experiment. Knapper will finish a five-year career as a Bronco. Ensminger seems on track to do the same. Graves, Cochran, Chukwudebelu, and Hammond are all highly rated guys who bought into the belief that Santa Clara was their best opportunity to prepare for whatever came next.
The first Tournament bid in 30 years is locked (probably). But Santa Clara can still win one more game to guarantee it’s post-season future, claim the crown for a true WCC team, and give the sport the narrative it needs: that there’s a possibility for success that isn’t built on mercenary squads, realpolitik, and the pernicious vagaries of conference realignment.
Beat the Zags and, truly, all they stand for. Go Broncos!