FORT MYERS, Fla. — This was never going to be a normal way to start the season. We were all aware of that, tuning into a bubble-like environment with thousands of seats empty at the Fort Myers Tip-Off on a Thanksgiving kickoff for a season that typically starts weeks earlier.
But (in an admittedly optimistically narrow sense) tonight was the most normal it's felt for Gonzaga men's basketball in quite a while.
In a season-opening win against No. 6 Kansas, the top-ranked Zags' expansive depth manifested on the court in a way that arguably exceeded even the loftier expectations put out there by pundits and fans over the summer. The Zags crossed the 100-point mark with more than 2 minutes left in the game en route to a 102-90 win that assured the country that the No. 1 ranking was far from arbitrary.
Five players finished with double-digit scoring (Timme, Kispert, Suggs, Ayayi and Nembhard), to go with 2 apiece from Aaron Cook and Anton Watson. It felt, in many ways — save for four of the top six players from last year being absent — like a natural follow-up to the Saint Mary's game in March that the Zags won by 18, at least in terms of sheer offensive efficiency.
As analysts were quick to point out, this could be the third year in a row that Gonzaga leads the nation in that area if they continue at anything close to the audacious pace they set today.
"We played a great team," Jayhawks coach Bill Self said. "They have four guards that will be the best guards we play all year long ... Their speed and how fast they played definitely surprised us early. Defensively, we were never really connected."
It was GU's 17th straight season-opening win, although none of the previous 16 had come against an opponent as high-profile as this. This was the kind of season opener that we're used to Kentucky/Duke/MSU being a part of, not the Zags.
But with COVID ravaging the previously sacred art of nonconference scheduling, nothing was off the table. Few's play-anyone-anywhere mentality, one developed as a necessity for resume improvement over the years, came in handy.
What we finally got as a reward for our patience was a battle between two teams who were playing some of their best basketball last spring before the opportunity to face off in March evaporated. Kansas was deep last year, and capable of playing 10 in a game this year. Regardless of any single result, they still will be considered March contenders until proven otherwise.
Marcus Garrett, listed alongside Kispert on many preseason All-America teams, led the Jayhawks with 22 points by just about every means imaginable — post moves, midrange jumpers, transition, from deep. Junior Ochai Agbaji pitched in 17 in a similar fashion, finishing with 17 on 5-for-11 shooting. But even those scores felt scattered and opportunistic against a Zags team that allowed little room for error.
"Next to Kentucky's two teams [in 2012 and 2015], I don't know that we've played against a team where the pieces fit better and the talent matched the pieces more so than what we did today," Self said.
"They're really good."
The two winningest programs of the last decade, the same two who finished 1-2 in the AP poll to close out the season. But the gap felt bigger than that in the key moments.
Jalen Suggs with the ball on a string, slinging passes in transition and driving with a fearlessness that's almost jarring to watch.
"When I got out here today, I was going to play loose and really have fun with the game," he said. "I know when I have fun, I play a lot better, a lot looser, and that's what I did today, especially in the second half – and came up with a great one."
Corey Kispert cocking back without a moment's hesitation for transition 3 to reach 1,000 points in a Zag jersey, the most prototypical play imaginable for such an honor and such a player.
Drew Timme going over, under and around everything the Jayhawks threw at him en route to a 25-point outing.
Kispert again later on, 5 seconds on the shot clock with nothing developing, directing a screen from Oumar Ballo with his hands, jabbing, pulling up and nailing the deepest shot of the day before the buzzer expired. Placing his fingers to his lips in a 'hush' motion while returning to play defense. That's a statement — in every sense except for the verbal.
Maybe this game could be described the same way.
The two teams only had played once before, a 80-66 drubbing by Kansas in 1998, when the programs felt like they were in different stratospheres competitively, before anyone ever entertained the idea of a West Coast Conference team being a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tourney, nonetheless advancing beyond the First Round. That game, coincidentally, was also a season opener for both teams, just as today was.
But redemption rarely escapes the Bulldogs more than once, even against a Jayhawks program that's spent more time in the upper thresholds of collegiate success than most. This was the Jayhawks' largest margin of loss in a season opener since 1983, and the first time they'd ever allowed a team to hit the century mark under Self's tenure.
Oh, also: GU head coach Mark Few got win No. 600 of his career in only 724 games, joining the ranks of historically great coaches like his idol John Wooden and current rival Mike Krzyzewski in fewer games than almost all the coaches above him. Especially amidst all the talk of positive tests, protocols, travel and cancellations, it might not get as much attention as such a feat usually would, but Few is OK with that.
"From the first one to this one, it's never been about me. It's been about the guys … and about the guys that I've been able to coach with," he said. "For this one to be against such a legendary program and legendary Hall of Fame coach, that will be nice someday when I look back on it."
The surrealness of the circumstances of this season's start runs parallel with the surrealness of the Zags' rapid rise to this point. What was set in motion in two decades ago feels like it's been cranked into warp speed over the last five years, and the sea of new normals we've become inundated to has (especially in the case of Few and Kispert's achievements tonight) allowed some greatness to fly under the radar.
But one can only be so distracted from the fact that a tiny Catholic school in Eastern Washington, by most statistical understandings of collegiate success, shouldn't be here.
Even in the buildup to that breakthrough joyride to the championship game in 2017, it took 39 straight wins for the Zags to solidify a No. 1 seed. Entering the season as the top championship contender like this is — like many other aspects of this pandemic-entrenched season — in uncharted territory, something they've never experienced.
Gonzaga being a blue-blood is an idea that is often thrown out there by observers and just as often immediately extinguished with the modifier of recent success — because any conversation with GU basketball on the national stage begins in 1998 by nature.
But that doesn't make a team a blue blood under the working definition, does it? The Zags' genesis as a college basketball power was and will always be starkly different than the Kentucky's and Duke's and Kansases of the world. Nothing will change that. So how does a program bridge that gap? How many times do you have to win to become one of them? Is it only done with a championship banner?
It's going to be a bumpy, uncertain and (at times) frustrating winter. And with what seems like half of the Top 25 on the docket coming up, there are enough challenges ahead for Few and co. to heartily discourage looking too far ahead.
But after watching today, when the Zags did exactly what they've become expected to do and more, there's a growing feeling that we might have an answer to some of those questions sooner rather than later.
