On a trip last week to southern California, we ventured up the coast to Malibu to take the temperature of a Gonzaga basketball program that in 2023 ...

I’ll have to admit, I’m not much for advanced analytics in college basketball. My expertise in numbers tends to become strained somewhere just past the old maxim that a good free throw shooter will hit 70 percent. So it was a bit of a relief for me – if not for Gonzaga – when I stumbled across a nu...

John Calipari reminds me of the guy who, buying a used car from a private party, offers $7,800 for a vehicle listed at $8,000. The kosher thing to do would be to split the difference, settle for $7,900 and you drive it away. But no, Calipari holds out for $7,850. Gotta have an edge. Considering it’...

A funny thing happened to Gonzaga on the way to the ATM, to find out if there was anything left in the coffers. It looked up to see an exacta hit in the final race. Rasir Bolton decided another year of being loved up, and giving back to the community, was worth revisiting. Julian Strawther wasn’t r...

It was 23 years ago, in Seattle, that Gonzaga began one of sport’s all-time, improbable arcs. But Friday, were Zags coach Mark Few to have awakened in my town, he would have been jarred by this headline: “Fair or Not, Gonzaga Men Just Haven’t Met Expectations.” I think we just defined the term “par...

Gotta say this for Saint Mary’s: True, most of the time it plays a distant second to Gonzaga in the hierarchy of West Coast Conference basketball. In their two-decades’ jousting history, Mark Few has a 44-12 edge on Randy Bennett. But when the Gaels get the Zags, they get them good. They upended a ...

Five words. Five innocent, but chilling words that frame the future of two Pac-12 basketball programs, and indeed, the entire conference. “I never got a call.” As the college hoops season winds down, one of its surprises is the University of Arizona, which, following the skidding, contentious final...

Brainstorming how possibly to make sense of the John Stockton lightning bolt of a few days ago, I was alerted to my latest incoming e-mail. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune wrote that hospitals in that area have suspended a long-standing program of diverting ambulances from their emergency departments ...

Those Zags, always the show-stopper. They’re at it again, splashing up insane offensive numbers, cozying up to triple digits routinely, sending Drew Timme off to win national player-of-the-week honors on a weekend of 27-for-32 shooting. This year, they started No. 1, were all the rage after clownin...

A couple of years ago, a provocateur tweeter took note of Gonzaga’s 20 straight NCAA-tournament appearances and single foray to the title game, and tapped sarcastically, “Pretty nice return.” I took the bait and replied to the effect that the tournament is insanely competitive, annually. And Saturd...