Gonzaga soars past Kansas and into NCAA tournament Sweet 16

The 89-68 hoop aria made them glow from the NCAA men’s basketball tournament bracket on their way to the Midwest Region semifinal in Detroit. It placed them on familiar ground after a season in which they had become disregarded (and overheard same). It meant they gifted their coach, Mark Few, a ninth consecutive berth in the Sweet 16, an accomplishment up in the clouds for an event rich in the chaos.

Further, it made them feel things humans feel lucky to feel.

“So right now it just feels effortless,” said senior forward Anton Watson, with his 8 for 11, his 21 points, his six rebounds. “It feels like we’re playing with just motion.”

“It’s like great flow, man,” Graham Ike said after his beautiful turns and swishes in the post for his 15 points and nine rebounds. “Like water flowing through a stream. It’s like it can’t be stopped, almost. A sense of flow. Like we’re playing six-on-five, almost.”

“That’s one of the reasons I came here,” floor pilot Ryan Nembhard said after his grab-the-violins 12 assists and his assessment from Few as “managing these games masterfully.” “We just play such an amazing style of basketball, and who wouldn’t want to play a style like this?”

That style took time to congeal this season, with Drew Timme gone after all those years and with Ike inbound from Wyoming and Nembhard from Creighton. Assessments poured in declaring decline and with an unthinkable six losses through the regular season and with a general sense of moderate muddle. But after flowing wins over McNeese, a game anticipated as hellish, and Kansas, after a first half that ended 44-43, Watson’s viewpoint looks clear: “We’re starting to read each other and how we play.”

With the reading lucid, the plays poured out Saturday like some particular paradise of passes and swishes. The second half started off at 87.5 percent from the field (11 for 12). Study the game-long percentage through the art on the floor, and it began to inch upward from 55.9 at halftime, to 62.5, up through the 63s and into the 64s before landing on a mere 60.3 (35 for 58). When the excellent Ben Gregg splashed one down from the right corner for a 71-53 lead with 10:55 left, Kansas Coach Bill Self quickly called an irked timeout and the audience quickly began to realize what it saw.

It saw Gonzaga, trickling and lipping along as a No. 5 seed Few has found a refreshing outpost from which to operate in this, his 25th season of these befuddling brackets. “Totally,” he had said Friday, then referred to those frequent No. 1 seedings and said: “We’ve hauled it around. We had a nice run of hauling it around and dealing with it. And that 1-16 game is not fun in any way, shape or form. But, yeah, this has kind of been a nice change, to be honest with you, from my standpoint. It’s kind of fly-under-the-radar and just do your thing. And then it certainly probably fits my personality better.”

Where once they took knocks for not upholding seeding, now they have reached the nine straight Sweet 16s from a No. 2, a No. 11, a No. 1, a No. 4, a No. 1, a No. 1, a No. 1, a No. 3 and a No. 5. By next week they will have graced Sweet 16s in Houston, Chicago, San Jose, Los Angeles, Anaheim, Indianapolis, San Francisco, Las Vegas and Detroit.

That’s after they spent a good while Saturday joining Kansas as if the two might collaborate on the masterpiece of the tournament. They took turns at the kind of fluid beauty that justifies the invention of the sport. It felt thrilling even when shots would miss, technically.

With 2:33 before halftime, Kansas’s Hunter Dickinson flipped a dreamy bounce pass to Dajuan Harris, who barged through the lane to receive it and score. At 2:19, Gonzaga’s Nolan Hickman went on a driving layup. At 1:52, Harris rained in a three from the left and slapped his thigh, and at 1:32, Hickman rattled in a three from the top. At 1:12, Kansas’s Johnny Furphy swished a three from the left, and at 53 seconds, Gonzaga’s Braden Huff took a swell pass from Nembhard for a lonely layup, and at 32 seconds, Dickinson sent in a measured three from the top, and at 1.2, Gregg muscled in a follow while drawing a foul.

Only then did the flow allow time for the final TV timeout of the half, with only that 1.2 seconds remaining.

It had been “a horse contest,” as Self put it, and “pretty, probably, from a visual standpoint,” and a word about that: Yes. But then thereafter, as Gonzaga’s lead began at 50-49 and began stretching from there, Kansas, which was lacking key player Kevin McCullar Jr. because of an injury, showed “absolutely no sign of being able to slow them down,” Self said. Main reason: “They were great.” It became almost immaterial that Kansas, which practices all season at the 866 feet of elevation in Lawrence, reached exhaustion with the combination of the 4,265 feet of Salt Lake City and the frenetic 93-89 struggle with Samford late Thursday night and the inappropriate TV scheduling that brought it back to the court 40 hours later.

All gave way to how Gonzaga looked, even if most of the lookers weren’t focusing on a defense that had Kansas missing 23 of its first 27 shots after halftime, a defense the players say serves as the essential bud to that offense.

But that offense, like old-time Brazilian soccer, infusing sports with beauty …

“It’s not even pride,” Ike said, “but just love for it, like, how good it feels, to be a part of that, with these kinds of guys. Man, it means so much. The feeling is like, it’s priceless.”

“It gives us a little bit of confidence, I would say,” Hickman said before changing that and saying, “a lot of confidence, not a little bit.”

“You get goose bumps when someone hits a three,” Watson said, “and you take that little lead, and then you can feel the momentum changing for our side.”

After that momentum had come and stayed and the shots had kept splashing down, one minute remained with the lead long since insurmountable. So Few sat down with a look of insurmountable calm, and he patted the knees of the assistants flanking him.

They knew that it was good, and they knew that it was beautiful.