LAS VEGAS — Saint Mary’s knows it will still play for an unprecedented fourth straight year in the men’s NCAA Tournament, even after a disappointing 58-51 defeat to longtime rival Gonzaga in the West Coast Conference tournament championship game.
The Gaels’ place as an at-large entry into the field of 68 teams that will be unveiled on Selection Sunday is not in question.
But they also know Tuesday night at the Orleans Arena was a missed opportunity. The Gaels (28-5) had ambitions of winning the WCC tourney title for a second year a row, something they’ve never done.
After barreling through the WCC regular season with a 17-1 record, they were hoping to pull off a three-game season sweep of the Zags (25-8), which also is missing from their resume. By doing so, they would own a 5-1 record over the last two seasons against the WCC’s traditional kingpins.
There is only one appropriate response, according to senior center Mitchell Saxen, who scored a season-high 20 points to go with seven rebounds and two blocked shots.
“We kind of got to flush this one fast, get it out of our system,” Saxen said. “We need to face every day in practice with a focus that these are our biggest games of the year.
“I feel like every single night our group’s going to show up and we’re going to play frickin’ hard. That’ll keep you in a lot of games, but we’ve got to play better.”
Much better. The Gaels outrebounded the Zags 43-28 and held them nearly 30 points below their season average. They were sabotaged by a season-worst 18 turnovers and a 0-for-16 shooting night from the 3-point arc.
“We were atrocious offensively,” coach Randy Bennett said. “The biggest thing is you can’t have 18 turnovers against them. A lot of those turned into layups at the other end.”
Gonzaga outscored Saint Mary’s 20-3 in points off turnovers.
“The game probably got down to that statistic,” Bennett said. “If you hold Gonzaga to 58, you think you’d win, but we didn’t. They’re a good team. You can’t play like that and expect to win.”
Bennett couldn’t even digest the 0-for-16 on 3s, although Gonzaga was hardly better at 1-for-15. Yep, two teams ranked in the top 20 nationally by the NCAA’s NET computer combined to go 1-for-31 from deep in front of an ESPN audience.
“I don’t know if it’s ever happened,” Bennett said of his team failing to hit even one 3-pointer. “There’s probably one. I can’t remember.”
Well, it has not happened over the course of at least the past 15 seasons, which is as far back as the website Basketball Reference reports on individual game stats.
It didn’t help that two starters — foul-plagued forward Paulius Murauskas and guard Jordan Ross — were scoreless on a combined 0-for-12 shooting. Freshman sharpshooter Mikey Lewis, the WCC Sixth Man of the Year, was 2-for-10 and missed all seven of his 3s.
Two-time WCC Player of the Year Augustas Marciulionis, who had 12 points, eight assists and five rebounds, expects his team to regroup before the start of the NCAAs, a week from Thursday.
“All of our goals for the season are still out there,” he said. “Even though we won this tournament (last year), we lost the first (NCAA) game in March and it didn’t sit well with us. It didn’t feel like we finished the season well.”
Gonzaga coach Mark Few, whose team won its 19th WCC tournament crown in his 26 seasons, said the Gaels’ regular-season wins got the Zags’ attention.
“They’ve brought the best out in us over the years. That was the case tonight,” Few said. “They made us dig deeper and I think we played our most physical game all year. We made a jump by being nastier and dictating some things with our defense.”
The Gaels agreed this was a more physical version of the Zags. Marciulionis wasn’t giving his team an out on that.
“I don’t know, offensively in general we just didn’t play to the level we should,” he said. “They were physical but that’s not really an excuse. We’ve played against other teams that are really aggressive and we managed to take care of the ball.”
