– by Adesina O. Koiki
A Lot of Sports Talk editor-in-chief
GLENDALE, Ariz. — We don’t know it at the moment, but Gonzaga freshman center Zach Collins’ biggest sports inspiration might be the late, great heavyweight boxing champion, Muhammad Ali. In the biggest game of the freshman’s young career, he produced his best on-court performance on the sport’s biggest stage. And like The Greatest, who once said, “It’s not bragging if you can back it up,” Collins was cocksure beforehand that a monster performance was in the cards on Saturday night.
In only 23 minutes played, Collins, Gonzaga’s sixth man, scored 14 points, had 13 rebounds and blocked six shots as the Bulldogs reached their first national championship game with a 77-73 win over East Region champion South Carolina. Following in the footsteps of former Final Four heroes Michael Jordan (North Carolina), Mike Bibby (Arizona) and the Syracuse duo of Carmelo Anthony and Gerry McNamara, Collins didn’t let the fact that he is just a freshman stop him from embracing the Final Four spotlight and becoming the lead story in sports sections nationwide.
Collins pretty much knew he was going to do just that, as he shared with the media after the game that, before the game started, he said that he wouldn’t want to play against himself tonight since he knew he was going to have a breakout performance.
“I really did say that,” said Collins. “And Nigel (Williams-Goss) said the same thing back to me. I just felt like we did our homework. And the [scouting report] was really good. And we’ve been guarding them, their plays really well all week. We were all really confident whether they went zone or they went man.”
Less than 20 seconds after entering the game early in the first half, Collins was on the board with a dunk from a feed by fellow big man Przemek Karnowski. Two possessions later, Collins hit a jumper. He was well on his way to having a big impact in the contest, putting up eight points and grabbing six rebounds in just 11 minutes of first-half action.
While his offense and rebounding stayed consistent in the second half, it was his defense during the final 20 minutes that surprised many inside of University of Phoenix Stadium. Five of his six blocked shots came in the second half, including a show-stopping rejection of a dunk attempt by Gamecocks guard Hassani Gravett that brought many of the Gonzaga faithful to their feet in the stands and on the Bulldogs bench. Going into Saturday night, Collins, who was named to the All-West Coast Conference Second Team, had just seven combined points and 10 combined rebounds in the two games in the West Regionals last week. He more than made up for a subpar last weekend with his all-around performance Saturday.
“I knew I had a couple of rough games before this,” said Collins. “And I wanted to come out and just play a lot better for my team. In my head, I just said, I had no choice.”
Collins was also responsible for the basket that gave the Bulldogs the lead that it would not relinquish for the rest of the contest. Gonzaga had led 65-51 midway through the second half, but South Carolina’s vise grip defense locked in for a near four-minute stretch, allowing the Gamecocks to go on a 16-0 run and take a 67-65 lead on two Rakym Felder free throws. On the ensuing possessions, Collins, off a feed from Williams-Goss (who led all scorers with 23 points), was able to rattle in a three-pointer to put the Bulldogs back on top with 6:42 remaining, and Gonzaga would not trail for the rest of the night after that shot.
The comeback was indicative of the Gamecocks during their run to Phoenix, as they had trailed at halftime in three of their first four games in the NCAA Tournament and had overcome those deficits to win each time.
“Like I’ve been saying for the last three weeks, the harder it gets, the tougher they stand,” said South Carolina head coach Frank Martin. “And every once in a while, you get put down on the mat and you better have the courage to get off your back. And these guys do it every single time.”
PJ Dozier led the Gamecocks with 17 points, 12 of those coming in the second half. Sindarius Thornwell, the 2017 Southeastern Conference Player of the Year, ended his South Carolina career with 15 points.
It’s a good thing, for North Carolina fans at least, that Oregon’s lapse in executing the fundamentals late in the game superseded their own failures in executing fundamentals at the same stage to advance to another national championship game.
None of North Carolina’s four missed free throws in the final 10 seconds came back to bite the Tar Heels, as two consecutive offensive rebounds after the second free throw miss in each allowed UNC to run out the clock and defeat the Oregon Ducks 77-76 in the second national semifinal game at University of Phoenix Stadium. The Tar Heels will appear in their 11th national championship game on Monday when they take on Gonzaga, and are looking to bring home their sixth title back to Chapel Hill.
North Carolina head coach Roy Williams knew that his team, though dominant for most of the second half, got away with one at the end.
“The thing that’s easy to say and easy to understand, we’re relieved,” said Williams. “We fell very lucky. Feel very fortunate we’re still playing but the fact of the matter is we’re still playing.”
As many people involved in sports tend to say, no one single play over the course of over two hours of action can decide a game. Well, in this situation, let’s just concentrate on two plays. After Oregon’s Keith Smith hit a layup to cut the Ducks’ deficit to one (77-76), UNC’s Kennedy Meeks was fouled in the backcourt with five seconds left. Meeks, a 64 percent free throw shooter, missed both, but Carolina guard Theo Pinson was able to sneak in front of Oregon forward Jordan Bell and tip the ball out to the perimeter, where Joel Berry II retrieved the ball for the Heels.
A reprieve for North Carolina, right? Well, no.
Berry, an 81 percent free throw shooting coming into tonight, was fouled with 4.5 seconds left. He, however, also missed both free throws, but Meeks atoned for his misses just a second prior to grab the offensive rebound and, after Meeks threw the ball out to Theo Pinson, the Heels dribbled out the clock in one of the most bizarre endings to a Final Four game in recent memory.
Without the presence of Oregon big man Chris Boucher, who tore his ACL in the Pac-12 Tournament semifinals, Meeks was rampant inside for the Tar Heels, with 25 points and 14 rebounds – eight of the rebounds on the offensive glass. Those rebounds, especially offensively, had much more of an impact on the game than any of the points he scored.
“And it takes you a long time to really get over that you don’t have to score to be effective, you don’t have to shoot all the shots to be effective,” said Meeks, who will be playing in the national championship game for a second consecutive year. “So I just took it upon myself to do the best job I could, whether that was me having a great defensive game, scoring the ball when I can, or getting all the rebounds.”
What made the two offensive rebounds even harder to take for Oregon was that both rebounds were grabbed over the team’s best rebounder, Bell, who happened to actually lead all players in the game in rebounds with 16, to go along with 13 points and four blocked shots.
“If I would have just boxed out, I had two opportunities to do it,” said a tearful Bell after the game, overcome with emotion. “I missed both of them. We lost the game because of it.”
His head coach, Dana Altman, made sure that those two moments were not going to define the game that Bell had on Saturday.
“So Jordan felt terrible,” Altman said. “But I told him I said, ‘Buddy, you got 16 rebounds, we wouldn’t have been in this position if it hadn’t been for you.'”
Surprisingly, Oregon was in a position to win despite a poor game from its leading scorer, Dillon Brooks, who only made two of his 11 field goal attempts and scored just 10 points before fouling out with three minutes left. Brooks also ended the game with five of Oregon’s 16 turnovers.
Bell, Brooks and Tyler Dorsey, who led the Ducks with 21 points, are all underclassmen but are all serious candidates to depart Eugene early and enter the NBA Draft. Guard Dylan Ennis, who surely was playing his last collegiate game as a senior, played inspired and had 18 points and six rebounds.
