Game Preview: Gonzaga vs. Arizona State
Bulldogs face another athletic team early in the season
The first basketball Sunday is upon us as Gonzaga hosts Bobby Hurley’s Arizona State Sun Devils in Spokane, amongst the afternoon kickoffs in the NFL. Arizona State is undefeated with wins over Idaho State and Santa Clara. Their matchup against the Zags is their third game in five days after playing in Tempe, Arizona, and Las Vegas.
It’ll also be the first time in these schools’ history that they will face each other in what is scheduled to be a home-and-home series. The level of opponent that Arizona State faced this week covers up some of the concerns that their 103-47 exhibition loss to Duke may have raised. It was a beatdown so bad that if you visit the Sun Devils athletics website you won’t see the score.
Arizona State offers its own sets of challenges for the Zags to figure out after dismantling Baylor for 35 minutes on Monday night. Similar to USC, the Sund Devils are an athletic, high-major team that offers decent length and veteran players with a few NBA-level-athlete freshmen. But maybe most of all, putting up a similar level of output against a lower-level opponent to what was shown in their debut against a similar, top-10 team in the country.
It shouldn’t be necessarily hard to get up for the first game in the Kennel of the season, but keeping the team’s foot on the pedal for a full 40 minutes should be the standard if this is a team that can contend for a title. The Baylor game was reminiscent of the breakaway nature that the Kansas game in 2020 felt, where Mark Few’s team announced their arrival in their opening game. This should be viewed similarly to that subsequent Auburn game, where the Zags won by 23 points and had the game out of reach from about the 10-minute mark of the first half onward.
While Hurley’s team does not look otherworldly on offense or elite as a total team, they do provide wrinkles to their game to make this interesting. Arizona State ranks in the top 25 for defensive efficient field goal percentage and 34th in the country in three-point defense. The length at the point guard position and the interior allowed them to frustrate their two opponents in the early season as well. Their 19.4% block rate is 20th in the country. A terrific opportunity to see Gonzaga’s frontcourt try to outmaneuver mobile size.