Dawgs forget to Zag

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, December 3, 2003

SEATTLE – Lorenzo Romar didn’t need to look at the box score to decipher the beating his Washington Huskies suffered Wednesday night.

If the final score – Gonzaga 86, Washington 62 – wasn’t proof enough, all the blood that UW’s Tre Simmons spilled in the final minute was.

“All the hoopla about the Zags is true,” said Romar, the UW coach. “They’re a good basketball team.”

The victory was Gonzaga’s fifth straight over Washington and left the Huskies with a 3-1 record. Gonzaga, ranked 17th in this week’s Associated Press poll, is 3-1.

When Romar finally saw the box score, he knew where to look first.

The Bulldogs scored 54 of their points inside the free throw lane, and they seemed to stop that many on the defensive end as well, holding the Huskies to just 16 with a smothering zone.

“Fifty-four points in the paint. I haven’t seen that number since I’ve been here,” said Romar, in his second season at Washington. “I knew they were dominant, but I didn’t expect them to be that dominant tonight.”

Gonzaga, powered inside by 6-foot-10 Ronny Turiaf, 6-8 Cory Violette and 6-11 Richard Fox, outrebounded the Huskies 48-26, including 35-12 on the defensive end.

By the end, the Huskies were a battered and, yes, bloody team.

Simmons, a junior guard, tried to stop Fox in the lane and wound up giving up more than the Bulldogs’ final basket. Simmons staggered across the baseline and started up the court, leaving a 20-foot trail of blood from a gash on his forehead. Despite the gasps that the scene created, Simmons didn’t even need stitches.

The moral to this game was that Gonzaga did what Gonzaga wanted on both ends of the floor.

On offense, the mission was to pound the ball inside against Washington, which yielded 15 points to Violette, 12 to Turiaf and 9 to Fox. In addition, guards Blake Stepp and Tony Skinner scored 14 points each.

“We got the ball inside to our post in that one stretch and then Blake (Stepp) was solid again against a lot of pressure,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few said.

On defense, Gonzaga challenged Washington to shoot from outside and flattened anyone who tried to drive inside with elbows and body blows. Washington shot just 31.1 percent from the floor and, despite 35 free throw attempts, made only 51.4 percent of those.

“They are kind of like a machine,” Romar said. “They know what they do and they know how to play, and our hats are off to them.”

As big as the wipeout was, Washington actually had Gonzaga backpedaling for a while in the first half.

Gonzaga led 17-11 before Washington went on a 17-3 run that produced an eight-point Husky lead.

Washington scored nine straight points during its surge – Will Conroy’s 3-pointer, Curtis Allen’s two free throws, and back-to-back baskets by Brandon Roy – for a 20-17 lead before Fox scored for Gonzaga.

Roy then made two free throws and scored from the left wing, and Bobby Jones added two baskets from the baseline that were interrupted only by a free throw from Gonzaga’s Erroll Knight, a sophomore transfer from UW.

The Huskies’ shots were falling, they led 28-20, and one thought lingered in their minds.

“When you play a team like Gonzaga, any mistake is going to kill you,” UW guard Curtis Allen said.

A couple of mental lapses on defense, followed by a few missed shots, turned the momentum in a hurry.

Gonzaga outscored Washington 21-7 the rest of the half, limiting the Huskies to missed shots from the perimeter and nothing but seven free throws in the final 7 minutes, 28 seconds.

Kyle Bankhead’s rebound and 10-footer in the lane with 2 seconds remaining gave Gonzaga a 43-35 lead at the half.

“I thought our starting group really played well,” Gonzaga coach Mark Few said. “When they were in, we were able to build a lead, then we brought them back in and got the lead back and that’s why we let them play it out most of the second half.”

Gonzaga outscored Washington 19-3 to start the second half, when Washington didn’t score anything but a free throw for more than seven minutes.

Will Conroy, who made three of his six shots from 3-point range, led the Huskies with 15 points. Roy scored 13.