Mark Few talks about the key reasons behind Gonzaga’s upset win over UK at Rupp Arena

The Gonzaga men’s basketball team held its nerve on Saturday evening inside Rupp Arena.

Despite wasting away a 10-point halftime lead, the Bulldogs outmuscled Kentucky on the interior and were nearly flawless from the foul line in a 89-85 win over No. 17 Kentucky inside Rupp Arena.

Led by Graham Ike’s 25 points and Ryan Nembhard’s nine assists, the Bulldogs pulled through with key late-game execution on both ends of the court for a crucial Quad 1 win (per the NCAA NET rankings) that will boost their NCAA Tournament hopes.

Gonzaga shot just 4-for-18 (22.2%) on 3-pointers, but the Zags went 28-for-50 (56%) on 2-pointers and 21-for-24 (87.5%) on free throws. Another key to the road win was a 43-31 rebounding advantage enjoyed by Gonzaga, including 18 offensive boards.

One of these metrics was to be expected: Gonzaga entered this weekend as a top-10 team in the nation when shooting 2-point field goals. The other one? Not so much: Gonzaga was a 69.7% free-throw shooting team entering Saturday’s game.

But what’s clear is that despite the second-half comeback, Kentucky let Gonzaga get far too comfortable in the first half: The Bulldogs have now won 160 straight games when leading by double-digit points at halftime.

Former Kentucky signee Nolan Hickman, now a third-year Gonzaga Bulldog, had 17 points and five rebounds for the Zags.

Afterward, Gonzaga head coach Mark Few met with media members at Rupp Arena to discuss the result.

Here’s everything Few said:

Question about Gonzaga having success in the paint and with offensive rebounds.

Look, it’s one of our strengths so at this point of the season you kind of have to play to your strengths. You’re hoping you can do that, obviously we take a lot of pride in our rebounding and it’s been decent this year... But it was exceptional tonight. Because, I mean, Kentucky, they’re long and athletic and they’ve got a lot of bodies in there. I thought their wings and guard did a nice job going to the glass, too.

... You hope for the best and you plan for the worst if you’re a coach. So that was a pleasant surprise.

Question about the high pick-and-roll sets that Gonzaga repeatedly used in the second half.

... What an awesome, awesome college atmosphere man, just unbelievable. And I thought both teams did a good job, we’re switching our coverages, everybody is switching coverages, so you had to keep adjusting. We’d have success with one or two of our actions and Cal would switch up their coverage and we wouldn’t have success, so we kept adjusting and monkeying around.

They looked similar, but we were moving some pieces around too and then obviously when you have Ryan Nembhard, he makes the right read on those, which is just being a basketball player.

And then Nolan (Hickman) did a great job managing the game tonight, too. He made some really, really solid plays on the ball screens. I thought that was the big key. Those guards got a lot of our bigs those shots. There (was) a lot of stress brought their way by the crowd, by the toughness and athleticism of the Kentucky players, by the schemes that Cal and his staff brought at us. Those guards really showed a lot of poise tonight.

Question about the differences in preparing for Kentucky last season compared to this season.

The preparation, to me, was just so much harder this year. Just, what a job they’ve done assembling this roster. They have veterans like Reeves, and guys, I mean we spent a lot of time worried about Tre Mitchell. He’s a tough matchup with his picking and popping and what he can do and if he gets a small guy on a mismatch. We caught a huge break there with him not playing.

Just the skill (Kentucky) has, the skill they have and the pace that they play with. We love to get out in transition, it’s one of the best things we’ve done throughout the years. They’re an impressive team. At halftime we had only given up two transition points, which I thought was damn near miraculous.

That’s probably the biggest thing, just that skill level and a nice mix of some really talented young guys with some veterans.

Question about Gonzaga’s defense on a late-game play against an attempted lob by UK.

At that point we threw out maybe two or three ideas of what we thought they might go to: That’s a great play, I need to have that in the back of my head here, because Ben (Gregg) just made an incredible individual play there.

He did a good job making a read, making a basketball play and he jumped up and saved us, so. Obviously, we did not want to give up a three at that point. At minimum we wanted to guard without fouling, make them make a tough two and just rebound five (all players) is all we talked about in the huddle.

Question about the potential that Mark Few sees in Kentucky.

I see a lot in there. First of all, we played great. And I know maybe our results aren’t reflective of it, but we’ve literally been right there in every game with the exception of the UConn game. And we just haven’t closed them out. If we would have closed out some of these other ones, this would look a lot different.

So, I see a lot. I thought I saw two really, really good teams out there battling and making plays at the highest level. I think they’re going to be fine.

They’ve got skill. They have athleticism. I think they need to get healthy. Like I said, if they get Tre Mitchell back that adds that skilled 4. When you have a skilled 4 like we have in Anton (Watson), the schemes change dramatically. It puts you in a lot of difficult situations... Man, if they keep shooting it the way they’ve been shooting it and fly around. I know people have discussed a lot their defense, but man they climbed up into us in the second half and it was hard. We had to work really, really hard to get buckets there in the second half.

We executed goo. Made the right plays. But we had to work.

Question about the play of Braden Huff.

... He comes in and he’s scoring and he finally had some success against you know some high-level athletes and some high-level opponents. So I think that was encouraging.

His defense, he’s making some strides. It’s still not quite up to industry standards yet, but it’s making some strides. So that was great. It was obvious that we were very concerned about that, but I think everybody in the program has tons of confidence (in him). That’s why they kept throwing him the ball and he’s going to be able to score if he gets the ball, so obviously that’s a luxury.

Question about Gonzaga responding to going down six in the second half.

There was key stretches throughout that game. There were so many runs in that game, it was crazy, there were so many plays down the stretch... We just talked about settling down, playing with great poise, there was a lot of possessions left, a lot of game left.

We just, we needed to get back to getting shots on our terms. i thought we were kind of a bit panicky and rushed, especially in our shots around the basket.

Question about if Gonzaga felt it had an interior advantage over Kentucky entering the game.

... We run a lot of stuff through our bigs, we’ve always done that if you think about Drew Timme and Domantas Sabonis and Ronny Turiaf and just all the great players we’ve had. A lot of our stuff goes through our bigs.

Again, I think we’re analyzing statistics a little bit too shallow here. A lot of those points were on just absolute dimes from Nembhard for dunks and layups. One-on-one, (Kentucky) guarded us pretty dang good. They stood Graham (Ike) up and I thought handled him, it was tough to get baskets one-on-one. They bodied up on Anton, he was able to make a couple.

A lot of these baskets for those bigs were on just beautiful reads off the pick-and-roll and just kind of hand-delivering it to them.

Question about how Gonzaga handled Kentucky starting the second half strong.

When it was happening I didn’t think we were handling it very well, so I told them that. At the end, for us, we finally made plays to close out a game. We finally made some shots, we actually finally made some free throws.

We’ve had several that we probably could have won at the free-throw line this year. But, yeah we just talked about (how) we got through the first half and the reason we got through the first half (was) we took great care of the ball, we were just making the rest basketball play, we weren’t trying to challenge those Kentucky bigs at the rim. Because that’s what ignited some of those breaks was a blocked shot and they go to the other end and we’re giving up those transition points. Which we didn’t do in the first half.

We talked about just settling down there, and just kind of schematically got back in the right spots, not just trying to make something happen.... They deserve the credit. This was an incredible atmosphere tonight. It was hard to communicate... That was a great run Kentucky had, and they made another run there two-thirds of the way through... It’s a heck of a win.

Question about what the win does for Gonzaga for the rest of the season.

It’s obviously something we want to build off of. I don’t know how many teams could have come in here, with this environment... I mean to come in here and get this done against a really, really good team and a really well-coached team. We just need to keep drawing from that.

Probably the biggest thing is we finally closed one of these suckers out. We haven’t been doing that. So that’s what we’ll take out of it.

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