Mark Few has gone big in the NCAA Tournament, but is Gonzaga's supersized lineup big enough for Zach Edey?

Zach Edey was not going to let it happen again. With nearly the same team around him this year, the one that Farleigh Dickinson bounced from the NCAA Tournament last season, Edey’s Purdue Boilermakers cruised through the first weekend without any madness. A 78-50 win over Grambling State followed by a 106-67 dismantling of Utah State. Now Matt Painter’s path to his Final Four is clear, and it looks a lot like the Maui Invitational. 

To start the season in Maui, Purdue played with a vengeance. Southern Illinois transfer Lance Jones seamlessly integrated into the starting lineup, and with as much continuity as any team in the country, the Boilermakers knocked off Gonzaga, Tennessee, and Marquette in succession to win the Maui Invitational. All three of those teams are still left in the NCAA Tournament, two in Purdue’s region, and Mark Few’s Zags are the next roadblock to redemption. 

Painter’s team can find solace in that 73-63 win from November 20, but when his coaching staff turned on the tape this week, in preparation for the Midwest Regional Semifinal in Detroit, they undoubtedly saw a very different team than the one they remembered from that early season tournament. 

That’s because Mark Few has decided to supersize his lineup, a decision that carried him to his ninth straight Sweet 16 appearance with an 89-68 demolition of Kansas. When FDU beat Purdue and 7-foot-4 Zach Edey, Tobin Anderson’s team did it as the shortest in the entire NCAA Tournament, but on Friday night, Few will fight fire with fire. 

After last season’s trip to the Elite Eight, Mark Few was forced to overhaul his roster, only retaining Anton Watson, Nolan Hickman, and Ben Gregg from last season’s team and notably losing Drew Timme and Julian Strawther. Few began by adding Andrew Nembhard’s younger brother Ryan, a transfer from Creighton, and grabbing center Graham Ike from Wyoming. Because of the offseason churn, it was not a cohesive unit that traveled to Hawaii and until a February 10 win over Kentucky in Lexington the Zags were considered a bubble team. 

By that time, Few had finally unlocked his team’s superpower, its size. Ben Gregg, a 6-foot-10 junior forward, only played 19 minutes off the bench and finished with just two points against Purdue in November, but by February, he was a full-time starter, alongside 6-foot-8 Watson and 6-foot-9 240-pound Ike. 

Despite being the tallest of the bunch, Gregg is the de-facto “small forward” a 38.5% shooter from three on 3.1 attempts per game, he provides space for Watson as a rim-running power forward, and Ike, a traditional post-up center with a tremendous face-up game. Against Kansas in the Round of 32, that combination of front-court versatility had Hunter Dickinson in hell, constantly chasing Ike to the top of the key as he set a screen for Hickman or Nembhard and forcing the Jayhawks’ help-defenders to overcommit, leaving space for a baseline cut from Watson or a corner three for Gregg. 

Sets like that one produced one of the most efficient offensive performances of the entire NCAA Tournament. Zach Edey is a much better defender than Dickinson and will be a much bigger hindrance at the rim, but no matter who Painter deploys Edey on, the Zags will make sure he’s a part of the ball-screen action. Against Kansas, Gonzaga even ran a dribble-handoff action between Gregg and Watson which resulted in a layup for the former. 

The Golden State Warriors of the mid-2010s had their “death lineup” which was a small-ball group, but the 2024 Gonzaga version is giant. No, it doesn’t have the firepower of a Steph Curry- Klay Thompson duo but by college basketball standards, it’s pretty lethal. 

Against Kansas, the trio or "tri-towers" lineup combined for 51 points, each scoring at least 15, and Gonzaga shot over 60% from the field. For the season, the three-man combo of Ike, Watson, and Gregg played 387 minutes together and posted an offensive rating (points scored per 100 possessions) of 131.2 which was in the top one percent of the country with a 98.4 defensive rating. With that group on the floor, the Zags finished +209, had an effective field goal percentage of 60.3%, and grabbed offensive rebounds at a 37.2% clip (97th percentile). 

In the postseason those numbers are even better with an offensive rating of 131.8 and an effective field goal percentage of 64.8%. The Zags, like the Boilermakers, have two dominant wins in the tournament so far, and despite not even winning the West Coast Conference title, could make a run back to the Final Four for the second time in five years and third under Few. 

When facing a player like Edey, as Big Ten fans well know and won't let you forget, the foul line often becomes the focus. Edey was fouled at a historic rate this season and so far has attempted 392 free throws, the eighth most in a single season ever, and the only member of the top 10 whose season occurred after 1970.

Well, Gonzaga controls the foul line with this lineup, with a free-throw attempt rate of 36.3% for the season when Ike, Watson, and Gregg are on the floor together which is 93rd percentile, and allowing a free-throw rate of just 21.9% (98th percentile). However, when Ike and Watson are on the floor without Gregg, which happened for 318 minutes this year, the team’s free throw attempt rate dropped to 21.1% which is in the bottom one percent of college basketball. The Zags simply don’t get to the line without Gregg on the floor. It’ll be crucial to match Purdue’s free throw rate and get Edey into foul trouble. 

Those discrepancies between lineups with Ike and Watson and no Gregg vs. when the "tri-towers" are even more pronounced against quality competition. In Gonzaga’s nine Quad 1 games (3-6), the “three-big lineup” dominated. 

via CBBanalytics.com

This year, Zach Edey might just be an unsolvable riddle and maybe the Gonzaga-Purdue rematch yields the same result. Grambling State’s quick, high-pressure defense was no problem for Braden Smith and Fletcher Loyer, and against Utah State, Edey just stuffed the Mountain West Player of the Year Great Osobor into a locker, holding the opposing big to 14 points on 4/11 shooting while dropping a casual 23 and 14 boards on just 11 shots. But Gonzaga is going to try something different. Mark Few won’t let Edey sit in the paint and dominate the way he'd prefer. The Zags have the perfect combination of size and spacing to run Edey ragged on one end and bang with him on the other. 

This is far from Few's best team at Gonzaga and it's unlikely to be the one that finally brings him the national title that has eluded him over his storied 25-year tenure in Spokane. However, it is one of Few's most creative constructions, and if he and his trio of bigs can get the best of Painter and Edey on Friday, then what looked like a down year for the mid-major powerhouse, could be one of the best coaching jobs of its head coach's career.