Former Gonzaga players including Dan Dickau and Matt Santangelo preview Zags-UNC in title game
Apr 3, 2017, 12:36 PM
Gonzaga's run to the national championship game is the culmination of 19 straight NCAA Tournament trips. (AP)
(AP)
On a day 19 seasons in the making for the Gonzaga Bulldogs, it only makes sense to get some players that helped build the foundation for the Zags’ prolonged success to talk about the program’s first-ever national title game on Monday against North Carolina.
Former Gonzaga players Dan Dickau, Blake Stepp, Matt Santangelo and Matt Nilson joined “Brock and Salk” Monday morning to provide their takes on the biggest game in the history of a program that has reached 19 straight NCAA Tournaments, plus memories of the Bulldogs’ rise to prominence that each had a hand in at some point along the way.
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Here are some keys to the championship game and insights to this Gonzaga team that the former Zags provided on the show:
• Dickau: “Nigel (Williams-Goss) needs to have a really good game against the point guard of UNC, (Joel) Berry, (who has) been struggling with some ankle injuries. I think if we can keep Carolina off the offensive glass, which is one of their strengths, we’ll be able to get the ball out in transition where Nigel’s at his best.”
• Stepp: “These are those games where it’s just gonna be I think an exciting pace, which is fun to watch. The way we want to play, it’s the way they want to play. … They’re an incredible offensive rebounding team. We have as much, more size technically than they do. … Being able to match up athletically as we can, kind of use our size inside, we’re gonna have to make our 3s, and we’re gonna have to prevent a lot of kind of run-out breaks. Should be a high-scoring game and a fun pace.”
• Santangelo: “This group, they have had such a sense of ownership of the goals. … The fact that they talked about a Final Four as a preseason goal, the fact that they can talk about a national championship, it’s a part of their vernacular, that’s it’s OK to say ‘We are going to do this.’ Not ‘We want to’ or ‘We can’ or ‘We should’ – like, ‘We are going to accomplish these things.’ I think it’s that kind of comfort and kind of that ownership of the goal that’s different for this group than previous groups. Now I will say this, too, without those previous groups this group never gets that level of comfort, so to see kind of that maturation of the program and obviously to get to the pinaccle tonight has been really, really remarkable.”
You can hear the rapid-fire interviews with all four former players embedded above.
