DENVER — In the back corner of Gonzaga’s locker room, Drew Timme enjoys a rare moment to himself before he’s brought yet another proposition. His help is needed with a story made of stories about Anton Watson.
“I like it,” Timme says, nodding. “I like it.”
The big Texan likes it, of course, because that’s his best friend. But he really likes it for the reason all the rest of the Zags like it, which is a barely concealable rage that nobody talks enough about Anton Watson. When the 6-8 senior from Spokane didn’t show up on any all-conference teams in early March, when he didn’t take home any individual honors reflecting his value to the operation, his teammates were … displeased. And not in a sternly-worded-letter way.
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This wasn’t carelessness. This was plain disregard. Active refusal of reality. “I mean, down the stretch of this run,” Zags coach Mark Few says, “he’s been our MVP.”
Anton Watson, the most important player Gonzaga has. A tough sell as a premise, maybe.
Gonzaga is happy to explain why.
The example
Like any recruit bound for Spokane might, Braden Huff watched a lot of Gonzaga men’s basketball during his senior year of high school. He did not watch a lot of Watson, but only because there was not as much Watson to watch. With Timme and Chet Holmgren occupying starting spots, Watson was a full-time reserve as a junior, logging 10 minutes less per game than he is now. Huff had an idea of what Watson could do, but only an idea.
Then Huff arrived in the summer. He watched Watson work out, showing off the shooting and ballhandling skills he often couldn’t in 2021-22, and came to a much more crystallized conclusion. “I was like, this guy is a serious problem,” Huff says now. “He’s going to cause issues for teams.”
He became an issue for Huff, too. The 6-10 freshman is an intriguing combination of guard skills in a big frame, but he was bound for a redshirt season due to the glut of frontcourt options already on hand. This meant scout-team duties. The scout-team duties, as it turned out, meant impersonating the opposing player Watson would match up with most of the time. This meant Huff had one of his most important classes, every day for a year, in the practice gym:
How to be a Gonzaga Basketball Player.
“That’s been tough,” Huff says. “But it’s helped me learn how to deal with that physicality and that effort and I try to match it with the same intensity and effort. That’s been good for me. Through his work, he’s kind of showed me what it’s like to be a starting big and contribute on this team. Which is pretty cool.”
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The anchor
Way back on Nov. 20, when the game could be framed as a battle between two would-be national championship contenders, Gonzaga hosted Kentucky and dumped the visitors by 16 points.
Inside the result, though, was a hint of Watson to come. Sometimes he guarded Oscar Tshiebwe, the Wildcats’ redoubtable center. Sometimes he guarded C.J. Fredrick, the squirrelly sharpshooter six inches shorter than Tshiebwe. On the other end, Watson missed one shot on the way to a 10-point night, while posting eight boards, two steals, one block and just one turnover in 38 minutes. “That Kentucky game was, I think, a wakeup call for the country who Anton Watson was,” senior guard Rasir Bolton says. “He’s a unique athlete. He’s 6-8, 6-9, quick hands, nice with the ball, nice handle, moves his feet laterally well. It’s a combination of his physical attributes, his God-given ability, and he just goes out there and gets it done.”
Competitively, this is Watson. Leaving Gonzaga with no blanks to fill. Sophomore forward Ben Gregg remembers a possession earlier this year during which Watson had three straight tip-outs on missed Zags shots. “He doesn’t have a care in the world if he gets it or not, as long as someone in our jersey gets it,” Gregg says. Senior guard Malachi Smith recalls a similar sequence in which Watson had a tip-out on a missed shot, chased the ball down to save it from going out of bounds, and then wound up finishing the trip with a dunk.
“He got cheered for the dunk,” Smith says. “But they don’t realize he got an offensive rebound and he almost dove out of bounds to get the ball. That part wasn’t talked about.”
Common Anton Watson poster 🖼 pic.twitter.com/I9xr5dLQSB
— Gonzaga Basketball (@ZagMBB) February 26, 2023
Even last week, Few took to the dais after a slightly-too-uncomfortable first-round win over Grand Canyon and noted what no one else was noting: Watson had five offensive rebounds and two steals inside a 14-point, 11-rebound effort — providing his team critical extra possessions at this time of year, giving Gonzaga more time to find its footing after an uneven start. “What gets lost even in a game like this,” Few said that night “is just the absolute calming influence that Anton Watson has on our team.”
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Metrics can be a little janky. But Watson leads Gonzaga in steals (66), defensive Win Shares (1.8) and defensive box score plus-minus (3.5). He has 82 offensive rebounds, only five fewer than Timme. Meanwhile, he’s actually more efficient inside the arc than Timme (66.8 percent shooting on 2s, compared to Timme’s 64.7 percent). Watson, in fact, led the West Coast Conference in shooting (64.8 percent) during conference play. He’s two points shy of having three straight double-doubles in the postseason.
This is the part Watson thinks about a lot, bitterly: the part where people undervalue his offensive repertoire. He takes pride in his passing. He insists he’s a better shooter than his effective field goal percentage on all jumpers (45.1) suggests. “When I’m aggressive, I feel like I can be one of the best offensive players on the court, honestly,” Watson says. But he won’t overcook it. Or at least he tries not to. He has more important things to do than settle imagined scores.
“Sometimes if people are sleeping or talking down on me, I’ll get a little pissed off and prove them wrong,” Watson says. “But I don’t try to do too much. I just try to play my game.”
The igniter
From across the confoundingly small locker room at Ball Arena, Nolan Hickman watches Watson laugh a big laugh as he fields some questions from the crammed-in media, and the sophomore guard is not even a little shocked. He is, in fact, in mid-sentence talking about the generally positive vibes Watson brings to pretty much everything. “We’ll be out to eat, sees a homeless guy on the corner, slips him a five-dollar bill,” Hickman says. “But he makes it seem like it’s nothing. He’s an all-around exceptional dude.”
Timme’s theatrics have their own gravitational pull, but remove the core of Gonzaga basketball in 2022-23, and you might find Watson’s energy inside.
To prove the point, Hickman refers to a Feb. 9 home game against San Francisco, and the posterizing Watson performs on the Dons’ Isaiah Hawthorne a little more than three minutes in. Timme picks up a loose ball, fires it ahead to a streaking Watson, who finishes through a leaping Hawthorne. The normally subdued Watson adds a momentary flex after the flush. The entire sideline and building is up for grabs.
Not because it was a great dunk, Hickman says. Because it was a great dunk from Anton Watson. “Our guys definitely would’ve went crazy if anybody did it, yes, but because it’s Anton, there’s a little more oomph,” Hickman says. “Anton, he doesn’t show as much emotion as you guys think. But on the court, when he gets it going, he lets it loose. It gives us life, definitely.”
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The pal
What’s abdicated in favor of the mustache-stroking and bicep-flexing and a decided lack of you-know-whats to give — except during live television interviews, evidently — is inconspicuousness. Normalcy, in any realm. Exist near Drew Timme, and you might as well be walking on Jupiter. The strongest gravitational pull imaginable, for better or worse.
By now, after 132 college basketball games, Timme can handle either. And chances are he’s not ducking too many darts around Spokane. But the pressure and profile is real, even if he’s asking for it. Occasionally, Gonzaga’s star wants to retreat. Every now and then, he doesn’t mind a quiet place. Something mundane. Something rooted.
There’s usually one guy he goes to, to help him find it. Behind a door he can knock on, right across the hall. “Yeah, man, there’s nothing like him and I playing FIFA together or Call of Duty 2 and just chilling,” Timme says of Watson. “Even just going out drinking or something. Love to be around the dude. I am around him 24/7, pretty much. Without him, this experience wouldn’t be as fun for me, for sure.”
It’s another of Watson’s roles. It might be as big as any of them.
“Drew’s really my brother,” Watson says. “He gets so much hate, it’s crazy sometimes. I’m always there for him. Anytime we have a bad game, anytime I have a bad game, we can just go kick it with each other and we’ll be fine.”
The closing arguments
So about the Anton Watson Is Gonzaga’s Most Important Player postulate.
“Anton means the world to us,” Bolton says.
“He’s the X-factor of this whole thing,” Hickman says.
“Without him, we probably wouldn’t even be in the tournament right now,” Timme says.
“You see a beautiful house, you see the windows, you see the doors, you see the interior — but you don’t see what’s holding it all up,” Smith says. “That’s what ’Ton is. He’s the foundation of a beautiful house.”
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“He’s what Gonzaga basketball is,” Huff says.
Probably best that everyone else tries to explain him, because Watson can’t explain himself.
He says he’s always been this way. No big awakening along the way. No epiphanies. Best he can come up with is that he’s always been on teams for which the focus was sharing the ball and enjoying the moment. He makes it sound like a coincidence. He doesn’t realize it’s more of a riddle.
He might be this way because of those teams. Or maybe those teams were that way because of him. “If we’re all playing good, that’s my favorite thing,” Watson says. “That’s when I’m having the most fun.”
(Top photo: Justin Edmonds / Getty Images)
