No. 2 Gonzaga holds off USF

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Mark Few had to think for a moment back to when his Gonzaga group last got pushed quite like this.

That’s because it’s been nearly two months.

Corey Kispert’s three-point play with 1:33 left put his team ahead for good and he then knocked down a jumper with 34 seconds remaining, leading No. 2 Gonzaga past scrappy San Francisco for a hard-fought 83-79 victory Saturday to extend its winning streak to 15 games.

“Obviously we needed to work on in-game stuff. We hadn’t been in one of those maybe since, I don’t know, the Washington game was kind of close, the Arizona game became close at the end. It wasn’t close,” Few recalled of the back-to-back road games in December. “So, it’s always good to be able to work on that. It’s great to come in at halftime and be down and make adjustments and have those guys go out there and execute those adjustments and kind of turn the tables. They had us reeling there early.”

Khalil Shabaaz made a 3-pointer with six seconds left to make it a two-point game in a furious, back-and-forth finish — and that described most of the second half. Admon Gilder made two free throws with 3.6 seconds left to seal the win.

Filip Petrusev had 23 points and 11 rebounds playing in foul trouble and Drew Timme scored 19 for the Zags (23-1, 9-0 WCC), who ran their West Coast Conference regular-season winning streak to 36 games for the longest such unbeaten run in the nation for a conference.

They had zero room for error at sold-out Memorial Gym, with a capacity crowd of close to 3,000 anxious until the very end. Once the buzzer finally sounded, the relieved Zags stood at mid-court and gave a wave to their loud cast of supporters in the upper bleachers.