More Questions than Answers: What Gonzaga Needs From Its Key Players in 2026-27

It’s official, Zag fans… Mario Saint-Supéry is gone. After dropping 16 points on Denmark in the FIBA World Cup Qualifying round in Madrid, he flew back to Spokane, practiced with the Zags, shook hands at the brand new Sabonis Center dedication, and then signed a four-year deal with Valencia in Spain’s ACB League before the week was out. The staff was apparently blindsided. The projected starting point guard up and left in the middle of the night, posting an insultingly underwhelming farewell to Zag Nation from his instagram page at 2:30 in the morning PST.

The transfer portal is closed, and damn near every guard worth signing is already spoken for. And this isn’t the first time Mark Few has had the rug pulled out from under him this offseason. Jack Kayil, who committed to the Zags back in March out of Alba Berlin in Germany’s BBL, elected to instead stay in the NBA draft. He went 39th to the Knicks, who promptly put him on ice and shipped him right back to Berlin for a year of pre-NBA limbo.

None of this sinks the 2026-26 season, however. Gonzaga’s incoming frontcourt can practically carry a team by itself, with Braden Huff an All-America candidate and Massamba Diop alongside him giving Few as much size and skill as anyone in the country. But the margin is certainly way thinner for the Zags than it was in June, and everyone who will suit up for the Bulldogs this season must be better than they were a year ago.

Gonzaga returns redshirt senior Braden Huff and rising sophomore Davis Fogle. That’s pretty much it. International additions Nathan De Sousa and Izan Almansa, along with transfers Isiah Harwell and Massamba Diop, round out the presumed rotation. All six will need to sharpen some aspect of their game based on their respective performances last year for this team to cohere and play to the standard Mark Few expects. Here’s a look at where each of them should be focusing this offseason to make sure Gonzaga hits the ground running when nonconference play kicks off.

Braden Huff

Braden Huff was the best version of himself last season, right up until his left knee gave out in January. This season, however, he’s healthy and also the only upper classman on the team. Make no mistake, this is Braden Huff’s team.

Huff will need to remain at least as productive and efficient this year as he was last year. The scoring must carry over. But he must do more than that also. Huff grabbed just 2.9 defensive rebounds a night and got walked off the block too easily and too often for a man his size. He will need to become a more reliable defensive rebounder to prevent second chance scoring opportunities for opposing bigs. 

The free throws have to get fixed too: 57.5 percent is unplayable for a go-to scorer who lives inside and draws contact every night, and it’s points left on the floor that can turn narrow wins into devastating losses. His three point percentage will have to climb, also, because Massamba Diop is a 7-foot-1 rim-runner who needs a larger share of the paint to operate than Ike often demanded. Huff drifting out to the arc will open up a lethal offensive attack and keep the Zags from becoming one dimensional.

The most vital thing Huff will need to contribute this year, however, is his voice. This is a team built around its frontcourt, and Huff is the senior who has to run it, on the floor and in the huddle. There’s a lot about Graham Ike that’s difficult to replace, but his leadership, intensity, and sheer presence are what this year’s roster might be most sorely in need of. 

Davis Fogle

Davis Fogle spent the first two months of last season buried on the bench and the last two looking like the future of the program. By March he was a starter in everything but the box score; a vital part of Gonzaga’s offense in the WCC final and opening rounds of March Madness who also posted a 2.0 assist-to-turnover ratio to match.

His role gets bigger now, much bigger, and three things have to come with it. The three-ball first: he took just 40 all season and hit 35 percent, fine on that volume but nowhere near what a floor-spacer needs when Huff and Diop are demanding double and triple coverage in the paint, so the attempts have to climb and the accuracy has to hold when they do. Then the defense: Fogle was listed as a thin 200 pounds that Pac-12 wings will hunt and attack him on the wing until he adds the strength to hold up defensively on the perimeter. The Zags will badly miss the stopping power of Emmanuel Innocenti this season, and some kind of defense will need to come from somewhere in its absence. For Fogle, it won’t be enough to make shots, he’ll also have to keep from being a liability on the other end of the floor.

Massamba Diop

Massamba Diop was one of the better freshman bigs in the country last year, which is a strange thing to say about an older freshman who had already played professionally in Spain. The 7-foot-1 Senegalese center put up 13.6 points and 5.8 rebounds on 56.9 percent shooting with roughly two blocks a night across about 30 minutes for Arizona State, backed by a 7-foot-4 wingspan, a soft touch at the line, and even eight made threes. He picked Gonzaga over St. John’s, and on paper he’s the rim protection this defense has lacked and the ideal lob threat to run alongside Huff.

For that frontcourt to hit its ceiling, three things have to change. First, the rebounding. 5.8 boards a night is thin for a man with that length, and with Braden Huff alongside him, the emphasis will need to be on cleaning the glass. Then, it’s the one thing every Gonzaga big man has been made or broken by: the fouls. Because Diop is the only shot-blocker of consequence on the roster, and every stretch he spends on the bench in foul trouble is a stretch Gonzaga has no answer at the rim and has to survive on some combination of Huff and Almansa. Last is the post game. Right now he scores on rim-runs, floaters, and short rolls, a face-up, downhill big. Huff plays his best basketball next to someone who can operate with his back to the basket, and if Diop builds that, the two can play high-low instead of taking turns in the paint. The size and skill set say All-Pac-12. The details decide whether he gets there.

Nathan De Sousa

Nathan De Sousa is the most experienced player on the roster who has never played a college game. He is 23, he has logged more than 200 appearances for Cholet in France’s Pro A League since he was a teenager, and he is coming off the best season of his career: 10.9 points and 4.9 assists on 40 percent shooting in France’s top division, second on the team in scoring and running the point for a Champions League club. Before that he won U-20 Euro gold and took silver at the U-16s next to Victor Wembanyama. He’s a high quality distributor, the floaters in the paint look very promising, and the motor is the thing everyone mentions first. He is a professional floor general, and Gonzaga now badly needs exactly that.

What he has to become is a true starting lead guard, which is not what he was. At Cholet he played 20 minutes a night as the second option behind Gerald Ayayi (yes, brother of Gonzaga legend Joel). In Spokane he inherits the keys to a top-15 offense for 30-plus minutes a night, and that jump is the whole story. The three-ball has to keep climbing, because 33.8 percent won’t move a Pac-12 defense off Huff and Diop. Then there’s the adjustment every European makes to the American college game, faster and more physical than what they’re used to. The learning curve may be steeper for De Sousa than any other incoming player on this roster, and unfortunately, the stakes for figuring it out just got a whole lot higher for the young Frenchman since Saint Supery absconded back to Spain. 

Isiah Harwell

Isiah Harwell was the No. 12 recruit in the 2025 class, a McDonald’s All-American Gonzaga chased for three years before Houston got him. The freshman year that followed was a write-off: 3.6 points on 27.9 percent from the field and 27.1 from three across 85 attempts, 0.5 assists in 13.8 minutes a night, out of Kelvin Sampson’s rotation by March. An ACL injury that cost him more than a year is most of the reason, and his lone 20-point night, against Jackson State, is the reminder of the mid-range pull-up and 6-foot-9 wingspan that got him ranked in the first place.

Now he’s the presumed starter next to De Sousa in the backcourt, and every hole in that line has got to be an offseason priority. The 27 percent from three has to climb into the mid-30s, because a backcourt of De Sousa at 33.8 and a second guard who can’t stretch the floor lets Pac-12 defenses wall off Huff and Diop and dare the guards to beat them. The 0.5 assists has to multiply, because when De Sousa sits or gets blitzed, nobody else on the perimeter can run the offense. Gonzaga is at its best when it has two guards who can both make plays and move the ball. De Sousa and Harwell will need to develop some chemistry lickety split in order for the Gonzaga offense to reach its full potential. 

The defense is where he’s needed most: at 220 pounds with that wingspan, he’s the only guard on the roster built to smother the other team’s best perimeter scorer, and there’s no one behind him to hand that job to. If Saint Francis transfer Skylar Wicks never gets his eligibility waiver approved, all of it comes at 30+ minutes a night on a surgically repaired knee that hasn’t carried that load yet.

Izan Almansa

Izan Almansa won MVP at the 2022 U17 World Cup and the U18 EuroBasket in the same summer, the first player ever to take both, then added U19 World Cup MVP in 2023. The pro track since has cooled him off, however. He posted 10.5 points and 7.2 rebounds on 54 percent across 48 games with the G League Ignite in 2023-24, withdrew from that year’s draft, spent 2024-25 in Australia going for 6.9 point and 3.9 boards per night with the Perth Wildcats of the NBL, then declared for the draft once again in 2025 and went undrafted, the only one of the 12 prospects in the second-round green room who never heard his name called. He landed back at Real Madrid, where a EuroLeague frontcourt held him to 4.8 points in under 10 minutes a night. He’s 21, 6-foot-10, and still shaped like the rebounder those youth teams relied on so heavily. He’s also never played a minute of NCAA basketball.

At Gonzaga he’s the presumed third big behind Huff and Diop. Huff is coming off a knee injury that ended his junior year 17 games early, and Diop is a shot-blocker who tends to live on the edge of foul trouble, which makes Almansa the frontcourt’s insurance and means he has to be ready to give 20+ minutes on a night’s once his number gets called. The job is narrow: rebound on both ends, finish what the starters pull the defense apart to create, and–most importantly–defend the paint without fouling. What he has to prove, after a year of sub-10-minute nights, is that he can seize a steady role and hold it without compromising the integrity of Gonzaga’s frontcourt rotation.

Final Thoughts

A few potential impact players have been left off this list as well. Parker Jefferson redshirted last year, so there’s no film to grade and nothing honest to ask him to fix. A season pounding against Graham Ike in practice and a winter in the Olynyk Clinic should’ve done what a redshirt is for, though, hopefully. The freshmen are also a total wild card. Sam Funches, Luca Foster, and Juwan Ekanga-Ehawa may redshirt, may become key rotation pieces, and may become garbage time superstars, but guessing at first-year guys is a good way to look dumb by December. 

A roster this green doesn’t come together on talent alone. It comes together when every guy knows the one thing between him and the player his team needs him to be. Huff’s voice and leadership, De Sousa’s jumper and comfort with the learning curve, Fogle’s stroke and frame, Harwell’s defense and physicality, Diop’s discipline, Almansa’s motor. The top-15 team is still in there, somewhere. But reaching that bar means everybody will need to lock in and sharpen the edge that makes the whole thing hum, and quick.