At the culmination of the 2024-2025 NBA season, there are twelve former Zags currently playing pro ball. Some are household names, some are hanging on through two-way deals and injury exceptions, and a few are right in the middle—steady, reliable, and impossible to root against. The spread now covers more than a decade of Gonzaga basketball, from Kelly Olynyk’s draft night in 2013 to Anton Watson’s arrival this spring. In between sit Rui Hachimura, Zach Collins, and Domantas Sabonis. Domas certainly stands as the former Zag putting together the most complete and dominant pro career, and his performance this season makes a compelling argument to position him as the program’s first Mark Few-era Hall of Famer. This is Part One of the update: the veterans, the anchors, the ones who’ve already logged the miles in their post-Spokane journeys.
Kelly Olynyk – Toronto Raptors / New Orleans Pelicans / Washington Wizards
Twelve seasons in, Kelly Olynyk continues to function as one of the league’s most modular veterans—rarely central, never irrelevant. He began the 2024-2025 season in Toronto before being included in the Brandon Ingram deal and arriving in New Orleans as an immediate starter. His minutes climbed from 16 to over 25 per game with the Pelicans, and over his final 20 appearances, he averaged 10.7 points, 5.9 rebounds, and 3.6 assists while shooting 50% from the field and nearly 42% from deep. The stretch-big role that had long defined his utility sharpened into something situationally essential in New Orleans, especially for a team still orbiting competitive ambition.
He missed the final three games of the season with left Achilles tendinosis and underwent a tendon debridement procedure in London shortly after. Recovery is expected to last through the offseason, though it didn’t prevent New Orleans from moving him again—this time to Washington alongside CJ McCollum in exchange for Jordan Poole, draft capital, and cap restructuring. Olynyk’s $13.4 million expiring deal now sits in a new rebuilding cycle, his value indexed to floor spacing, effort stability, and transactional elasticity.
Olynyk’s arrival in Washington raises the possibility of two former Zags sharing a rotation, with Corey Kispert still on the roster heading into the offseason. Whether that overlap survives the trade market is another question entirely. It would be nice to see Olynyk and Kispert share the floor, if only for the novelty, but Washington remains one of the league’s more persistent basketball purgatories—an organization where player development goes to plateau and rotational clarity dissolves on contact. Kispert’s been steady for years in the middle of all that noise, which only makes it harder to watch. If there’s any justice left in the sport, they both find a way out before the rebuild drags them down with it
Domantas Sabonis – Sacramento Kings
Domantas Sabonis just completed the most productive season of any Gonzaga alum currently in the league, and by most measures, one of the most statistically dominant years of any frontcourt player in basketball. He averaged 19 points, 14 rebounds, and 6 assists across 82 games, shot 59% from the field, and raised his three-point percentage to a career-best 41.7% while doubling his attempts from beyond the arc. In Sacramento’s halfcourt-heavy offense, Sabonis operated as both interior fulcrum and possession-stabilizer, collecting 10 triple-doubles, logging 32 points in a December win over New Orleans, and grabbing a career-high 28 rebounds against the same team in February. Over one three-game stretch in January, he compiled a combined 59 points, 33 assists, and 49 rebounds against playoff-caliber Eastern Conference opponents. The metrics were equally lopsided. He led the league in defensive rebounding rate and ranked eighth in effective field goal percentage among players with meaningful minutes, landing statistically adjacent to Nikola Jokić despite taking five fewer shots per game.
The defensive liabilities that have long followed Sabonis remained present, though rarely in isolation. Sacramento’s perimeter containment broke down repeatedly over the course of the year, forcing Sabonis into compromised help situations and exposing his limitations in space—particularly when recovering to stretch shooters or attempting hard closeouts. Opponents shot nearly 39% from deep when Sabonis was the primary defender, a number compounded by the frequency with which he found himself out of position or tasked with late-clock recovery duties that played to none of his strengths. Still, at the rim, he remained solid. Opposing players shot 3.5% worse on attempts inside ten feet when guarded by Sabonis, and his foul rate—though elevated in stretches—never fully neutralized the value of his rebounding and offensive orchestration. The drop in his assist-to-turnover ratio marked a step backward in one area of efficiency, but it never tilted his overall impact into anything less than all-star territory.
This was Sabonis’s fourth season with the Kings and his tenth in the NBA, a decade-long stretch that has reshaped expectations for what a modern center can control without overwhelming a system. His scoring is efficient, his rebounding unmatched, and his durability quietly historic. Among all the Zags who have passed through the league, only John Stockton has earned enshrinement in the Naismith Hall of Fame. Sabonis, still in his prime and already among the league’s most versatile bigs, appears likely to become the second—and the first to do so, having played under Mark Few.
Zach Collins – San Antonio Spurs / Chicago Bulls
Zach Collins began the 2024–25 season in San Antonio as a well-compensated reserve big, but the front office’s full transition toward a Victor Wembanyama-centric future left little room for overlapping development timelines. After watching his minutes dwindle from 22.1 to 11.8 per game and logging just four starts across 36 appearances, Collins became a contract component in the three-team deadline deal that moved De’Aaron Fox to the Spurs and Zach LaVine to Sacramento. Chicago received Collins alongside Tre Jones, Kevin Huerter, and a future pick—a package that read more like roster detritus than targeted acquisition. He arrived in Chicago with two years remaining on a $35 million deal and immediately entered a depth chart already clogged with stalled projects and cap-stabilizing overpays.
Collins played 28 games for the Bulls, started eight, and averaged just under 20 minutes per contest while shooting 54% from the field and collecting nearly seven rebounds per game. His scoring bumped to 8.6 per night, and his usage settled into something closer to his Spurs peak—functional but narrow, valuable only in specific configurations. He shared floor time with Nikola Vucevic, Patrick Williams, and Matas Buzelis, but none of those combinations produced any kind of lasting identity, and Chicago’s rotations began to blur into speculative asset management by mid-March. His role may expand next season if the front office fails to bring in frontcourt depth, but even that possibility remains hypothetical in an organization that now appears more committed to opacity than outcomes.
Chicago’s frontcourt got even more complicated on draft night. The Bulls added 18-year-old Noa Essengue to pair with Matas Buzelis, giving them two long, athletic forwards clearly intended to define the next phase of the roster. Both players stand 6-foot-10 with 7-foot-1 wingspans, and both fit the organization’s renewed commitment to pace, versatility, and transition-heavy offense. Collins doesn’t mirror that blueprint, but he brings a kind of floor awareness and physicality that the younger forwards are still learning to apply. Whether the Bulls see him as a stabilizing presence or potential trade flexibility remains to be seen, but his role now sits inside a timeline that may be moving faster than his game was ever designed to match.
Rui Hachimura – Los Angeles Lakers
Rui Hachimura spent his second full season with the Lakers in a holding pattern that never quite tipped toward prominence or irrelevance. He played in 59 games, started the majority, and averaged 13.1 points and 5 rebounds across nearly 32 minutes per night while shooting over 50% from the field and 41.3% from deep. Those marks climbed even higher in the playoffs, where he contributed 14.8 points on 48.4% three-point shooting over a first-round series that briefly amplified his value before the team’s broader limitations came back into focus. In stretches, particularly during December and January, Hachimura found comfort as a low-volume catch-and-shoot option, spacing the floor for Luka Dončić and LeBron James while carving out points in transition and off secondary actions. His offensive rebounding improved under head coach JJ Redick’s system, and the baseline movement Redick emphasized early in the year remained one of the few sources of off-ball dynamism on a roster increasingly reliant on isolation.
A midseason bout of patellar tendinopathy sidelined him for nearly a month and compromised his explosiveness through the final stretch of the season, though even post-injury, his numbers remained consistent. The more defining tension emerged from usage. He averaged fewer than 10 shot attempts per game, yet the Lakers won nearly 76% of the contests in which he eclipsed that mark—an indicator less of his individual dominance than of the system’s ongoing confusion around who should initiate and when. With Dončić controlling the majority of possessions and Austin Reaves acting as a secondary ball handler, Hachimura’s touches became more situational than schematic, and his isolation skill set—which had shown flashes in Washington—rarely found application beyond mismatches and late-clock resets. Despite this, the efficiency held. More than 80% of his two-point makes were assisted, and he continued to finish well above league average from mid-range and at the rim.
Rui spent most of March in a black face mask, and while the box scores stayed measured, the aesthetic tilted cinematic, like he didn’t check in to the game so much as descend from the rafters armed with a grappling hook and a monologue about vengeance. Even injured, even underused, he moved like someone with a subplot we weren’t being told about.
Hachimura enters the final year of his deal with a defined but precarious role: too skilled to be expendable, too context-dependent to become central. His contract—$18.26 million expiring—places him squarely in the trade-rumor slipstream as the Lakers attempt to recalibrate around aging stars, defensive gaps, and payroll strain. Whether he stays or moves, the floor spacing, frame, and professional restraint remain real assets. What lingers most, though, isn’t what he forced or failed to do—it’s how rarely he looked out of place, even when the roster around him veered toward dysfunction. At 27, he’s not the future of any franchise in rebuild mode, but he remains one of the few Lakers whose presence never needed explanation.
