Gonzaga added another international guard on Friday, landing 23-year-old Frenchman Nathan De Sousa out of Cholet Basket to fill out a thin backcourt for 2026-27. De Sousa is the fifth foreign-developed player on next year’s roster, joining countryman Juwan Ekanga-Ehawa, Spaniards Mario Saint-Supery and Izan Almansa, and Senegalese center Massamba Diop. Few has recruited internationally for years, but this is shaping up as one of the most globally built rosters of his tenure, and there are rumblings that there still could be one more coming down the pike.
The incoming class is loaded with international talent, but so too is the alumni board. Two and a half decades of Gonzaga basketball have stocked rosters all over the world, from EuroLeague contenders to the Japanese B.League, and a strong crop of former Zags is in the middle of pro seasons right now.
Eighteen of them are playing abroad this year. Here are the first nine.
Ben Gregg — SIG Strasbourg (France – Betclic Élite)
Ben Gregg spent five years in Spokane, played 141 games, won four conference tournament titles, and turned himself from a buried freshman into the emotional load-bearing wall of one of the nation’s most dominant programs. He went undrafted in June, caught a Summer League look with Boston, and by the fall had signed a one-year deal with SIG Strasbourg in France’s top flight, where through 13 games he was shooting 42.5% from three and adding 7.2 points and 1.4 steals a night for a team that opened 9-4. Coach Janis Gailitis has worked him into a rotation full of French pros, alongside Oscar Wembanyama, Victor’s older brother. The shooting was the question coming out of college after his percentage cratered as a senior, and so far in France, he’s answering it from the open spots while doing the rebounding and defending that kept him on the floor for five years at Gonzaga.
Khalif Battle — Dolomiti Energia Trento (Italy – Serie A)
Battle took the long way to Spokane, four schools across six years, Butler to Temple to Arkansas to a final run with the Zags, and the long way kept going. His first pro stop was Trento, and the start was rough. In the EuroCup, he shot 21.8% from three across 14 games while the club went 1-14 and finished dead last in its group, the kind of opening stretch that ends careers before they start.
The domestic season went better. Battle settled in at 13.0 points a night in Serie A on a respectable 36.1% from deep, and Trento climbed into the LBA playoffs, where it drew Virtus Bologna, the best team in the league. The series went the distance. Battle scored 22 in a Game 4 win and 16 in a Game 5 win to force a decider before Bologna closed it out. For a 25-year-old who came to Gonzaga as a one-year scorer and left the same way, holding up against that kind of competition in a do-or-die playoff series is the part of the rookie season worth keeping.
Filip Petrušev — Dubai Basketball (United Arab Emirates – EuroLeague and ABA League)
No Zag abroad has lived more careers by age 26 than Petrušev. Belgrade-born, raised in Baskonia’s academy, WCC Player of the Year in his one full season at Gonzaga, ABA League MVP at 20, a EuroLeague title with Anadolu Efes, a three-game cameo in the NBA, an Olympic bronze with Serbia in Paris. And last summer, he added a new chapter, a monthslong buyout saga that had him linked to half of Europe before Olympiacos finally let him go and Dubai Basketball signed him to a three-year deal ahead of EuroBasket.
Petrušev took a step back in volume to fit it, 11.6 points and 4.8 rebounds across 38 EuroLeague games after posting 14.1 a year earlier at Crvena Zvezda, but he shot 57% inside the arc and made the All-EuroLeague team for October. He has been open about what all of this is for. In April, he told Serbian media the NBA remains the goal, which makes Dubai less a home than a very well-funded audition.
Nigel Williams-Goss — Žalgiris Kaunas (Lithuania – EuroLeague and LKL)
Williams-Goss was the engine of the 2017 team, the 37-2 group that reached the national championship game and the best squad Gonzaga had ever fielded to that point. He won a EuroLeague championship and an ACB title with Real Madrid, a Greek Cup with Olympiacos, played in Belgrade and Krasnodar and Piraeus, and had a very brief signing with the Utah Jazz. What he had not done, until last summer, was run a team of his own.
Žalgiris changed that, signing the 31-year-old to what local reporting called the most lucrative contract in the club’s history, a 2+1 deal that made him the centerpiece of one of Europe’s most storied franchises. Žalgiris opened the year as the EuroLeague’s last unbeaten team, and Williams-Goss settled in at 11.6 points and 3.8 assists across 31 games despite a hamstring strain in October and a calf strain in January that cost him stretches of the schedule. He saved his best for the spring, averaging 13.0 points and 5.0 assists over four playoff games and dropping a EuroLeague career-high 24 on Fenerbahçe in the opener before the Turkish side closed out the series.
Joel Ayayi — Paris Basketball (France – EuroLeague, Betclic Élite)
After a year on the NBA-G League shuttle with Washington and two seasons climbing the French ladder at Nanterre and Bourg, Ayayi signed with Paris Basketball this summer on a deal through 2027. Paris is the most ambitious basketball project in France right now, last year’s domestic champion playing its second EuroLeague campaign in the brand-new Adidas Arena built for the 2024 Olympics. The level is leaving a mark. Ayayi has been buried in the EuroLeague rotation through the season’s first months, averaging 2.8 points on 19% from three in 12 minutes a game, often the ninth man on a team stacked with imports. In the domestic league, he has looked more like himself, around 9 points, 5 boards, and 4 assists, including a triple-double-adjacent 14-8-11 line in a November blowout. Last year at Bourg, he started in the EuroCup, Europe’s second-tier club competition. This year in Paris, he is a bench guy in the EuroLeague, the top one. He took the smaller role on the bigger stage.
Killian Tillie — Unicaja Málaga (Spain – Liga ACB and Basketball Champions League)
Killian Tille has built one of the most stable lives any modern Zag has abroad. Unicaja Málaga signed him in 2023 and brought him back on a multi-year extension. He averaged 6.3 points in 14 minutes a night across 21 ACB games this year, modest numbers that undersell the role, because Unicaja keeps winning. They took back-to-back Basketball Champions League titles in 2024 and 2025, finished third in the BCL Final Four this spring after a semifinal loss to AEK Athens, and pushed Real Madrid to four games in the ACB semifinals before bowing out 3-1. For a player whose first three years out of college were spent fighting to stay on NBA rosters, settling into a winning ACB program on a multi-year deal is the kind of second act most undrafted bigs never get.
Kevin Pangos — Esenler Erokspor (Turkey – Basketbol Süper Ligi)
The 32-year-old Canadian left Spokane in 2015 as the conference Player of the Year and spent the next decade as a EuroLeague starter for Žalgiris, CSKA Moscow, Zenit St. Petersburg, Barcelona, and Maccabi Tel Aviv, with a brief NBA stop in Cleveland mixed in. Last season, he was at Napoli in Italy’s Serie A. This summer, the elite jobs went elsewhere, and Pangos sat as a free agent until October 14, when Esenler Erokspor, a mid-table Turkish BSL club with no European competition, signed him to a one-year deal. He debuted on October 18 and, through his first six games, was averaging 11.2 points and 4.5 assists, including an 11-assist night in a December home win over Pinar Karsiyaka. As of June 14, however, it would appear Kevin and Erokspor have parted ways. No word as of yet regarding where Pangos could be headed next.
Kyle Wiltjer — Reyer Venezia (Italy – Serie A)
Wiltjer turned 33 in October and is now in his third season with Venezia, a relationship that has outlasted any other professional stop in his career. The 6-foot-10 stretch four put up 14.0 points and 3.9 rebounds on 41.3% from three across 26 Serie A games this year, a sharpshooter’s stat line that reflects what he is and has always been since transferring out of Kentucky to Spokane for his last two college seasons. Venezia entered the playoffs as the four-seed and went on a run, taking down Trieste 3-2 in the quarters and defending champion Virtus Bologna 3-1 in the semis before losing to Olimpia Milano in five in the Finals. Milano won its 32nd Serie A title. Wiltjer’s resume already included a Basketball Champions League ring from his year at Lenovo Tenerife, and he just added a Serie A runner-up to a journeyman career that has taken him to Greece, Turkey, China, Spain, and now four years in Italy if he re-ups.
Rasir Bolton — Napoli Basket (Italy – Serie A)
After two seasons at Gonzaga, Bolton has been on the move since 2023: Antwerp in Belgium, a Latvian league stop, and Serbia with Spartak Subotica to open this fall. He didn’t stay. Napoli signed him mid-season after a guard injury, and the move worked for both sides. The 26-year-old put up 15.0 points, 4.0 assists, 3.4 rebounds, and 49.8% from the field across 23 Serie A games for Napoli at 31 minutes a night, including a career-high 10-rebound effort in a March home win over Varese. Napoli finished 10th in the LBA standings and missed the playoffs, but Bolton played his way into a real starter’s role in Italy’s best league, his clearest pro foothold yet.
That’s nine! Part 2 picks up with the rest of the eighteen: another Frenchman in France, a Frenchman in Germany, a Belgian-based shooter coming back from a second Achilles tear, a Lithuanian-developed wing in Romania, an American in Lebanon, an American in England-then-back-to-the-Philippines, an Aaron Cook cameo in New Zealand, a 40-year-old Jeremy Pargo who just won a title in Iceland, and the oldest Zag still playing pro ball anywhere on the planet. Coming soon.
