Welcome back to Part 2. Part 1 covered the top of the Gonzaga alumni pipeline abroad: the EuroLeague headliners, the Italian Serie A veterans, and the two 2025 grads finding their footing in France and Italy. The nine in this half of the piece live somewhere different. The leagues are smaller, the countries are farther out, the careers are older, and in a couple of cases, the stories are stranger than anything Part 1 could offer. There is a 0-26 team in Romania, a Bulldog who played on three continents in a single season, a 40-year-old point guard who dropped 48 in an Icelandic Finals game, and the oldest Zag playing pro ball anywhere on the planet, who has been in Japan for so long he is now a citizen of it. Nine more, all told, closing out the 2025-26 overseas class.
Geno Crandall — SL Benfica (Portugal, Liga Portuguesa and Basketball Champions League)
Crandall keeps finding a new country to play in. The 29-year-old point guard has now suited up in the Czech Republic, England (back-to-back British league MVP with the Leicester Riders), Germany, and Israel since leaving Spokane in 2019, and this summer, he signed with Portuguese giants Benfica after two seasons at EWE Baskets Oldenburg in the Bundesliga. He’s been the engine of the operation. In the Basketball Champions League, Europe’s third continental competition below the EuroLeague and EuroCup, he averaged 12.2 points, 6.5 assists, 3.8 rebounds, and 1.5 steals across six group-stage games. Domestically, he led the entire Portuguese LPB in steals at 2.5 per game while adding 6.0 assists, and dropped a season-high 29 with 5 steals in a May playoff road win at Oliveirense. Benfica finished top of the LPB regular-season table and entered the playoffs as the favorite, with Crandall in position to add a Portuguese title to a resume already stacked with pieces of hardware from the lower rungs of European ball.
Mathis Monninghoff — BG Gottingen (Germany, ProA)
Mönninghoff is the longest-tenured Bulldog abroad, in his 14th year as a pro after two seasons at Gonzaga in 2010-12. The 34-year-old German small forward has spent most of his career in his home country, and the last three years back at BG Göttingen, the club where he came up. Last season, Gottingen was relegated from the top-tier BBL down to the second-division ProA, and the front office rebuilt the roster from scratch this summer, keeping only four youth players and one veteran, Mönninghoff, as captain. He signed an extension through 2027 in April. The rebuild has held. Gottingen spent the 2025-26 ProA season near the top of the standings, positioned to make an immediate return to the BBL through direct promotion or a playoff run. He is not the reason they are winning, and he was never going to be. He is the reason there is still a “they” to win in Gottingen at all.
Silas Melson — Filou Oostende (Belgium, BNXT League and Basketball Champions League)
Melson has played pro basketball in eleven countries since leaving Spokane in 2018. Belgium, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Israel, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Turkey, and one stretch of G League ball in the US. Oostende signed the 29-year-old shooting guard in August after a 2024-25 season spent split between two clubs, and the fit was immediate. He put up 13.3 points and 1.2 steals per game in Basketball Champions League play for a Belgian side that went 0-6 in group and got bounced from Europe by mid-October, then shifted into the BNXT League, the combined Belgian-Dutch domestic competition, where Oostende ran deep into the playoffs and reached the Belgian league Finals against Mechelen. The Portland-born guard is now the same age Kevin Pangos was when he first landed in Turkey. He is not headed for that kind of career, but he keeps getting picked up by good clubs in good leagues, and now he is one series win from a Belgian title.
Martynas Arlauskas — CSM Galați (Romania, Liga Nationala)
After a few years in Spokane as the charismatic garbage-time aficionado and de facto Drew Timme off-court sidekick, Arlauskas left Spokane in 2022 after three seasons as a walk-on forward from Siauliai, Lithuania. Three years and a stint back home at CBet Jonava in the Lithuanian LKL later, the 6-foot-8 forward crossed borders again this summer, signing with CSM Galati in Romania’s top division. The move worked for him and disastrously for the club. Galați finished the regular season 0-26, one of the worst records anywhere in European pro basketball this year, and Arlauskas was one of the few things keeping the team competitive on a given night, second on the roster in scoring behind American import Marcus Randolph. He set career highs in points (23 against CSM Corona in October) and rebounds (10 alongside 20 points against Targu Mures in March) while the losses piled up around him. Pro basketball rewards individual production even on wrecked ships, and Arlauskas played his way into a real starter’s role in a national league he’d never seen before, which is how careers keep going.
Byron Wesley — Sagesse Beirut (Lebanon, Decathlon Lebanese Basketball League)
Criminally underrated and vital glue guy for the 2014-25 Bulldog Squad, Wesley is the most-traveled Zag in this group by a comfortable margin. Since leaving Spokane in 2015 as a graduate transfer, the 33-year-old shooting guard has played in Bulgaria, Finland, France, Greece, Iraq, Israel, Libya, Lebanon, Mongolia, Nicaragua, Poland, Venezuela, and the NBA G League. Thirteen countries and counting. This season, he is back at Sagesse Beirut, one of Lebanon’s historic clubs and the home base of a roster full of familiar journeymen names, including former Detroit Pistons first-round pick Sekou Doumbouya, former NBA big Johnny O’Bryant, and Makur Maker, the highly ranked recruit who briefly committed to the Howard Bison in 2020. Lebanese basketball is not the destination anyone plans for when they walk off a college floor, but it pays, and it is a step above the very low rungs Wesley has been on, and a decade into his career, he is still finding rosters that want him.
Aaron Cook — Taranaki Airs (New Zealand, Sal’s NBL)
Speaking of criminally underrated glue guys… while every other Zag in this piece is either between seasons or one series from being done, Cook is still working. The New Zealand NBL runs on a southern-hemisphere calendar, April through August, so Cook has been the starting point guard on the Taranaki Airs for the past three months while the European clubs empty out. The 27-year-old former Gonzaga transfer is a top-three assist man in the league at 7.2 per game across 12 outings for a team that returned only one player from its 2025 squad. He piled up 17 points, 14 assists, and 4 steals in a home win over the Hawke’s Bay Hawks in early April, and 18 points and 12 assists in a one-point win over Franklin later that month, running an Airs side that has settled inside the top four of the eleven-team league. Taranaki plays Hawke on the road tomorrow.
Johnathan Williams — London Lions / Suwon KT / Phoenix Fuel Masters (England, South Korea, Philippines)
Williams played on three continents this season. He signed with London Lions in August as the Lions’ import center for their SLB and EuroCup campaigns, put up 8.7 points and stout defense across 13 combined games, including a December 30 EuroCup meeting with Khalif Battle’s Trento, and then vanished from Europe in mid-March. On March 19, he transferred to Suwon KT of the Korean Basketball League. Six weeks later, on April 30, he was back in the Philippine PBA with the Phoenix Super LPG Fuel Masters, his second stint with the club after being named the league’s Import Player of the Year in 2024. That is three domestic leagues on three continents inside eleven weeks. Williams is 6-foot-9 and 30 years old with NBA time on his resume (Los Angeles Lakers, Washington Wizards) and a career that has now touched thirteen countries.
Jeremy Pargo — Grindavik (Iceland, Urvalsdeild karla)
Pargo was on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s 2009 March Madness issue. Seventeen years later, at 40 years old and on his 19th professional stop, he’s still doing cover-story worthy things. On May 18, he scored 48 points on 10-of-16 shooting from three, 6-of-7 from two, and 6-of-8 from the line in Game 4 of the Icelandic Irvalsdeild Finals, closing out Tindastoll 3-1 to give Grindavík the national title despite playing without three of its starters. He was named the Playoffs MVP. Pargo has been to a EuroLeague Final with Maccabi Tel Aviv, made the All-EuroLeague Second Team in 2011, played in the NBA with the Memphis Grizzlies, Cleveland Cavaliers, Philadelphia 76ers, and Golden State Warriors, led the Israeli League in assists in 2015 and the Chinese league in assists in 2016, and here he is at 40 posting a 48-8-8 stat line to win a title in Iceland. He signed with Grindavik in January to replace former San Francisco Dons guard Khalil Shabazz, who caught on with rival Njardvik and finished the season averaging 23.1 points a game, fourth in the league. Pargo played the final six games of the regular season as Grindavik ran to the best record at 16-2, and now the trophy sits in a town of 3,000 people on the southwestern tip of the country. Full disclosure, I can write the names of every team in this league, but could not confidently pronounce a single one of them out loud in a room with other humans.
Ira Brown — Kyoto Hannaryz (Japan, B.League)
At 43, five weeks from his 44th birthday, Brown is the oldest Zag playing pro basketball anywhere on earth. He is also the only Zag on the international stage who represents a country other than the one in which he was born. Brown has been in Japan since around 2011, married there, and in August 2016, he became a Japanese citizen. This is particularly worth noting as Japan runs one of the strictest naturalization regimes in the developed world. Applicants must live in the country for at least five continuous years, pass Japanese-language proficiency exams in reading and writing, prove financial self-sufficiency, submit to interviews with the Ministry of Justice about their relationships and daily life, demonstrate what officials refer to as “good moral conduct” through tax and legal records, and renounce whatever citizenship they held before, because Japan does not permit dual nationality for adults. The whole process typically takes 12 to 18 months of official review on top of the five-year residency, and Japan naturalizes fewer than 10,000 people in a given year out of a population of 125 million. Brown did all of it. Then he was named to the Japanese men’s national team, played alongside Rui Hachimura, and represented Japan in 3×3 basketball at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021 at the age of 38. This season, Kyoto Hannaryz signed him after an early-year stint with Alvark Tokyo, giving him another home in a league that has been his for a decade and a half. Brown is a full 12 years older than the oldest domestically born player on his current roster. He is the last one still going, on a roster full of players who were in elementary school when he first landed in Osaka.
That’s eighteen. From the EuroLeague to Iceland to the New Zealand NBL, from Petrusev auditioning for another NBA run in Dubai to Ira Brown carving out year fifteen in Kyoto, this is where the Gonzaga alumni pipeline actually lives. Nine of these eighteen are playing in Europe’s top three continental competitions, four are on rosters that reached a domestic final this spring, two won titles outright (Pargo in Iceland, and Tillie taking third in the BCL is close enough), and one of them is 43 years old and a naturalized citizen of the country he plays in.
Free agency will reshuffle most of them by August. Pangos and Wesley are already out of contract, Williams is on his third team of the calendar year, Ayayi is fighting for EuroLeague minutes he may not keep, and Battle and Gregg are still figuring out where the rookie ceiling is.
