The Washington State Cougars come to the Kennel on Tuesday night, Feb. 10, for an 8:00 p.m. PST tip, with ESPN2 carrying the broadcast. The Bulldogs are home after a week that has dramatically raised the stakes for the remainder of their regular season. The Zags are coming off a commanding 20-point win over the Oregon State Beavers at Gill Coliseum, but also their most troubling performance to date: a convincing loss to the 10-144 Portland Pilots in which Gonzaga looked flat, unprepared, and clueless as to how to stop the bleeding.
The focus in recent weeks has narrowed to how this team functions offensively without Braden Huff. Graham Ike has carried the load, playing some of the best basketball of his career while averaging 37 minutes per night. Gonzaga coach Mark Few rarely moves away from a plan that’s working, but the margin for error tightens when the offense leans this heavily on one post option. Tuesday offers another chance to stabilize, because a Gonzaga team that never finds a second offensive pillar risks running out of road long before March ends.
The last time these two teams met, Gonzaga, in their first game without Braden Huff, pulled away early and never looked back, flattening the Cougars by more than 20. They did so by leaning once again very heavily on Ike, who logged 36 minutes and finished with 23 points on 11-of-15 shooting, plus 11 rebounds. But it was Gonzaga’s defense that tilted the game by forcing 17 turnovers, grabbing 14 steals, and holding Washington State to 40 percent from the field. The blemish once came from the arc, though, where the Cougs hit 46 percent on 28 attempts, a familiar leak that Gonzaga will hope cools off with a return to the Kennel.
From a numbers standpoint, the Cougars are flat-out bizarre. They sit No. 126 in KenPom, powered by a top-80 offense paired with a defense ranked 238th. Of all the teams listed in the top 100 offenses according to KenPom, only five other teams boast a worse defensive efficiency ranking than the Cougars.
Over the past seven games, Washington State has yet to have the same player lead them in scoring in consecutive games. Rihards Vavers was absent in the first meeting but has since established himself in Washington State’s starting five, averaging nearly 30 minutes along with about 15 points and five rebounds per game. Of late, he’s functioned as the Cougars’ primary perimeter volume shooter, scoring in double figures in five of those games and knocking down threes at a high rate in wins over the Pepperdine Waves and Portland, where he combined for 10 made triples.
ND Okafor has supplied the interior scoring, averaging solid efficiency around the rim and producing his best stretch with 21 points on 8-for-10 shooting against the San Diego Toreros before following it with double-digit efforts against Portland and Pepperdine.
But it’s true freshman Ace Glass who’s functioned as the most dangerous scorer in the group, topping 20 points twice during that span, including a 29-point night against San Diego and 20 against the San Francisco Dons, largely driven by pull-up threes and transition offense. Eemeli Yalaho rounds out the core as a connective forward, consistently filling the box score with double-digit scoring while helping stabilize lineups through spacing and tempo. As a team, the Cougars play best when those pieces combine to generate perimeter volume and early-clock scoring, even if that same approach leaves them vulnerable on the other end.
The Cougars ride the hot hand and rely on a relentless offensive attack to make up for some glaring defensive deficiencies, including more than 13 turnovers per game (Glass leads that group with 65 on the season). With Vavers back in the lineup, this will not be the same Washington State that Gonzaga played a few weeks ago.
The Zags need to find scoring from someone other than Graham Ike. He has been dominant, yes, averaging just under 30 points per game over Gonzaga’s last three outings, but the drop-off behind him has been stark, with no other Zag averaging more than 10 points per game since his return. Ike has led Gonzaga in scoring in every game he has played since Braden Huff went out, which speaks to his value as much as it does to Gonzaga’s lack of other options.
Whether an additional offensive spark arrives through Tyon Grant-Foster attacking downhill, Davis Fogle providing shot-making on the wing, or Mario Saint-Supery creating offense in space, Gonzaga needs functional alternatives. Ike remains the offensive cornerstone, but the Zags can’t rely on him this heavily for the remainder of the season.
I’d love to stop writing about how bad this team’s three-point shooting has been, but it just keeps getting worse. Since the last meeting with Washington State, Gonzaga has shot under 24 percent from three as a team, and the trend line has continued to move in the wrong direction. Since losing Braden Huff, the Adam Miller-VSteele enters pairing has combined to go 6-for-37 from deep, a 16 percent mark that has compressed the floor and narrowed Gonzaga’s offensive options dramatically.
There has been one clear exception. Over that same stretch, Mario Saint‑Supery is 12‑for‑25 from three, accounting singlehandedly for the bulk of Gonzaga’s reliable perimeter production by a wide margin. At the moment, he has functioned as both the team’s most willing and most effective outside shooter, and if the Zags want to stabilize their spacing and punish teams for loading up on Graham Ike, the rotation has to reflect where the shooting actually lives.
Gonzaga’s current starting group of Braeden Smith, Adam Miller, Emmanuel Innocenti, Graham Ike, and Jalen Warley has not once been the lineup that has flipped a game’s momentum positively for the Bulldogs. Not once. It’s a group that often comes out flat and struggles to produce balanced offense, with nearly everything flowing through Ike. The contrast really begins to show up when the second unit hits the floor with Tyon Grant-Foster, Davis Fogle, and Mario Saint-Supery in for Innocenti, Miller, and Smith. That combination has consistently generated better scoring flow and more disruptive defensive stretches for the Zags. Every time.
Without Huff, the cost of sticking with lineups that stall is more than the Zags can afford. Leaning harder into what has already worked, whether through Saint-Supery’s shooting, Fogle’s willingness to score, or Grant-Foster’s downhill foul pressure, gives the offense more functional paths while easing the burden on Ike. The Portland loss underscored the risk of waiting too long to adjust, and the pattern since then has been clear: the lineups finishing games are not the ones opening them.
For better or worse, Gonzaga’s upcoming schedule offers no relief. After hosting Washington State, the Zags head into a demanding stretch with back-to-back road games at the Santa Clara Broncos and San Francisco Dons, followed by the Pacific Tigers, a rematch with the Portland Pilots, and then the Saint Mary’s Gaels in Moraga before the West Coast Conference Tournament arrives. At the moment, the Zags sit one game behind Santa Clara in the conference standings, with little room left to drift through games searching for answers.
While Ike has been playing his way into the All-American conversation, the rest of this team has looked increasingly unlike itself. This stretch places the decision-making squarely on Few. Gonzaga needs to find a reliable offense beyond its big man, because if the only solution remains running him into the ground, the next few weeks threaten to become punishing for more than just the standings.
