Season Recap: Adam Miller, Gonzaga’s Unlikely Glue Guy

Adam Miller is in the transfer portal. The 24-year-old Gonzaga guard entered his name hours before the window closed on April 21st, taking one last swing at another college season. It’s worth pausing on that before the news cycle moves on, because Miller’s year in Spokane deserves a proper look, and the stats alone won’t give you the whole picture.

The 2025 offseason was not supposed to be this hard. Following their first second-round NCAA tournament exit in nearly a decade, Gonzaga had lost Ryan Nembhard, Nolan Hickman, and Khalif Battle in one shot — three starting guards, the entire backcourt wiped clean. And the portal wasn’t cooperating. Highly prized Maryland transfer Rodney Rice put Gonzaga in his final six and chose USC. Desmond Claude had the Zags making what reports called a “strong push” and then ultimately committed to Washington. The right targets, swung at, missed.

Then thirty-nine days into the portal window, Adam Miller posted a photo of himself in a Gonzaga uniform. Signed…

It was exactly the type of player Few had been hunting. Newly departed Nolan Hickman (two All-WCC selections, 78 threes in a single season) was the hole that needed filling, and Miller fit it. He’d just shot 42.9% from three against Pac-12 defenses at Arizona State, chose Spokane over Baylor, Texas, Indiana, and Arkansas, and brought the kind of experience a young locker room was going to need. A perimeter shooter who could make defenses pay for collapsing on Ike and Huff, and a steady hand who’d been everywhere and wouldn’t be rattled by anything.

He wasn’t a consolation prize. He was the guy.

Miller’s path to Spokane was longer and harder than most. He grew up in Peoria, Illinois, won the state’s Mr. Basketball award in 2020, and arrived at the University of Illinois as a top-35 recruit with a reputation as one of the best shooting guards in his class. He announced himself immediately: 28 points on 10-of-12 shooting in his debut, a program record for a freshman, 6-of-8 from three. He led all Big Ten freshmen with 52 made threes that season and helped the Illini to a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament.

Then after one very solid year at Illinois he transferred to Will Wade’s LSU, which was then one of the more attractive landing spots in the country for a shooting guard, and in October 2021, before he’d played a single game for the Tigers, he tore his ACL. Missed the entire season. But he came back the following year and averaged 11.5 points in 33 starts, then hit the portal again.

From there, Miller landed at Arizona State for two seasons, had his waiver denied at one point — “heartbreaking,” he called it — and rebuilt his game under Bobby Hurley until the 2024-25 version of Adam Miller was the focal point of the Sun Devils’ offense. A long leash in terms of playmaking, pace, and shot selection. Shooting nearly 43% from deep and drawing interest from half the Big 12.

By the time he got to Gonzaga he was 24 years old and on his fourth school in five years.

The appeal of a place like GU is easy to see for a player like Miller. Few’s offense has always been built for catch-and-shoot guys who can make plays off the ball and navigate space away from the action. Lots of movement, screens, patient ball rotation, bigs who draw help and kick. The system creates threes. It doesn’t need its guards to generate them off the dribble; it needs them to be ready when the ball swings. Quick release. Smooth trigger. That’s Miller’s entire game. It’s what he’d been doing at ASU, just with less surrounding talent and less disciplined spacing.

Next to Braeden Smith — the closest thing to a Nembhard replacement the Zags were going to find, a guy with elite vision and the instinct to find the open man — Miller didn’t need to create anything. He needed to stand in the right spot and shoot. As close to backcourt continuity as Gonzaga was realistically going to get, with a guy who could shoot the lights out if the game went his way.

On paper, it was a beautiful fit.

What the Numbers Say, and What They Don’t

Miller was penciled in as a starter from the jump and stayed there for most of the year, notching 25 starts in 35 games. The shot always looked perfect, the ball left his hands beautifully every single time. But it just didn’t fall the way it had earlier in his career.

It showed up sometimes. Against Santa Clara in February he dropped 21 on 6-of-9 shooting and for one night looked exactly like the player Gonzaga had recruited. Those nights existed. They just didn’t come often enough, and 30.2% from three on 129 attempts is what it is. The thing he was brought here to do never arrived consistently.

But when the shot wasn’t falling, Miller worked his tail off. His defense and lateral movement improved dramatically over the course of the season. He developed an off-the-bounce attack at the rim and a floater in the lane that gave him another way to contribute. He figured out how to be useful to the Zags even without the weapon that had defined his career. None of it added up to the player Gonzaga thought it was getting. Miller never rebuilt himself into anything more than “very solid most of the time” — but Few kept trusting him, and that trust is an extremely valuable currency in Spokane.

Few has always had an affinity for the type of player Miller is. What he values, what he has always valued, is the guy who stabilizes things when they’re getting weird. This year’s team was talented and deep, but due to injuries and shifting roles, could also be volatile. The offense was never fully consistent, the rotations and lineups constantly in flux. Unpredictable game-by-game.

When your offense is hunting for consistency and two very talented freshmen like Davis Fogle and Mario Saint-Supery are carrying a significant part of the scoring and distributing load, it helps to have an Adam Miller on the floor. Someone who has been in a hundred close games, who doesn’t need a play drawn up for him, who understands what the moment requires and responds to it without being asked.

I encourage you to rewatch some of the close games from this season. When margins were thin and the Zags needed a heads-up play more than a big shot, Miller was on the floor. He made heady plays, controlling pace and off-ball movement, he drew key fouls, he watched the clock and kept defenses honest without needing the ball. He kept young teammates focused. His highlight reel, cut honestly, would be the number of times he brought the team into a pre-free throw huddle, made eye contact with everyone, and put exactly the right energy on the floor in about eight seconds.

We can’t fully know what Adam Miller was worth to last year’s team because the ways guys like him show their value aren’t always visible. He was the glue. Few knew what he had, and he played him accordingly.

In this year’s NCAA Tournament, Gonzaga beat Kennesaw State in the first round. Miller played 15 minutes, went 1-of-3 from the field, scored 2 points, grabbed a rebound, picked up a steal. Useful. Present. But not the reason they won. Then came Texas in the second round, and Few went to a tighter rotation when it mattered most. Miller played 9 minutes. Two points. One rebound. The Zags lost 74-68 and the season was over.

Nine minutes in what turned out to be the last game of his Gonzaga career. Maybe the last game of his college career, period.

It’s not necessarily a damning number; Few makes those decisions based on matchups, on what the game requires in real time, and a second-round NCAA Tournament game against a physical Texas team is not the moment you lean on a guy whose shot hasn’t been reliable. But the image still lingers. The veteran who did everything right in November and December and January to keep the machine running, watching the most important game of the year mostly from the bench.

Hours before the transfer portal closed on April 21st, Miller’s name appeared in it. A 24-year-old seeking a seventh college season, banking on a potential NCAA rule change that most observers agree he almost certainly doesn’t qualify for. He’s not the only player taking this shot. There’s a whole cohort of guys with similar eligibility situations throwing their names in on the same long odds, but the specifics of his case make it particularly thin. He used his COVID year. He redshirted at LSU. The math doesn’t work in his favor no matter how you run it.

And yet. You don’t do what Adam Miller has done — four schools, 152 games, a torn ACL, a waiver denial, more portal cycles than most players have seasons — if you’re not built from something that doesn’t respond to long odds the way most people do. He came to Gonzaga for one more run and gave it everything he had. The shot didn’t come back the way anyone hoped, but the role he carved out instead was real and it mattered, even if it doesn’t show up cleanly anywhere.

Gonzaga felt like the last chapter, and it’s hard to know that it didn’t play out the way anyone expected it to. And even harder to sit with the reality that he probably will not get to play the season where it all comes together — where the guy who set a freshman scoring record at Illinois and won gold with U-19 USA Basketball gets to be, for one sustained stretch, The Guy once again.

Maybe the waiver comes through. Maybe some program takes a flier and gives him one more year to find it.

If it doesn’t happen, the career he had is still wildly impressive. He kept Gonzaga steady in ways that don’t fit in a box score. And in the right context, with the right team, that goes a long, long way.