Ismaila Diagne was the first Zag into the transfer portal once the 2025-26 season wrapped up, and nobody who followed this team closely was particularly surprised. However, that doesn’t make it not hurt. It’s ultimately understandable, with Graham Ike gone and a frontcourt vacancy that would almost certainly get filled from the outside, the writing was on the wall for “Izzo,” a backup center who never quite made the leap for the Bulldogs in his two years in Spokane, Washington. He leaves with two more years of eligibility remaining and a basketball résumé at Gonzaga that just never got to where it needed to be. He also leaves as one of the most genuinely beloved guys to wear a Zag uniform in recent memory. And that gap, between what he produced and how much people rooted for him anyway, is basically the whole story of Ismaila Diagne in the Pacific Northwest.
Diagne came to Gonzaga by way of Nguekhokhe, Senegal, and the Real Madrid youth system. He was good enough at a very young age to get plugged into one of the premier player development pipelines in European basketball, averaging double figures and nearly double-digit rebounds for Real Madrid’s U18 squad and helping them win the Adidas Next Gen Tournament in Berlin, Germany. He even appeared in a pair of EuroLeague games at seventeen years-old.
Mark Few doesn’t sign guys like that without believing in what they could become, and in Diagne’s case the belief made sense. A true 7-footer with that kind of basketball pedigree, in Gonzaga’s frontcourt development pipeline, practicing daily against the two most effective scoring big men in the country in Braden Huff and Graham Ike? The trajectory looked extremely promising on paper. He committed in the summer of 2024 and arrived in Spokane as one of the youngest players in college basketball, a raw but tantalizing piece of the program’s future.
A Tough Legacy to Inherit
Part of what made Diagne’s situation so difficult is that Gonzaga fans don’t really have a frame of reference for a big man whose ability to score is still a work in progress. Going back to Casey Calvary in the late nineties, this program has run an almost unbroken conveyor belt of productive, skilled, back-to-the-basket big men — Turiaf, Sacre, Olynyk, Dower, Karnowski, Sabonis, Petrusev, Timme, and then Ike. Just reading those names in sequence tells you everything you need to know about the standard. For the better part of three decades, if you watched Gonzaga basketball, you watched a team built around an elite scoring presence in the paint. That’s a tough legacy to play behind, even as a backup.
The offseason narrative heading into 2025-26 was genuinely optimistic. Ike and Huff were clearly the tip of the spear, but a reliable body off the bench — someone who could protect the rim, clean the glass, and keep two of the best scoring bigs in college basketball fresh for 40 minutes — was exactly the kind of complementary piece that could make a good team dangerous. Diagne was the obvious candidate. A full healthy season of development, real practice reps, a defined role: the sophomore leap felt not just possible but likely. He’d looked the part in flashes. All he needed was minutes and health and time.
He got a little of each, and not quite enough of any of them.
Part of what made Diagne such a difficult fit had nothing to do with effort or attitude and everything to do with geometry. Graham Ike, listed at 6’9” and 250 pounds, was a thick, powerful, back-to-the-basket scorer who carved, created, and demanded space in the paint. Diagne, at 7’0” and somehow thirteen pounds lighter than Ike, was a shot-blocking presence who filled space rather than created it, exactly the kind of player who clogs the lane Ike needed to operate in. You couldn’t put them on the floor simultaneously. And with Huff already occupying the backup center role when Ike went to the bench, there was almost nowhere to put Diagne in a way that made basketball sense.
The fouls made it worse. In 193 total minutes this season, Diagne racked up 33 personal fouls — roughly one every six minutes on the floor. That’s an unsustainable rate for any player, but it’s a death sentence for a backup big trying to carve out a role. When Huff went down midway through the season, the opportunity Diagne had been waiting for never quite materialized. Few turned to the wings to bolster the offense at the 4-spot and leaned harder on Ike, whose minutes climbed to nearly 36 a night. Diagne was averaging 6.7 minutes before the injury. He finished the year at 6.9. Through an entire season of shuffling and injury and doors swinging open, his average budged by two tenths of a minute. The foul trouble is the biggest reason why.
And yet. Watch any game this season and you’d find him on the bench, quick to his feet, absolutely losing his mind over a hard-fought and-one from Ike, a dagger three from Mario, a big stop when the Zags needed one. Nobody in that building was happier to be there than Ismaila Diagne, and it wasn’t even close. First one off the bench going into timeouts, last one off the floor after a win, that smile going full wattage whether he’d played twenty minutes or zero. The stat sheet never captured him. But by every available indication, Izzo was deeply beloved — by his teammates, his coaches, and a fanbase that might wince when he checked in and then lose their minds when he swatted a shot or threw down a dunk. There are worse things to be remembered for in Spokane than being the guy everybody rooted for regardless of what the box score said.
The best version of Diagne this year showed up early in the season on November 18th against Southern Utah, 6 points, 5 rebounds, and 4 blocks in 16 minutes. When Huff’s injury forced Few’s hand in mid-January, Diagne got the starting nod for three consecutive games: Seattle U, Pepperdine, and San Francisco. He was raw but very solid in the first of those two, grabbing 8 rebounds against the Redhawks and 10 against the Waves in 20 minutes apiece. It was the kind of performance that made you think maybe this was finally the moment the door would crack open for Diagne. Then San Francisco came four days later and he played just 8 minutes, grabbed 2 rebounds, and was back on the bench. Despite having a true 7-footer on the roster, Few opted to play small-ball. For Diagne, the door closed almost as fast as it opened.
The foul trouble never went away, and the offense never materialized. He shot 50% from the field on the season, which sounds fine until you realize he attempted just 24 shots all year. He went 6-15 from the free throw line. In game after game, he’d check in, pick up a foul or two, and check back out. It was a hard year to watch for anyone pulling for him, which in Spokane was just about everybody.
There’s something uniquely wonderful about being a Zag fan that has nothing to do with wins and losses, and that’s the local ad. Drew Timme for Walker’s Furniture. Anton Watson for Papa Murphy’s. Braden Huff and Graham Ike for Coeur d’Alene Casino. Davis Fogle for Bill’s Heating and A/C. An NIL-era tradition of Zags doing their absolute best in situations they were just not well trained for.
Watching Ismaila Diagne play basketball was sort of like that. Underprepared, limitations visible, but so genuinely committed to the effort that you couldn’t help pulling for him. The hope now is that he finds a program that sees what’s actually there: a true 7-footer with ridiculously high upside, and on top of that, a personality that regional advertisers would kill for. The size, the smile, the pure unfiltered joy and natural charisma of the man are his greatest and most visible asset, and it will be missed in Spokane.
There was a time when it was genuinely feasible that Diagne would be the next great Gonzaga big man. Probably a long shot, but stranger things have happened in Spokane. What’s certain is that he had everything necessary to become the greatest local ad celebrity this program has ever produced. It’s a real shame we won’t get to see him make the leap as a player in a Zag uniform. but it might be an even greater shame we’ll never get to see what he could’ve done with a Papa Murphy’s pizza and thirty seconds of airtime.
Ismaila Diagne leaves Spokane with two years of eligibility, an abundance of potential, and a couple years spent playing for a certified Hall of Fame head coach behind two of the best bigs in the country. He will end up somewhere great. The basketball never quite got where anyone hoped it would. But the smile never wavered, the energy never dipped, and every single day he was exactly, completely himself. Wherever he ends up, Gonzaga fans will be pulling for him.
