Gonzaga once again enters 2026-27 as a legitimate national title contender on paper, with a frontcourt that may be the most physically imposing that coach Mark Few has assembled in years. Massamba Diop, a 7’1 projected 2027 lottery pick, slots in alongside a returning senior Braden Huff, with Izan Almansa possibly providing professional-level depth behind them. The backcourt, however, is perilously thin and alarmingly young, the conference is new and stiffer, and the roster outside the frontcourt is largely unproven. In that context, one player carries more weight than anyone else on the team, and it isn’t one of the freshmen or the transfers. It’s the senior who spent three years doing everything the right way at Gonzaga, finally got his starting job, played 18 games at an All-American level, and then watched his knee give out on a routine defensive play in practice.
This is a look back at what Huff did in those 18 games, what his injury meant for the team that had to play without him, and what a full senior season from a healthy Huff means for a Gonzaga program with genuine championship ambitions.
Mr. Basketball Goes to Washington
Braden Huff arrived at Gonzaga in 2022 as Illinois Mr. Basketball, a four-star recruit who had turned down offers from Wisconsin, Michigan State, and Iowa to play for coach Mark Few. He arrived to find a frontcourt featuring Drew Timme, Anton Watson, Ben Gregg, and Efton Reid, and rather than burn a year of eligibility, he redshirted. In the current landscape of college basketball, where four-star recruits treat the transfer portal as a first resort, that decision was genuinely unusual. Huff understood he needed to build his body and repertoire, and trusted the GU staff with its proven track record of turning big men into NBA prospects. He spent a year guarding Drew Timme in practice every day, which he later acknowledged was not always enjoyable but was unquestionably formative.
The patience and competition paid off steadily. He averaged 9.3 points per game as a redshirt freshman, leading the conference in two-point shooting percentage at 70%, and appeared in all 35 games. His sophomore year brought more of the same: 11 points per game, 57.7% from the field, still coming off the bench behind Graham Ike for most of the season. Then, toward the end of 2024-25, Few began pairing Huff and Ike in the starting lineup simultaneously, and the results were immediate. Huff scored 18 points in the WCC Tournament title game against Saint Mary’s, then followed it with 18 more in the NCAA first-round win over Georgia, making 8 of 11 field goals with eight rebounds and three assists. Opponents had spent the season game-planning for Ike. They had no answer for both of them on the floor at the same time.
Then Gonzaga lost to Houston in the second round and the offseason question became whether either player would be back. Wisconsin loomed as a potential destination for Huff. Ike fielded NBA interest. Gonzaga hit the frontcourt lottery when both players announced their returns on April 22, one day before the transfer portal closed. With Ike and Huff together as a starting tandem for a full season, the frontcourt argument was settled before November: there wasn’t a better one in the country.
Playing 25 minutes a night in a starting role for the first time in his career, Huff was extraordinary. He scored 37 points on 16-of-18 shooting against Campbell on December 18th. The efficiency that had always been his calling card reached a different level as a starter: 66.2% from the field across 18 games, 17.8 points, 5.6 rebounds. He was shooting 69.7% on two-pointers in 25.4 minutes per night, on pace for an All-American caliber season. At no point did the production look like a hot streak. It looked like a player who had spent four years getting ready for exactly this.
Then, in practice on January 14th, his knee gave out. The diagnosis was a dislocated kneecap. He spent weeks back home in Chicago recovering, returned to Spokane to attend games from the bench, and was still unavailable for the WCC Tournament and the opening weekend of the NCAA Tournament.
The ripple effects of his absence were significant. Graham Ike’s workload increased substantially, and the offense that had run so efficiently through two interior scoring threats had to recalibrate. Saint-Supery and Fogle absorbed more responsibility, which as covered in previous articles accelerated their development in ways that ultimately benefited the program. Entering his ninth week of recovery, he was able to climb a ladder and cut a portion of the net after the WCC title game, but could not suit up to play in it. Gonzaga lost to Texas in the second round and Huff’s junior season was over.
Gonzaga went 12-5 in the games Huff missed, a winning record that nevertheless included losses at Saint Mary’s and Portland and a second-round NCAA exit that feels considerably less inevitable in retrospect when you account for what wasn’t on the floor.
The 66.2% figure deserves context that the season arc section doesn’t provide. Zach Edey shot 61.6% in his Wooden Award-winning 2023-24 season with Purdue. Gonzaga’s own Drew Timme shot 61.5% in his best season. Oscar Tshiebwe, Kentucky’s two-time rebounding monster and one of the most physically dominant college players of the last decade, shot approximately 57%. Huff’s 66.2% surpasses all of them. The difference in volume is lefitimate: Edey and Timme took more shots over more minutes and against stiffer competition, but from a pure field goal efficiency standpoint, Huff was doing something in those 18 games that very few college big men in recent memory have done. On 219 total attempts across the season, he missed just 74 field goals. That is not a rounding error, that is a player operating in a different efficiency tier than anyone playing college basketball at the time.
The 28-point, 11-of-14 performance against Seattle in the January 3rd overtime win is the kind of game that gets buried in a season narrative when the player goes down a week later. So does the 24-point, 12-of-17 effort against North Florida on December 8th, and the 20-point, 9-of-16 game against Oregon on December 22nd. Three games, 64 points, 32-of-47 from the field. The Campbell performance (37 points on 16-of-18 shooting, 13-for-13 from the field to open the game) is the one everyone remembers. But the remarkable thing about Huff’s first half of the season was that the Campbell game wasn’t an outlier. It was a peak expression of what he was doing every single night.
The three-point question remains a thorny unknown. Across his career Huff has shot 32.2% from three on modest volume. For a team entering 2026-27 thin on perimeter floor-spacers, getting anything reliable from him beyond the arc would change the offensive geometry significantly. The touch is clearly there. Whether 35-38% from three is achievable as a senior is the most interesting developmental question heading into the season, and given the trajectory of everything else in his game, it would be foolish to assume the answer is a total no.
The first thing worth saying about Braden Huff’s senior season is that it hasn’t started yet, and there is plenty of uncertainty about what he’ll look like when it does.
A dislocated kneecap that gave out on a routine defensive play in practice, with no contact and no obvious cause, is a different category of injury than the ones that come with a clear mechanism. A knee that gives out on a normal play raises questions that don’t have clean answers: whether the joint has a structural vulnerability, whether 35 games in a new and stiffer conference will stress it in ways that a recovery timeline can’t predict, and whether the player who shot 66.2% from the field in 18 games will look exactly like that player when November arrives. Nobody knows. The optimistic read, supported by the recovery timeline and Few’s public comments, is that Huff is healthy and ready. The honest read is that optimism is not the same thing as certainty.
What makes the stakes so high coming into this season is the roster around him. Huff is the only upperclassman on a roster that will otherwise consist entirely of sophomores, transfers in their second year, and freshmen. He is being asked not just to be the best player on the team but to be its anchor, its most experienced voice, and the player opposing coaches build their defensive schemes around. That is a lot to ask of anyone. It is a particularly large ask when that player is returning from a significant injury and stepping into a conference he has never played in.
Luckily, the Zags have spent this offseason investing in frontcourt insurance. ASU transfer Massamba Diop averaged 13.6 points, 5.8 rebounds, and 2.1 blocks as a freshman and is a projected first-round pick in 2027. Izan Almansa brings professional experience from the G League Ignite, Real Madrid, and NBA Summer League with the Philadelphia 76ers. If Huff misses time, Gonzaga does not face the same scoring vacuum it faced when he went down last January. Similarly, redshirt Parker Jefferson will be fresh out of the same pipeline that gave us a young Braden Huff a few years ago. Only instead of getting reps against Drew Timme, Jefferson spent his first year with the team getting worked by Braden Huff himself (and, for that matter, Graham Ike).That is meaningfully different from the situation that confronted the team in the second half of 2025-26.
But Diop and Almansa are not Huff, and what Huff provides offensively, specifically that 66.2% efficiency, the post-up game, the floater, the mid-range touch that draws defenders out of position and creates space for everyone else, is not replicable from the bench. A healthy Huff for 35 games is what separates a very good Gonzaga team from a genuine national title contender. A reasonable stat line for a full senior season looks something like this: 28-32 minutes, 19-22 points, 6-7 rebounds, shooting somewhere between 63-67% from the field. The three-point number is the variable nobody can project with confidence. If the offseason work pushes him toward 36-38% from deep on meaningful volume, the offensive picture changes substantially. Every extra foot of floor space he demands from defenders is a foot of room for Saint-Supery to operate, for Fogle to attack, for Diop to catch lobs in traffic.
Huff showed up as Mr. Basketball in Illinois, willingly redshirted, spent two years coming off the bench, trusted the process, and earned his moment. The moment got taken from him after 18 games by a knee that gave out on a play he can’t fully explain. Next year is the continuation of that story, and if the knee holds, it has every chance of being the best chapter yet. Gonzaga fans have waited four years to see what Braden Huff looks like with a full season and a full mandate. So, for that matter, has Braden Huff.
