It’s getting genuinely difficult to write anything definitive about this Gonzaga team, and even harder to guess what the actual 2026-27 roster is going to look like once the season tips off. Two international signees, Izan Almansa and Nathan De Sousa, are still waiting on the NCAA to sign off on their eligibility. Skylar Wicks, who was reported to have committed back in July, now looks like a long shot to ever suit up — his college career spans six schools and doesn’t fit cleanly into the NCAA’s new eligibility rules.
Right now, the Zags don’t have a single eligible point guard on the roster, and there’s no proven depth at the two behind Houston transfer Isiah Harwell. A huge chunk of this season is being decided in courtrooms, not gyms: a federal judge in Colorado just forced the NCAA to grant a fifth year of eligibility to the entire high school class of 2022 — a ruling that directly involves Gonzaga’s top point guard target, Donovan Dent, and one the NCAA is already appealing. Plenty of names have been connected to the Zags this summer. None of them are locks. Far from it.
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What we do know is that Gonzaga has a handful of absolute dogs already confirmed on the roster, and several of them are lined up for a real leap in 2026-27. Here’s a list of breakout candidates from Gonzaga’s current roster.
Sophomore wing Davis Fogle
Fogle is a score-first wing who thrives in isolation, and the numbers make the case for why he’s the top breakout name on this roster. Buried in garbage time through Gonzaga’s first 13 games (7-8 minutes a night), his role exploded once Braden Huff went down with a knee injury on Jan. 14. Over the final 14 games, including the postseason, he averaged 24 minutes and 11 points a night on his way to becoming Gonzaga’s third-leading scorer, and from the moment he cracked the rotation on Jan. 15 through the season finale, he shot 50% from the field. He finished the full season at 8.6 points, 3.1 rebounds, and 1.3 assists on 51.8% shooting in 16.8 minutes per game, numbers that undersell what he did once given consistent minutes.
That’s the case for the breakout: he was already producing like a featured scorer in a limited run as a true freshman. Now he walks into a starting job and 20-30 minutes a night, with Saint-Supery gone and no returning wing ahead of him competing for shots. The gap between a good season and a genuine leap comes down to the same short list scouts keep flagging: a more reliable three-point shot (35% on low volume last year), tighter on-ball defense, rebounding that matches his size, and better movement without the ball instead of relying purely on isolation. He’s already turning up anywhere from the low 20s to high 40s on early 2027 mock drafts, proof that his second-half trajectory alone was enough to get him on boards before he’s played a game as a full-time starter.
Sophomore center Massamba Diop (Arizona State Sun Devils transfer)
Massamba Diop last year was a load-bearing rookie stuck in the wrong system. He averaged 13.6 points, 5.8 rebounds, 2.1 blocks, and 1.1 assists in 29.6 minutes for Arizona State, shot 59.4% on twos, and finished with 69 blocks, second-most in the Big 12 and third-most by any freshman in the country. But Bobby Hurley’s offense was built around guard dribble-drive, not deliberate post touches. Diop produced elite numbers anyway.
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Gonzaga is the best possible landing spot for Diop. Few’s offense has always been inside-out and screen-heavy by design, built to get bigs paint touches and easy reads off ball screens, and it’s produced more lottery frontcourt picks than just about any program in the country over the last decade. Pairing Diop with Huff, who isn’t a breakout candidate so much as an expected centerpiece and an All-America-caliber player in his own right, gives Few two legitimate low-post threats. Gonzaga hasn’t had a shot-blocker at Diop’s level since Holmgren averaged 3.7 a game in 2021-22.
Expectations for Diop are already high. But they may not be high enough yet. Best case: something like 17-18 points, 8-to-9 rebounds, and 2.5-to-3 blocks a night, on efficiency that mirrors what he did at ASU, which would make him one of the best two-way big men in the country and a legitimate All-American. He’s already turning up anywhere from No. 41 to inside the top-15 on early 2027 draft boards, without having played a single game in a Gonzaga uniform.
Sophomore guard Isiah Harwell (Houston Cougars transfer)
Harwell is a potential breakout candidate for the Bulldogs because the tape that made him a consensus top-15 recruit and Utah’s Gatorade Player of the Year is still in there, buried under one lost season. As a senior at Wasatch Academy, healthy and finally given a full year on the floor, he averaged 17.4 points, 5.3 rebounds, 3.1 assists, and 1.1 steals on 43.1% three-point shooting across 29 games, leading his team to a 25-4 record and a Chipotle Nationals berth. That’s the player Gonzaga chased for three years. Then he re-aggravated the ACL he’d torn as a junior at the McDonald’s All-American Game that April, lost his entire summer ramp-up, and arrived at Houston with no training camp. The results were brutal: 3.6 points, 2.0 rebounds, 0.5 assists in 13.8 minutes across 32 games, on 27.9% shooting from the field and 27.1% from three.
The gap between those two seasons is the whole story. Harwell’s college tape says nothing about his talent and everything about a guy who never got a normal offseason. He’s now a year removed from the injury, up to 220 pounds with a 6-9 wingspan, and got a full healthy summer for the first time since before his junior year. With Jack Kayil gone to the NBA and no proven depth behind him at the two, Harwell is the presumptive starter by default. If he gets back to anywhere near the player who averaged 17-5-3 on 43% from three as a senior, and not the one who shot 28% at Houston, Gonzaga isn’t getting a rotation piece. It’s getting one of the best two-way guards in the Pac-12.
Forward Izan Almansa (Spain’s Real Madrid)
*Pending eligibility approval from the NCAA
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Almansa’s eligibility case looks like the most straightforward of Gonzaga’s pending international waivers, and he’s already been photographed working out with the team in Spokane, though nothing is finalized yet. Almansa is a potential breakout candidate for the Bulldogs because people forget how close he actually came to being an NBA player. Last June, he sat in the actual draft green room at the Barclays Center waiting to hear his name called in the second round. He didn’t get picked, but an NBA front office thought he was worth flying out and sitting in the room. Two years before that, coming out of the G League Ignite, he was viewed as a legitimate lottery talent before a chaotic Ignite season knocked him down. At 6-10, 230 pounds with a 7-1 wingspan, he’s an above-average athlete who screens, rolls, rebounds, and passes at a level that earned him MVP honors at three separate FIBA youth tournaments (the U17 World Cup, U18 Europeans, and U19 World Cup) before he turned 19.
What’s held him back is opportunity, not ability. In his one season with Real Madrid, he was buried on a loaded roster, managing just 4.5 points and 2.0 rebounds in limited minutes across 22 games. But give him actual run and the numbers change fast: in an expanded role with Spain’s senior national team this summer, playing 21.2 minutes a night against Denmark, Georgia, and Ukraine, he averaged 6.5 points and 5.8 rebounds, a per-36 rate north of 11 points and 9 rebounds.
The fit matters here, too. Whenever Almansa has had a featured role at any level of his career, he’s typically been the only frontcourt piece worth game-planning for, drawing extra attention every time he touched the ball. At Gonzaga, he’s the third option behind Braden Huff and Massamba Diop, and defenses will be occupied elsewhere. Best case: something like 9-11 points, 6-7 rebounds, and a block or two a night in 15-18 minutes off the bench, with efficient shooting against college-level size he simply hasn’t faced in two years of pro ball. The tools are exactly what got him a seat in that draft green room in the first place.
Redshirt freshman forward Parker Jefferson
Jefferson spent his freshman season with the program in the Olynyk Clinic, the program’s long tradition of using a redshirt year to physically and technically remake a big man behind the scenes (is Travis Knight the most underrated asset in college basketball? Perhaps). Important to remember who Parker Jefferson spent last year practicing against. Jefferson just spent a year banging bodies down low against Graham Ike and Braden Huff, the two best frontcourt scorers in the country, and it’s kind of absurd to imagine that experience hasn’t sharpened Jefferson’s skills as much as anything he did in the weight room. Jefferson has been treated as a genuine long-term project by a staff that doesn’t take that responsibility lightly, and he’s got the frame (6-10, 230 pounds) to be more than a garbage-time stud in 26-27. Worst case, he doesn’t play much this year, takes another year in the system, and picks up late-game blowout minutes behind Huff, Diop, and Almansa. Best case, he surprises everybody.
Final Thoughts
Everything above comes with the same caveat that opened this piece: almost none of it is settled. Almansa and De Sousa are still waiting on the NCAA. Wicks looks like a long shot. There is currently no proven point guard on this roster, and the backcourt depth behind Harwell is thin enough that a favorable ruling in any of the many pending eligibility lawsuits currently going on could reshape the entire outlook by October. Gonzaga’s frontcourt is about as close to a known quantity as college basketball gets. Everything else is being decided by lawyers as much as by anyone in Spokane. That’s exactly why the names above matter so much: with so much of the roster still theoretical, how far this specific group jumps is doing a lot of the heavy lifting for how good this team actually is.
