‘Hungry’ Gonzaga ready to shake December doldrums in West Coast Conference opener at Pepperdine
MALIBU, Calif. – The month of December has brought more anguish than joy for Gonzaga in recent years. Three of the Zags’ four losses this season have come within the last four weeks, and December games have also accounted for half of GU’s 12 losses the last two years.
Gonzaga won’t be able to flip the page on December before taking the court again, but Monday’s West Coast Conference opener will give the Bulldogs a chance to move on from their latest loss – a gut-wrenching defeat against UCLA on Saturday at Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California – and reset while facing a Pepperdine program that’s come up short in its last 47 attempts against Mark Few’s teams.
Heavy preseason favorites to win the WCC, the 14th-ranked Zags (9-4, 0-0) are one of three teams that didn’t begin conference play on Saturday, negotiating with the league’s schedule-makers to push their opener back a few days so they could squeeze in Saturday’s marquee nonleague game against UCLA.
Now under the direction of first-year coach Ed Schilling, the Waves (6-8, 0-1) got their first glimpse of the WCC on Saturday in a 90-81 loss at Santa Clara. Schilling, an assistant at Grand Canyon from 2020-24, was hired to replace Lorenzo Romar after Pepperdine won just eight games over the last three seasons.
Even with a new man at the helm, beating the Zags appears to be the same daunting challenge it’s always been, particularly after GU lost in dramatic fashion against UCLA to close its nonconference schedule.
“It was just good to play a good nonconference schedule,” point guard Ryan Nembhard said. “It gets us prepared for later in the season when we have those neutral-site games versus good teams. We’ll take all this and try to improve and get better on both ends of the floor and come back hungry and get these wins in these close games.”
Close games between Gonzaga and its next opponent haven’t been all that common, at least during the last 23 years of the Bulldogs’ WCC series with Pepperdine. The Zags won both meetings last year in blowout fashion – and by nearly the same score – beating the Waves 86-60 at Spokane Arena and 86-61 at Firestone Fieldhouse, the venue where Monday’s 7 p.m. (KHQ) contest will take place.
When Romar’s six-year run in Malibu ended on the heels of a 13-20 record and 5-11 WCC mark in 2023-24, all but one of Pepperdine’s scholarship players took the opportunity to enter the NCAA transfer portal.
Gonzaga was one of the schools to benefit from the mass exodus in Malibu. Not long after the Waves’ top scorer – and top WCC scorer – entered the transfer portal, Few’s coaching staff identified Michael Ajayi as someone who could help the Zags in 2024-25, signing the all-league first-team selection in March, one day before traveling to play Purdue in the Sweet 16.
Ajayi might see one or two familiar faces on Monday evening, but the senior’s homecoming won’t be as meaningful with 11 new players on Schilling’s roster. The only returner is Boubacar Coulibaly, a senior forward who averages 9.8 points and 7.2 rebounds for the Waves.
“Well, obviously in the current state of college basketball when the head coach leaves, the players scatter,” Schilling said in October at WCC Media Day. “… We signed 11 players on 14 visits in two months. So it’s been quite an opportunity to know a lot of these new faces from all over the world actually. … Obviously we’ve got a long way to go with the quality of teams in the conference. We know we’ve got a long, long way to go, but we’re trying to make progress on a daily basis.”
Most of Schilling’s roster is new to Pepperdine and Malibu, but the team’s top three scorers aren’t new to the WCC.
Stefan Todorovic, a transfer forward who spent last season at San Francisco, is averaging 19.7 points and 5.5 rebounds. Point guard Moe Odum is another familiar face for Gonzaga after spending the last two seasons at Pacific. The junior is second in the WCC assists per game (7.5), sitting below GU’s Ryan Nembhard, and is currently averaging a career-high 12.1 ppg. Coulibaly, who’s faced injury setbacks in each of his three seasons at Pepperdine, has had two previous encounters with Gonzaga.
The Waves sit well outside the top 100 in most statistical categories, but have been one of the WCC’s top defensive rebounding teams, averaging 27.7 per game, and rank No. 55 in assists per game at 16.7.
Pepperdine faces a tall challenge against Gonzaga’s Graham Ike, who scored 44 points in two games against Romar’s team last year, and is currently riding the best personal stretch of his senior season, averaging 23 ppg over the last three games.