Gonzaga’s Ryan Nembhard, Graham Ike and Nolan Hickman voted first-team All-WCC

Ryan Nembhard, Graham Ike and Nolan Hickman – three-fifths of Gonzaga’s starting lineup – have been named first-team All-West Coast Conference.

Nembhard and Ike are repeat selections while Hickman made second team last season.

Washington State was represented by Lejuan Watts and Nate Calmese (honorable mention) and Tomas Thrastarson made the all-freshman team.

Regular-season champion Saint Mary’s claimed five of the six major individual awards, including repeat winners Augustas Marciulionis (player of the year), Mitchell Saxen (top defender) and Randy Bennett (coach).

The other awards went to Portland’s Austin Rapp (freshman of the year) and the Gaels’ Mikey Lewis (sixth man) and Paulius Murauskas (newcomer).

All-WCC teams and individual awards were voted on by the conference’s 11 head coaches.

Nembhard, who matched Blake Stepp’s school record with 16 assists in Saturday’s win over San Francisco, has been rewriting the Gonzaga and the WCC record books in his senior season. The 6-foot, 180-pound Canadian native has 311 assists , easily breaking the school record (243) he set as a junior and the conference mark (284 by Emmett Naar of Saint Mary’s in 2017-18).

Nembhard also holds the record for assists in conference games with 181, eclipsing BYU’s Kyle Collinsworth’s 136 in 2016.

Nembhard is 13th in Division I single-season assists, eight behind No. 12 Leon Wood’s 319 for Cal State Fullerton in 1982-83, according to sportsreference.com records dating back to 1973-74.

Nembhard is 30th in career assists with 849. Pepperdine’s Colbey Ross is 29th with 854.

The 6-foot-9, 250-pound Ike leads Gonzaga in scoring (17.0 points) and rebounding (7.4) for the second consecutive season.

He’s No. 1 in the conference in field-goal accuracy at 59.9% for the season and 61.1% in WCC games.

Ike’s 79.5% at the free-throw line and 1.4 assists per game are career highs. He’s made 11 3-pointers this year, one more than his previous three seasons combined.

Ike, an Aurora, Colorado, native, has 12 games with 20 or more points and 25 with at least 10 points. He’s listed as a redshirt senior but has the option of returning to play another season of college basketball.

Hickman is third on the team at 11.4 points and second in assists at 2.2 per game. He’s made 44% on 3-pointers, third in the WCC, and his 71 made 3s is second in the conference.

The 6-2 senior guard from Seattle has averaged 16.6 points over the past five games, hitting 13 of 27 3-pointers (48.1%) and handing out 3.4 assists.

The Gonzaga trio was joined on the 10-player first team by Marciulionis, Saxen, Murauskas, San Francisco’s Marcus Williams and Malik Thomas, Santa Clara’s Adama-Alpha Bal and Oregon State’s Michael Rataj.

Watts, a 6-6 redshirt sophomore from Fresno, California, paces WSU at 4.4 assists per game while averaging 13.3 points. Calmese, a junior guard from Gilbert, Arizona, averages 15.0 points and 4.1 assists.

Second-team selections were Parsa Fallah, Oregon State; Max Mackinnon, Portland; Lamar Washington, Pacific; and Santa Clara’s Carlos Stewart and Christoph Tilly.

Bennett earned his fourth consecutive WCC Coach of the Year award. Saint Mary’s, picked second behind Gonzaga in the coaches’ preseason poll, went 2-0 against the Zags and won the conference by three games. The Gaels are the top seed in the WCC Tournament for the third year in a row.

Second-seeded Gonzaga (23-8) returns to action in Monday’s semifinals at Orleans Arena. No. 6 Washington State (18-13) begins play Saturday night at approximately 8:30.