That No. 6 Gonzaga kept winning with its two big men, Braden Huff and Graham Ike, sidelined by injuries goes to show the depth of the team.
Huff remains out with a left knee injury, possibly for the rest of the regular season, but with Ike back, look out.
Ike, who missed the previous three games with right ankle soreness, scored 30 points in his return Saturday as the Bulldogs defeated visiting Saint Mary’s 73-65 in a West Coast Conference showdown.
The Bulldogs (22-1, 10-0 WCC) enter Wednesday’s game at Portland (10-14, 3-8) in first place in the conference, a half-game ahead of Santa Clara and two games up on Saint Mary’s.
The Bulldogs were ready after having lost the previous two years to the Gaels at home.
“It was extremely personal. We know how much this means to the university and also to us, everybody here in Spokane,” said Ike, who was named the conference’s player of the week. “We definitely wanted to take care of business. Personally, I had never beat these guys before on our home floor before this and that was definitely something I wanted to do in my last year and I’m glad we could get that done.”
Emmanuel Innocenti scored all 10 of his points in a span of 3:12 early in the second half and supplied stellar defense for the Bulldogs, especially on the Gaels’ Paulius Murauskas, who entered the game leading the WCC in scoring with 19.3 points per game but was held to 15, including just two in the second half.
“Big shout-out to E,” Gonzaga wing Jalen Warley said, referring to Innocenti. “He came up really big because when he wasn’t guarding Murauskas, he was guarding (point guard Josh) Dent. He was really making life difficult for them.
“He (Murauskas) is a great player. I knew we weren’t going to shut him out, he was going to score. Trying to make his life difficult, not letting him get the shots he’s used to getting all year. We did a good job kind of knocking him off his normal spots and normal rhythm.”
The Bulldogs will take a 15-game winning streak into Wednesday’s matchup. They have won 20 straight against the Pilots and are 47-2 against them under Mark Few.
Portland has lost three in a row, including a 104-74 defeat Saturday at Washington State. Joel Foxwell, who tops the WCC with 6.8 assists per game, led the Pilots with 21 points.
Foxwell, a freshman from Australia, was a developmental player for Melbourne United of his home country’s National Basketball League and got to practice against former Saint Mary’s standouts and fellow Australians Matthew Dellavedova, Tanner Krebs and Kyle Bowen.
“I got to share two seasons with Delly, which was really cool. I got to learn everything just from asking Delly questions,” Foxwell said. “As an 18-year-old, every kid wants to meet Delly and I got to go up against him in practice.”
Pilots coach Shantay Legans, who is familiar with Gonzaga from his time as the head coach at Eastern Washington University in the Washington suburb of Cheyney, said Foxwell benefited from that experience.
“He came in with a confidence about himself. That’s something that was instilled in him at a young age,” Legans said. “He’s one of the hardest workers we have. It’s been fun watching him go out there and play with confidence. It doesn’t matter who he’s going up against.”
