Season in Review: Ismaila Diagne Was More Than His Minutes

Ismaila Diagne was the first Zag into the transfer portal once the 25-26 season wrapped up, and nobody who followed this team closely was particularly surprised. However, that doesn’t make it not hurt. It’s ultimately understandable, with Graham Ike gone and a frontcourt vacancy that would almost certainly get filled from the outside, the writing was on the wall for “Izzo,” a backup center who never quite made the leap for the Bulldogs in his two years in Spokane. He leaves with two more years of eligibility remaining and a basketball résumé at Gonzaga that just never got to where it needed to be. He also leaves as one of the most genuinely beloved guys to wear a Zag uniform in recent memory. And that gap, between what he produced and how much people rooted for him anyway, is basically the whole story of Ismaila Diagne in Spokane.

Spain to Spokane

Diagne came to Gonzaga by way of Nguekhokhe, Senegal and the Real Madrid youth system. He was good enough at a very young age to get plugged into one of the premier player development pipelines in European basketball, averaging double figures and nearly double-digit rebounds for Real Madrid’s U18 squad and helping them win the Adidas Next Gen Tournament in Berlin. He even appeared in a pair of EuroLeague games at seventeen years-old.

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Mark Few doesn’t sign guys like that without believing in what they could become, and in Diagne’s case the belief made sense. A true 7-footer with that kind of basketball pedigree, in Gonzaga’s frontcourt development pipeline, practicing daily against the two most effective scoring big men in the country in Braden Huff and Graham Ike? The trajectory looked extremely promising on paper. He committed in the summer of 2024 and arrived in Spokane as one of the youngest players in college basketball, a raw but tantalizing piece of the program’s future.

A Tough Legacy to Inherit

Part of what made Diagne’s situation so difficult is that Gonzaga fans don’t really have a frame…

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Publish date : 2026-04-14 13:00:00

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