Gonzaga helped make hoops a global game

FROM FRANCE WITH LOVE

The world is catching up to Gonzaga.

OK, that’s a bit presumptuous, since we’d be referring to an entire planet, along with its 8 billion inhabitants — plus all the cultures, politics, languages and so forth that the Earth presents to us.

In the relatively tiny society of basketball, however …

The Zags are worth a conversation.

At the very least.

Let’s start with this: The player who perhaps should be a poster child for the merging of American and international hoops — oh, you hadn’t noticed? — could be any one of the Zags’ fantastic foreign stars of the past two decades or so.

If you want to call them the Tommy Lloyd All-Stars — to honor the Gonzaga assistant who has found and landed so many foreign-born contributors — you could open a new hall of fame and the Lloyds roster might fill an entire wing.

But with all due respect to those wonderful players, here’s the guy who now represents something entirely different in the basketball universe ...

Joel Ayayi.

AND YOU say: “Huh?”

Ayayi is a solid player, indeed — a strong and athletic, 6-foot-5 guard who has played his way into the Zags’ starting lineup after basically spending last season almost entirely on the bench.

Happy to have him and all that, but how does Ayayi represent a seismic shift in any way at all?

Why would he be the poster child in any serious basketball discussion beyond soon-to-turn-20, French-Beninese combo guards from Bordeaux?

Sure, he’s done his job in the Zags’ rotation, averaging 11.4 points per game on 50.3 percent shooting as the Bulldogs head into this week’s road assignments against Santa Clara and San Francisco.

Ayayi admits his roughly 3-to-1 ratio of assists to turnovers could be better, but he fills other roles, as well (like 6.2 rebounds in 28 minutes of game time).

All in all, a nice — and perhaps surprising — output for a young man playing his first real season of college hoops after viewing the previous season almost strictly from the pine.

IF THERE were something all that special about Joel Ayayi, surely Mark Few would have had him on the floor a lot more during his first season in Spokane.

“There were just a lot of things he had to learn,” Few said. “He wasn’t ready for the level of basketball, especially defensively.”

So far, this could be the tale of almost any college player who arrived on campus to little fanfare — but was considered a possible contributor down the road.

Thus, we have to ask again …

What makes Ayayi any kind of poster child?

Easy.

Check with any NBA scout or executive.

As staggering as this may sound to Zag loyalists — who are just getting used to hearing Ayayi introduced as a starter — there is a chance that the new kid from Bordeaux could be drafted this year.

Perhaps …

In the first round.

YOU THINK I’m exaggerating Ayayi’s future just a bit, right?

Maybe, but NBA scouts have been closely watching Ayayi since those long nights when Few left him on the pine.

So why would they have been paying attention to Ayayi back then?

Did they know that Gonzaga was hiding another first-round draft selection?

Not exactly.

But they saw the possibility, and …

Well, that’s the point of this whole story — America, which really means the NBA, is checking out ballplayers from all over the world, and the players themselves could be from Mali, Lithuania or Serbia …

But they’re checking right back.

And now it’s happening from earlier ages, as pro scouts are hard at work almost everywhere.

The worldwide hoops boom also has spawned more and more pro teams in various leagues across the globe — clubs drawing bigger crowds and paying heftier salaries, year after year.

THERE ARE worse ways to make a living than earning about $2 million a year to play hoops in Barcelona.

The bottom line is that there are no secrets, not anymore.

Ayayi may not have filled out physically during his first season with the Zags, and he’s the first to admit he needed to perfect the nuances of big-time defense.

But scouts have noticed other things, in particular Ayayi’s almost freakish 6-foot-10 wingspan.

To put that in perspective, Ayayi stretches out — fingertip to fingertip — the exact same distance as teammate Killian Tillie, who is 6-10.

Things like that are recorded and recalled, especially when a player like Ayayi apparently comes from nowhere to playing regularly, and then to showing the first flashes of stardom.

WE’RE NOT just making up this interest from the NBA.

The closest most of us can get to a serious look into the future of players who will be at least 19 years old by the time of the draft is to use the mind, time and contacts provided by someone who knows this stuff.

Our best shot comes courtesy of The Athletic, which offers an item called the “Big Board,” put together (and updated regularly) by industry veteran Sam Vecenie.

The board isn’t just a peek at scouting the U.S. college game.

It includes the top 100 prospects from across the world, some competing in the States and some not.

Players rise as they develop, and some tumble downward as they fail to improve in areas of interest to future employers.

Sam also provides plenty of information on American-born prospects who have gone overseas to showcase their skills — most for a single year. That allows for comparison between Iowa State star guard Tyrese Haliburton and, say, LaMelo Ball (coming off a pro season in Australia).

In the 2019 year-end edition of the Big Board, Joel Ayayi is ranked No. 29 overall — which is, yes, the bottom of first round in the NBA draft.

GONZAGA has four other players in the top 100. Corey Kispert sits at No. 59, Killian Tillie at No. 65 and Filip Petrusev at No. 69.

Here’s a curiosity: Even though the WCC is considered a stronger conference this year, most of that must be coming through team improvement, because Jordan Ford of Saint Mary’s (No. 95) is the only WCC player joining the four from Gonzaga.

(Prediction from the author: A now-healthy Tillie will trend much, much higher than 65th, and soon. I’ll bet he’s not only drafted, but becomes a regular rotation player in the NBA. So there!)

We weren’t kidding about how the U.S. and international games are growing together — 13 of the top 25 on the current Big Board either are foreign-born players or, like Ball, have been playing outside the American college system.

ANOTHER interesting item is that it’s obviously nice to have players with enough talent to excite the NBA, but it doesn’t guarantee overwhelming success by NCAA standards.

Gonzaga clearly is doing very well with its four prospects in the top 100, but what about Arizona?

The Wildcats have so far been good, but not special, despite having three of the top 27 prospects — an almost unprecedented group for one school.

Stanford has three on the Big Board, too.

Top-ranked Baylor offers just one, Jared Butler at No. 50.

You can see now, I think, why a player new to the headlines — a guy like Joel Ayayi — ties this all together.

And what the heck?

Next year at this time, we might be checking the rising draft stock of Martynas Arlauskas.

To paraphrase Walt Disney …

When we’re talking hoops, it really is a small, small world.

Email: scameron@cdapress.com

Steve Cameron’s “Cheap Seats” columns for The Press appear on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He also contributes the “Zags Tracker” package on Gonzaga basketball each Tuesday.

Steve’s various tales from several decades in sports — “Moments, Memories and Madness” — run on Sundays.