Everything is coming up Gonzaga today with the news that the Zags landed Grand Canyon transfer Tyon Grant-Foster for his theoretical final year of the season (he needs a waiver that will almost 100% be granted).
Grant-Foster was one of the nation’s best guards in the 2023-24 season, averaging 20.1 points per game for GCU. Those numbers took a bit of a dip last season, falling to 14.8 points per game, but enough to keep the hard-charging guard on the Zags radar, and deservedly so.
Grant-Foster fills the role that Khalif Battle is leaving behind–the insta offense. Grant-Foster is nowhere near as good of a three-point shooter, but he might be as good, if not better, with a head full of steam charging down the court. Last season, Grant-Foster’s fouls drawn per 40 minutes of 7.3 ranked No. 9 in the nation. The year before, his 6.9 mark was No. 16.
Combine that with the foul drawing machine that is Graham Ike, and next year’s Zags already have a rather interesting plan of attack–death by attrition.
He will be 25 years old next year, thanks to two years at junior college, a year at Kansas, a “year” at DePaul, and his last two years at Grand Canyon. Don’t discount this “kid’s” drive, however. Grant-Foster collapsed in the DePaul locker room in a terrifying experience that is as close to near-death as one can get to without actually dying.
His perseverance paid off. Teams understandably were reluctant to recruit a player with a questionably functioning heart who hadn’t played basketball in over a year. Grand Canyon took the leap and Grant-Foster repaid them as the WAC Player of the Year.
For Gonzaga, Grant-Foster is the score-first sort of guard that the roster has needed. Along side transfer Adam Miller, Few and company have bolstered the scoring potential of this squad, that for the most part, looks like it should have no issues being a top 25 team for the entirety of the season.
Coming off of perhaps too many years of highly lauded preseason rankings, it might seem like a step down, but this Gonzaga roster is loaded with experience, and much of that experience has been together. Currently, the Zags are trotting out only three underclassmen of the 11 scholarship players. Of those eight upperclassmen, only miller and Grant-Foster are new faces–the other six are well acclimated to the Gonzaga system, and more importantly, each other.