Gonzaga Bulldogs Abroad: EuroLeague Edition

Eighteen former Zags played professional basketball outside the United States in 2025-26. Mario Saint-Supery joined them on July 11, when he left Gonzaga after one season to sign with Valencia Basket in Spain. The group is spread across Spain, France, Italy, Lithuania, Japan and the United Arab Emirates, among other places.

Nigel Williams-Goss, Filip Petrusev and Saint-Supery all play for EuroLeague clubs in 2026-27. At 32, Williams-Goss is the oldest of the three, a point guard for Žalgiris Kaunas who won the EuroLeague with Real Madrid in 2023. Petrusev, 26, plays for Dubai Basketball, the reigning ABA League champion, and won his own EuroLeague title in 2022 with Anadolu Efes. Saint-Supery is the youngest at 20, and Valencia has him under contract through June 30, 2030.

The Euroleague season just tipped off and the Gonzaga pipeline is well represented at the highest levels this season. Here's a brief check-in on how each of these former Zags is faring in their Euroleague homes and what fans can expect from them this season.

Žalgiris opened the 2026-27 LKL season today at Neptūnas, and Williams-Goss takes the floor as the unambiguous lead guard of a team that lost its best player over the summer. Sylvain Francisco, All-EuroLeague First Team last year at 16.5 points and 6.5 assists per game, bought out his contract and signed with Panathinaikos. That's a real vacancy. The replacement piece is Jonas Valanciunas, 14 years in the NBA before Denver waived him, who looked like himself in preseason — 14 points and 9 rebounds against Juventus — and gives Žalgiris a frontcourt anchor it hasn't had. In that same game, Williams-Goss ran the offense quietly: 6 points, 6 assists, the right kind of preseason line for a 32-year-old point guard managing his minutes before a long year.

He'll need them. The EuroLeague opener comes Thursday at Crvena Zvezda, then Žalgiris hosts Olympiacos — his former club, the reigning champion — on September 29. He's spent a career collecting hardware in places American fans don't watch closely: a EuroLeague title with Real Madrid in 2023, the Lithuanian league with Žalgiris last spring, four straight Final Fours before Fenerbahçe knocked them out in the quarterfinals in May. The body is the variable. Three soft-tissue injuries interrupted his first Kaunas season, but when healthy he was the best version of himself in Europe, and this roster — built around him and Valanciunas — has the bones to go deeper than last year if he stays on the floor.

The story of Petrusev's first year in Dubai was partly buried under a knee that he described, at 26, as feeling like it belonged to a 36-year-old. He played all 38 EuroLeague games anyway, averaged 11.6 points and 4.8 rebounds, and helped the club win the ABA League title in just its second season of existence. By the end he was running on injections and painkillers, grinding through cartilage damage and two bone edemas in his right knee severe enough that he admitted publicly this summer there was barely any cartilage left in certain spots. The fact that he suited up in last weekend's EuroLeague SuperCup third-place game against Fenerbahçe and scored 7 points as a starter is either a good sign or a sign that he'll play through anything.

He's 26, has a EuroLeague ring from his year at Anadolu Efes and an Olympic bronze from Paris with Serbia, and enters year two in Dubai as the frontcourt anchor for a team that just swapped coaches (Golemac out in April, Xavi Pascual in) and added former Virginia star Mamadi Diakite alongside him up front. The roster is deeper and the EuroLeague opener is Thursday at home against Real Madrid. Petrusev told Italian media this week that the preparation has been ideal and that the only way to grow is to test yourself against the best. Whether his knee allows him to do that over the course of a full season is the real question going into 2026-27.

Mario Saint-Supery left Gonzaga after one season, and then suddenly announced just two days after shaking hands and posing for photo-ops at the Domantas Sabonis Strength and Conditioning Center dedication ceremony that he was taking a four-year, $15 million deal with Valencia Basket. He was back in Spain later that week.

He told the Spanish press that the EuroLeague is "the best league in the world after the NBA," which is the kind of thing you say when you'd like everyone to stop asking why you bailed on a top-10 NCAA program that made you its starting point guard as a freshman. Valencia made the EuroLeague Final Four last year and won the Liga ACB, then spent the summer watching Jean Montero leave for Olympiacos and Sergio de Larrea go 25th in the NBA Draft, so Saint-Supery arrives as the replacement plan for two players who are considerably better than him, behind a 35-year-old Nikola Mirotic on a roster that looks considerably worse than last year's.

For Zag fans who want to track all three at once, the schedule serves up six Gonzaga alumni matchups across the season. Williams-Goss and Petrusev meet twice — December 4 in Kaunas and April 7 in Dubai. Williams-Goss and Saint-Supery face off December 23 in Kaunas and March 4 in Valencia. Petrusev and Saint-Supery meet December 15 in Valencia and March 10 in Dubai. Circle December 23 in particular: that's the one where an all-time fan favorite Gonzaga point guard in Williams-Goss gets to play against an all-time Gonzaga fan-least-favorite in Lithuania. That one will air somewhere around noon Pacific time for anyone willing to find the stream.