After three long weeks without a clear answer at point guard, Gonzaga finally plugged the biggest hole on its roster for the 2026-27 season.
Javon Bennett committed to the Bulldogs on Wednesday, giving Mark Few a veteran floor general with one season at Merrimack and three at Dayton already on his résumé. Bennett will use his fifth and final year of eligibility in Spokane after being one of 24 college basketball players granted an extra season through the Ohio lawsuit, which also opened the transfer portal without penalty for those players.
The Zags have now added Bennett to a transfer group that already includes center Massamba Diop from Arizona State and guard Isiah Harwell from Houston. More importantly, they’ve landed the only true point guard on the roster, a glaring need after the backcourt took hits with the surprising departures of Mario Saint-Supery and Jack Kayil.
Bennett, a 5-foot-11 guard from Orlando, Florida, first made his name at Merrimack in the NEC. As a freshman, he averaged 9.6 points, 3.4 assists and a league-best 2.9 steals per game, good enough to earn NEC Rookie of the Year honors before he jumped to the Atlantic 10 and Dayton.
His production climbed every season with the Flyers. This past year, Bennett put up 15.8 points, 2.9 assists and 1.5 steals per game while logging 34.5 minutes a night. He shot 45.3% on twos, 34.7% from behind the arc and 89.8% at the line.
His best three-point season came as a junior, when he knocked down 39% of his 5.4 attempts per game. Even though that number dipped last season, he still launched seven threes a night and finished with 90 made triples, third-most in the conference and nearly twice Gonzaga’s team leader last season, Mario Saint-Supery, who had 48.
Bennett also showed he could deliver against high-level competition. Last season he scored 22 points with three assists on 6-of-11 shooting from three against BYU, added 25 points, two assists and two steals against Florida State, and posted 19 points, four assists and three steals at Marquette.
He’s not Ryan Nembhard as a distributor, but he can handle the ball, direct an offense and work the pick-and-roll while still having enough scoring punch to take over when needed. With Gonzaga’s attack built around its big men and with Braden Huff, Davis Fogle and Massamba Diop in the mix, Bennett should be asked to lean more into the facilitation side of the job in Spokane.
The assist-to-turnover numbers back that up. Bennett has a career 399-to-211 ratio, a strong sign that he can manage the position cleanly.
At 5-11, he won’t bring ideal size for a Gonzaga guard, but he has shown plenty of fight on defense and should be annoying enough to bother Pac-12 guards throughout the season.
Bennett’s arrival does not close the door on Donovan Dent, but it does give Gonzaga a starting-caliber point guard who is already cleared to play. For a team that spent the offseason losing pieces in the backcourt, that’s a major step forward.
In Other News...
Gonzaga's Roster Rebuild Just Got A Very Intriguing New Twist
The roster-building calendar in college basketball keeps getting stranger, and Gonzaga has every reason to pay close attention. A Georgia judge granted an injunction to 30 student-athletes, clearing them for immediate eligibility in the 2026-27 season and allowing them to sign with any Division I school without NCAA penalties even though they did not enter the transfer portal. It is the latest in a growing line of legal rulings, following similar injunctions in Ohio and Tennessee and standing in contrast to a federal decision in Colorado.
For Mark Few and the Bulldogs, the practical effect is obvious: the pool of available talent is shifting again, and it could give Gonzaga a cleaner path to players it might otherwise have had to chase through the portal maze. Names such as Chauncey Wiggins and Washington now sit in a more intriguing space as the program evaluates how to reshape its roster, and the next move may depend less on recruiting tradition than on how these competing court decisions keep redrawing the rules. [Read more 🡒]