Like the clouds piling up before a thunderstorm, the best story in the Big Sky Conference this season built slowly.
When the Eastern Washington Eagles narrowly beat Montana and Montana State in the first weekend of the Big Sky Conference season, I wrote that they were “an early contender” and “might have put the rest of the league on notice.”
Then they kept winning…and winning…and winning, biting off chunks off the schedule two games at a time – a sweep of Idaho and the return home game against Montana to finish a season sweep of the Griz…two weeks later, a weekend home sweep of early-season darling Idaho State and perennial contender Weber State.
With every weekend sweep, the Eagles changed the discussion around the conference, leaping from tier to tier, going from early-season curiosity to challenging Montana State as the best team in the conference to Montana State challenging *them* as the best team in the conference.
The home win against Weber State was their 10th in a row in conference play, and 12th overall.
A few weeks later, the storm finally broke.
An 89-77 win over Northern Colorado on February 18 was the Eagles’ 15th Big Sky win in a row, clinching at least a share of the conference title and tying the 1968-69 Weber State Wildcats for the best start in conference history.
After waiting nearly a week, they went to Ogden and beat Weber State 89-82, breaking the Wildcats’ half-century-old record and wrapping up the outright conference title.
Despite losing their final two games of the season, Eastern Washington enters the conference tournament as the No. 1 seed, the favorite to make a second trip to the NCAA Tournament in the last three years.
It was a long way from where the Eagles were on that late-December night in Missoula when they kicked off the streak. It was a long way from where they were in the non-conference, when they started the season with double-digit losses to Santa Clara, Yale and Hawaii plus a 24-point whipping by Washington State.
And, more than anything, it was a long way away from where they were two years ago, when David Riley was tasked with rebuilding a roster that had crumbled away like the sole on a pair of 20-year-old Jordans.
It’s hard to come up with a better college basketball story than “win your conference tournament, get a 14-seed and take Kansas all the way to the wire, led by two brothers, including one who looks like the second coming of full-beard Bill Walton.” But two years after Tanner and Jacob Groves and Shantay Legans wrote that story, and two years after it all fell apart, Eastern Washington might be writing an even better one.
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Ironically, at least to hear David Riley tell it, the story of this year’s team started with Tanner Groves, anyway.
Groves, who won the Big Sky’s conference and tournament MVPs in 2020-21 before scoring a career-high 35 in that legendary loss to Kansas, transferred (along with his brother Jacob) to Oklahoma after that season when Legans left to take the head coach job at Portland.
That was just the start of the exodus. Defensive Player of the Year Kim Aiken Jr. ended up at Arizona. Australians Tyler Robertson and Jack Perry, along with guard Mike Meadows, followed Legans to Portland. Former all-league wing Jacob Davison transferred to Cal Poly.
Reserve guards Ellis Magnuson and Steele Venters, who’d each averaged 3.6 points that year, were just about the only players left on the roster.
Riley, who became the youngest coach in the league at 33 years old when he replaced Legans, was determined to build a new foundation, and the first block came from thousands of miles away across the Atlantic. Craig Fortier, who’d been an assistant at Eastern Washington earlier in the decade and also coached Riley during his playing career at Whitworth, saw Ethan Price on a recruiting trip to England for the Gonzaga women and passed on a tip about the 6-9 center from Suffolk.
“It kind of started with Tanner – realizing that, hey, when you have a five man who can shoot, you can really do some other things offensively if you get bigger guards,” Riley said. “It turns into a mismatch nightmare, and we’ve got an offense that allows you to do that. Once we were able to realize Ethan Price was coming in, we (realized we) should try to get bigger guards to fit around that.”
There was one other piece already on the roster – Venters, a walk-on from Ellensburg, Washington who, after one year as a redshirt and one year coming off the bench, exploded in 2021-22 for 16.7 points per game on 43.7% shooting beyond the arc.
Now, at 6-foot-7, he’s a wing with size and shooting, a rarity for the Big Sky and a perfect fit for EWU.
Venters was named conference MVP on Friday after leading the Eagles with 15.1 points per game and shooting 38% from beyond the arc.
“Steele coming in as a walk-on for two years and putting a lot of hard work into where he is now, it’s one of those stories that you hear in college basketball that makes it such an amazing thing,” Riley said. “It’s all credit to him for putting all that work in.”
To build around those two, Riley cast a net so wide it made Price’s overseas background look downright normal (Price, by the way, was everything Fortier suggested he might be – Big Sky Freshman of the Year last year on 9.9 points, 4.9 rebounds and over 40% shooting from 3 last year and an almost identical line so far this year, which earned him an honorable mention all-league spot).
Angelo Allegri was unhappy after three years at UNC-Greensboro and thinking about just focusing on school when his old prep school coach Roberto Bergersen took a one-year assistant job with Eastern Washington.
“He’s like a dad to me, and I felt there was no better refresh button than to go across the country to Washington,” Allegri said.
Allegri slotted in perfectly alongside Venters as a 6-7 lefty guard who could shoot, distribute and rebound, plus already had NCAA Tournament experience from his final year at Greensboro. After averaging 12.1 points last year, he’s been a revelation this year, averaging 13.5 points and 5.5 rebounds and leading the team in assists.
The expressive, experienced guard picked up a first-team all-Big Sky selection on Friday.
Casey Jones, one of the most unique players in the league at a built 6-6, 220 pounds, with goggles on his face and springs in his legs, averaged under six points per game his senior year at basketball factory Wasatch Academy in Utah but leads EWU this year with 5.7 rebounds per game.
Third-leading scorer Tyreese Davis played a year of prep school with Allegri, and transferred over this year from Jacksonville of the Atlantic Sun Conference. Deon Stroud, who obliterated a rim against Idaho with one of the dunks of the year, was already on his third school after one year at UTEP and two at Fresno State.
Dane Erikstrup, a young big with a Wolverine haircut and experience on Danish youth national teams, transferred from Division II Cal Poly Pomona, where he was his conference’s Freshman of the Year last season. Long-armed Cedric Coward, who had 10 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists against Northwest Indian College for the second triple-double in program history, transferred from Division III Willamette University, where he averaged 19 and 12 and finished last season on a streak of 15 straight double-doubles despite being 6-foot-6.
Of Eastern’s top eight players – Price, Venters, Allegri, Jones, Davis, Stroud, Erikstrup and Coward – only Price, Venters and Jones came to the Eagles out of high school, and only those three plus Allegri were in Cheney last year.
Together, they’ve combined to give Riley an eight-man rotation that nobody else in the Big Sky has the tools to solve. All eight are at least 6-5, and they’ve all attempted at least one 3-pointer a game this season. In a league where everybody else has to pick between size and shooting, Eastern has both.
The Eagles are second in the league in rebounding margin (narrowly behind Sac State), but also first in field-goal percentage, second in 3-point percentage and third in assist-to-turnover ratio.
“I think it’s something that’s really nice to have where you can pick on mismatches,” Riley said.
“That’s just our identity,” Allegri said. “We’re just big and we’re tough.”
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Despite the program’s rise to prominence under Jim Hayford and then Legans in the 2010s, Cheney remains a tough place to recruit to. The Eagles have always gone after under-recruited talent – internationals like Venky Jois, Mason Peatling and Bogdan Bliznyuk, late bloomers like Tyler Harvey (who grew 11 inches in high school) or local kids like the Groves brothers.
If that’s the status quo, imagine the recruiting pitch Riley had to come up with in his first year.
Not only had all the players walked out the door, so had the assistant coaches..
Riley could sell the continuation of a successful program – after all, he had been one of Legans’ top assistants – but there wasn’t much of anything left in Cheney to back that up, just the banners on the wall and a 33-year-old who’d never been a head coach before.
It was like a magician gesturing at his top hat, asking the audience to believe that a rabbit is hiding within – or, in Riley’s case, that he was the man for the job.
But instead of giving in to that disadvantage, Riley and his new staff turned the problem on its head.
Like every staff, Eastern’s has a selection of attributes that they look for in every recruit – skill, IQ, motor and character.
“Those are the four keys that we have in each coach’s office,” Riley said. “We can live without a little bit of athleticism or quickness or whatever. But if you can think and pass and dribble a little bit, you probably have a chance to be successful in this program.”
Really, Eastern’s coaches were looking for one thing in particular: players who were committed to the project, who not only wanted to be at Eastern Washington, but really believed that Cheney was the best place for them.
They did have one thing to sell. Eastern didn’t have any established players on the roster. Nobody was coming back expecting a certain number of touches, so Riley and his staff could offer new opportunities and new roles to players who were only looking for a chance.
Allegri was likely about to fall out of the rotation at UNC-Greensboro after a coaching change. Stroud had already seen his role get reduced at Fresno State, dropping from 12.2 points per game as a sophomore to 5.2 as a junior. After being named to his conference’s all-freshman team, Davis lost a year to a knee injury and then saw his averages drop as a sophomore. Nobody else was offering Coward and Erikstrup a chance to move up to Division I, let alone come in and play a role right away.
“They take pride in being at Eastern Washington and being a part of this program,” Riley said. “We offer them the best opportunity, or they understand that this was the best opportunity they had to achieve their goals. … They might have had other offers to go places, but it wasn’t gonna be in the same role or the same system or as good of a fit for them, personally.”
Players and coaches around the program say that’s manifested in a desperate competitiveness, even in practice – “In the game, they call calls. But in practice, we don’t really call that many calls,” Allegri explained simply, while Riley said practices are “like life or death” – and a very real sense of camaraderie.
That showed up in the non-conference, when they bounced back from the Washington State blowout to beat North Dakota State and Cal. A few days later, they blew a 23-point second-half lead to South Dakota State – the Jackrabbits didn’t get the deficit to single digits until there were under three minutes left but still won 77-76 – and then dropped a potential statement game to Texas Tech.
“After the Washington State game, we had a good team meeting and talked about how adversity can do two things to a team,” said Riley, who won the conference’s Coach of the Year award on Friday. “It can tear you apart, or it can bring you together. It just helped him poke holes in our foundation, and once we filled those holes, we had the potential to be a really good team.”
After the Texas Tech loss, they didn’t lose for two-and-a-half months, surviving a gauntlet of close games thanks to a succession of heroics mostly from Venters and Allegri.
In fact, only seven of their 16 wins in the streak came by double digits. That’s one of many holes to pick in the Eagles’ resume, along with the fact that their season-long point differential is behind Montana State’s. After they lost their final two games, they took the conference crown by just a game over the Bobcats and head to Boise with no momentum. All of that has made Montana State a popular pick in Boise, or even caused people to move Weber State and Montana up into that tier – disrespect, of course, to a team that at one point had the longest winning streak in the country.
But this year, with this Eastern Washington team that came from nothing and is fighting not to go back to nothing, it couldn’t be any other way.
“If you look at our team, nobody on our team was highly recruited,” Allegri said. “I graduated with no Division-I offers. Steele, he walked on here his freshman year and redshirted. Cedric, he came from the Division-III level. I can go down the list, but I feel like that has really played a part in who we are. We want to win games and we play with a chip on our shoulder. When we don’t have that chip, we’re not ourselves.”
Photos by Brooks Nuanez. All Rights Reserved.
