Because someone can only spend so many hours in a basketball gym before efforts to improve start to have the inverse effect, Graham Ike and Braden Huff have found a variety of other hobbies to occupy their time off the court at Gonzaga.

Hit reality dating show “Love Island,” for instance, was appointment viewing for a number of Gonzaga players this offseason. Ike and Huff admit they indulged, but the steamy television drama didn’t always provide the calm tranquility they were looking for. Often, the best way to escape the monotony of summer workouts, strength training sessions and NIL obligations meant getting outside and breaking out the paddleboards.

The Spokane River conveniently flows right by Gonzaga’s campus, a stone’s throw from where the Zags practice and play, so Ike and Huff could be wrapping up a rebounding drill at the Volkar Center one moment and loading their boards into the water five minutes later.

The long floats, sometimes lasting up to three hours, helped the Gonzaga teammates and close friends recenter and reset their minds in a still environment where the only discernible sounds were birds chirping, paddles plunging into water.

“Just enjoying the sun, enjoying the day, enjoying the nature,” Ike said.

The only potential drawback: paddleboarding isn’t a big man’s game, and center of gravity is everything if you want to stay dry.

Proportionally speaking, the concept of two 6-9/6-10, 250-pound college basketball forwards trying to balance on long, narrow slabs of plastic seems risky at best.

“You get (a paddleboard) that’s 7-foot,” Ike said, offering a solution. “And we’ve got good balance. Shout out to TK (GU strength coach Travis Knight), the stuff we’ve been doing, that helps. Just find one that’s big enough and stay afloat. I’ve had a couple bumpy days.”

Staying afloat might be the best Gonzaga’s opponents can hope for when they encounter Ike and Huff on the court this season, although bumpy days are probably in the forecast.

Any scouting report for Gonzaga in 2025-26 will begin with those two — likely Ike at the top and Huff occupying a space right below. There won’t be many ways around, over or through the Zags’ prolific frontcourt duo this season, and even if you are prepared for the multitude of duck-ins, short rolls and two-man actions, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to shut down the entire operation.

“I think the combination of those two coming back, we should be one of the best frontcourts in the country,” coach Mark Few said. “I think they’ve showed that at times, I think they showed that down the stretch at the end of last year and they certainly played great in our last game against one of the best defenses in the country and probably one of the best defensive frontcourts in the country. That’s the expectation.”

Ike and Huff are unique from other Gonzaga posts in how they operate, but they won’t be the first double-big pairing to start under Few. In some ways, actually, 2025-26 will be a return to the norm, rather than the start of something brand new.

Four years ago, Drew Timme played alongside Chet Holmgren on a team that earned the NCAA’s top overall seed. Gonzaga’s national runner-up squad in 2016-17 had a few options: Przemek Karnowski and Johnathan Williams, Karnowski and Zach Collins, Williams and Collins. In 2014-15, Karnowski occasionally shared the floor with Domantas Sabonis. Kelly Olynyk and Elias Harris made for a successful tandem — along with Sam Dower off the bench — in 2012-13 and Robert Sacre played next to Harris the year before that.

“So it’s definitely something we’re really comfortable with here, that’s been successful here,” said assistant Brian Michaelson, who works closely with Gonzaga’s forwards and centers. “I think there’s actually a lot of comfort to getting back to what that looks like.”

After flirting with the Ike-Huff look in practices all season, the Zags hard-launched their double-big lineup at the 2025 West Coast Conference Tournament title game against Saint Mary’s.

The Gaels won two close calls during the regular season — 62-58 in Moraga and 74-67 in Spokane — so Gonzaga, rather than continue to bang its head against the wall hoping for a different outcome, chose to mix it up entering the third meeting.

“It had been bounced around, it had been a thought but obviously we didn’t pull the trigger until right there at the conference tournament,” Michaelson said. “So it was definitely something, that was not the first time it had been brought up but that was obviously the first time we pulled the trigger on it. Really early in the year, there was obviously practices where you’re playing yourselves this time of year and they were on the court together and had done some nice things.”

Huff dominated Saint Mary’s 4-man Paulius Murauskas at both ends of the floor, to such an extent that Gaels coach Randy Bennett essentially pulled the WCC Newcomer of the Year from his rotation and went to backup big man Harry Wessels instead.

In a career-high 32 minutes, Huff scored 18 points and made 8 of his 16 shots. In just 14 minutes, Murauskas missed all seven of his and went scoreless for just the second time all season.

“It’s fun to watch Graham from the bench for sure, but to share the court with him, it’s way more fun,” Huff said. “… It was the first time we really played together, in the WCC Tournament, but it felt like we’d been playing together a while. So that was the coolest part about it.”

The switch-up served two key purposes.

Gonzaga rode the momentum of the WCC title game into the NCAA Tournament, where it bludgeoned Georgia 89-68 in the opening round and took top-seeded Houston down to the wire, losing 81-76 in a game where Ike and Huff overwhelmed the Cougars’ rugged defensive frontcourt, scoring 38 points.

After months of searching, the Zags had finally uncovered their best five-man unit. Three of the five would be out of eligibility, but GU’s coaching staff knew retaining the other two would be critical to building another contender in 2025-26.

They could’ve pitched the two-big concept in exit meetings with Ike and Huff, but the visual examples they obtained in three high-level postseason games were much more helpful in convincing both players to run it back.

“It was a great precursor for the visions we were going to paint to Huff and Graham last spring,” assistant Stephen Gentry said. “Instead of it being this hypothetical, it was like no, no, no, this is what it’s actually going to look like and we’re going to double and triple down on it.”

Ike and Huff made up 20% of the preseason All-WCC team unveiled last week. An ESPN list ranking the top 100 players in college basketball featured Ike at No. 13 and Huff at 66. Any preseason conversation handicapping what Gonzaga’s capable of this year starts and ends with what’s happening underneath the basket.

“I think a lot of guys that are in their shoes are obviously guys that could be options 1A, the dominant alpha on almost any team,” Michaelson said. “I think a lot of guys in that scenario would’ve said, ‘hey I’ll come back if the other doesn’t. I want it to be my group or me solo’ and those two were the exact opposite.”

Ike confirmed what most fans and viewers saw in the WCC title game: the pairing was pretty seamless from the jump.

“It wasn’t really many challenges,” Ike said. “Closest big takes the ball out, things like that. Who’s trailing, who’s rim-running, it didn’t have to be spoke, we just kind of knew.”

Because this had been in the works for about nine months, dating back to the early stages of offseason workouts in 2024, Ike and Huff didn’t have to learn on the fly when they were inserted into the starting lineup against Saint Mary’s.

The paint can get congested with two players of their height and size occupying it at the same time, but things like spacing and switching have come naturally to Huff and Ike, who looked like they were going on year four of their partnership by the end of their three-game stint last season.

“If he’s rolling, get on the other side, things like that. If he’s popping, cut the stunt,” said Ike, who was recently named a preseason third-team All-American by CBS Sports. “Things like that. It’s just kind of a feel thing. We already know how to play, so just being in the right positions.”

Coaches have pulled up film to show Ike and Huff how other Gonzaga teams have been able to capitalize on double-big lineups. The 2016-17 team was a particularly good case study for GU’s returning bigs.

“That squad is a big one that I think not only I paid attention to, but the coaches have brought that up as well,” Huff said.

Few’s assertion that Ike and Huff could form one of the nation’s best frontcourt duos isn’t off-base, but both still have room to grow. Efficient as they are on the offensive side, neither player will draw comparisons to Holmgren or Collins for their rim protection and Huff will need to get more comfortable stepping out to defend opponents at the perimeter.

“Those bigs will have to guard,” Few said.

They’re also working to curb the foul issues that occasionally propped up last season. Ike lived in the danger zone, incurring at least four fouls in 14 games and fouling out twice. Michaelson imitates the role of an official in practices, usually letting his voice do the work a referee’s whistle would in games.

“His voice is enough,” Huff laughed. “He tells us our fouls are valuable and gets on us. It’s not necessarily all fouls, it’s just the dumb ones he wants us to take out. The reaches or the little pokes that are preventable.”

Gonzaga doesn’t know how other teams will counter the double-big combo, but that opponents know it’s coming at all — and have a few games of film to study — are luxuries Saint Mary’s, Georgia and Houston didn’t get last year.

“It helped them, it made them better because they got their best players on the court,” Bennett said last week at WCC media day. “You’ve got to figure that out and they’re usually good at that. … You can’t just plug them in, you have to have an offensive scheme that will work and then you have to figure out how you’ll defend someone else’s ‘4’ with your ‘5.’”

Bennett also mentioned the Gaels will have a two-big lineup at the ready this year, too, and they probably aren’t alone.

Ike and Huff are prepared for all comers.

“I think they’re very clear of where they need to fit in the national landscape and what they need to do,” Michaelson said. “Their biggest thing is trying to help us win games and that is the nice thing is, we need them to be dominant to be able to win at the level we want to win at. … That’s why they came back together, is to be as good as any frontcourt as there is.”