Kyle Wiltjer’s being asked to carry a big load for Gonzaga

Kyle Wiltjer was in the seventh grade when his father, Greg Wiltjer, first realized that he had a budding basketball phenom on his hands.

Kyle played on a team coached by his dad, and the light bulb moment for Greg occurred the day he watched in awe as his son drained seven straight three-pointers in the second half of a game.

“He was aggressive and kept shooting, and I thought to myself, ‘Wow, he is good,’” said Greg Wiltjer, who played professional basketball in Europe for 13 years and played for the Canadian men’s basketball team at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

Now a senior on the Gonzaga men’s basketball team, that shooting flair Wiltjer, an All-West Coast Conference first-team selection, demonstrated as a pre-teen is still evident today.

Wiltjer finished the regular season as the league’s leading scorer, averaging 20.8 points per game. The transfer from Kentucky also topped the conference with an 87.6 percent free-throw shooting average.

With his 13 points in Gonzaga’s 92-67 win over Portland in the WCC quarterfinals on Saturday night, Wiltjer notched his 28th double-digit scoring game of the season.

He has had five 30-point performances this season, one of those against Brigham Young, which Gonzaga will face in the WCC tournament semifinals Monday night at the Orleans Arena.

Wiltjer has performed well against the Cougars this season. He had a season-high 35 points in the Zags’ 69-68 home defeat to BYU on Jan. 14, and he again led the Bulldogs with 21 points in their win against the Cougars on the road last month that helped them clinch a share of the WCC regular-season title.

But as reliable a shooter as Wiltjer has been, perhaps the aspect of his game that’s most frequently overlooked is his consistency and the stability he’s offered the Zags this season despite having to adapt to being the guy other teams game plan to stop.

It is a new role for Wiltjer, who was a sixth man extraordinaire in his two year-career at UK, and was part of an ensemble of veteran stars during his junior year at Gonzaga last season.

This year, however, Wiltjer returned as Gonzaga’s scoring leader, and when the Bulldogs lost starting center Przemek Karnowski (back injury) for the season at the beginning of December, Wiltjer cemented himself as the Zags’ biggest threat.

“There’s been a bunch of different defenses thrown at me,” Wiltjer said. “Being the first guy on the scouting report, people know my tendencies.

“I’m playing with double teams and all that, but even if a different defense is on you, you have to learn how to adjust in the moment of the game and learn how to help your team win.”

Despite nursing a foot injury over a span of four games in January, Wiltjer is averaging a team-high 33.4 minutes per game — though Sabonis, at 31, isn’t far behind — and will likely be on the floor even more Monday if center Ryan Edwards can’t play against BYU.

Edwards has been the Zags’ utility big man since they lost Karnowski. He plays when Few needs to give Sabonis or Wiltjer a breather.

But Edwards left the Zags’ WCC quarterfinal game in the first half with a twisted knee, and his status for the BYU game is unclear. If he can’t go, Wiltjer and Sabonis will shoulder a heavier load against the Cougars.

“We’ll deal with whatever we have to deal with,” Few said Saturday night. “Domas gets mad when I take him out anyway. … And Wiltjer is never too pleased when I take him out either.”

This story was originally published March 6, 2016 at 10:12 PM with the headline "Kyle Wiltjer’s being asked to carry a big load for Gonzaga."