EWU’s present, led by Dan Monson, and past – led by David Riley, who’s now at WSU – face off Thursday at the Spokane Arena

During the last couple of men’s basketball seasons, it was common for David Riley to talk about how competitive Eastern Washington’s practices were, and how the reserves played every bit as well as the starters.

Viewed in that light, Thursday’s game at Spokane the Arena looks like a public proof-of-concept exercise.

Riley is now in his first year as head coach at Washington State (3-1), which will bus up to Spokane to play Eastern Washington (1-3), the team Riley coached to back-to-back regular-season Big Sky Conference titles the past two years. Tip is set for 6:30 pm

Washington State’s second-, third-, fourth- and fifth-leading scorers this season are all former Eagles players who helped Riley cut down the nets the past two seasons in Cheney: Cedric Coward (13.5 points per game); Ethan Price (12.3); LeJuan Watts (12.5) and Dane Erikstrup (11.3), each of whom has started all four games for the Cougars.

They will likely be opposed Thursday by an Eagles starting lineup that features four players who were recruited to Eastern Washington by Riley and his staff: Nic McClain (14.8 points per game); Mason Williams (13.5); Sebastian Hartmann (7.8) and Emmett Marquardt (5.3).

Early last season, those could have been practical lineups at Reese Court.

“I think I’d be naive to think they don’t know who coaches there or who the players are,” EWU head coach Dan Monson said when asked about the matchup after Eastern’s 82-78 loss to Cal Poly on Sunday. “That speaks for itself.”

After saying that, Monson – who coached at Gonzaga from 1988 to 1999 and came to Cheney this season after coaching stints in Minnesota (1999 to 2006) and Long Beach State (2007 to 2024) – turned the focus back to Eastern.

“The biggest thing they can’t do is go off on their own because of that, like we did today,” Monson said. “We have too many things that we have to worry about with ourselves, let alone what Washington State’s doing or what our opponents are doing.”

Eastern has relied heavily on the six players who remained on the roster from last season, each of them in an increased role. Redshirt junior McClain, for example, was limited by an injury to just two games last season, but this season he ranks second on the team in scoring at 14.8 points and led the Eagles with 28 points against Cal Poly.

As a freshman, Hartmann played all 32 games off the bench last season and averaged 3.0 points per game. This year, he’s playing more than twice the minutes as a starter and averaging more than twice as many points.

It’s a similar story for the sophomore Williams, who is averaging 13.5 points (nearly 10 more than last season), and for sophomore Vice Zanki, who has already hit 9 of 23 3-pointers compared to the 5 of 19 he made all of last season .

Marquardt, too, has stepped up, starting all four games after redshirting as a true freshman last season.

Jackson Seale, the last of the six holdovers, has played the least, totaling 27 minutes in the four games so far.

It will be impossible to ignore the familiar faces when the Eagles and Cougars face off at the Arena for the second time in three seasons (WSU beat EWU 82-56 there on Nov. 20, 2022).

But McClain stuck to the same talking points – self-improvement over emotions – when asked about Thursday’s game.

“It’s just a great game for us, another game to get ready,” McClain said. “Just another game for us in the preseason to get ready for conference.”