Player Review: Yvonne Ejim

to round out the individual reviews, the award winner

Entering her fourth year with Gonzaga, a lot was expected of Yvonne Ejim, not just by coaches and teammates, but by herself.

Hailing from Calgary, Yvonne was a star athlete in high school that averaged more than 20 points per game from her sophomore year onward, earned the Miss Basketball Alberta award, and represented the Canadian youth teams at the under 17 and 19 levels. Despite this success, there are no records readily available online regarding her high school recruiting ranking unlike the other players reviewed thus far, which is astounding given the progress she’s shown while in Spokane.

After only averaging 6.5 minutes per game her freshman season, Yvonne has shown near exponential growth year after year within this program. For the ‘21-22 season, she averaged 20.8 minutes, 10.1 points, and 5.6 rebounds while the following year, she averaged 27.5 minutes, 16.8 points, and 8.4 rebounds.

That’s not to say she wasn’t perfect in those two seasons because she was still developing her feel of the game as evidenced by her low A/T ratio, 0.6 across both seasons, and high foul rate that saw her foul out of 7 games in the ‘22-23 season along with 7 games with four fouls that limited her time on the floor below her season average. Her 103 fouls that year placed her on the ignominious list for most fouls by a Gonzaga player in a single season.

One might also say she was a bit inconsistent with her impact on the game as, in that same year, she scored less than fifteen points in 12 of the team’s 33 games, including the team’s loses against Marquette and Stanford, despite her team high points per game. So heading into the ‘23-24 campaign, one had to wonder exactly how much room for development Yvonne Ejim had left to show us.

As it turns out, the 6’1” Canadian forward hadn’t even started the show yet. A quick glance at her season-ending averages may not jump out much given that her rebounding numbers were essentially the same, 8.7, and scoring increased slightly, 19.7 (good enough for 27th nationally), but I would implore anyone wondering about her quality to take a deeper dive into her boxscore numbers.

• Shooting Efficiency — after averaging 51.6% and 53.4% in her sophomore and junior years, Yvonne exploded this year up to 60.1%, a number ranked thirteenth in the NCAA and broke the all-time record for Gonzaga that was set by Kayla Standish’s 56.1% mark in the ‘10-11 season. She broke the mark by 4%! To put this into context, the number ten mark checks in just 3.4% below the previous record. Yvonne didn’t just squeak by the Bulldog’s all-time record, she destroyed it.
• Ball Distribution — Ejim is an elite bucket-getter and that’s what we want her doing for the majority of her time on the floor. But it’s still nice to know that your primary post-scorer isn’t a black hole when she gets the ball. After her poor A/T numbers the years prior, Yvonne made big strides in this area as she reached 2.3 assists per game while dropping her turnovers to just 1.8, both career bests. Scoring, distributing, and protecting the ball are essential checkboxes for an elite player and Ejim is making her mark here.
• Foul Trouble — dropping her fouls per game from 3.1 to 2.6 may not seem substantial, but I think this evolution played a huge role in Ejim’s development and in helping this team reach their peak. She fouled out in just 4 games this year and only had four fouls 5 games. If we exclude the first month of the season, those numbers fall to 2 and 3. Having Yvonne on the floor was essential for this team to reach not just their offensive potential, but also defensive. Her defensive box plus/minus of 3.7 doesn’t really paint the full picture about her contribution on that end, but if you watched some of the games this year, then you’ll remember how the team’s defensive seemed a bit lost without her manning the paint.
• Consistency — while I could be accused of being too hard about her ups and downs in the ‘22-23 season, it’s hard not to do so when compared to this past season’s performance. In 34 games, Yvonne scored no fewer than ten points in every single match, less than fourteen points in just 4 games, and more than twenty in 17 games. She also set the Gonzaga all-time season record for player efficiency rating at 43.5, which surpassed Courtney Vandersloot’s rating of 41.3 in the ‘10-11 campaign.

Thankfully, readers of this site weren’t the only ones to recognize Ejim’s impact on and off the court this year as she earned so many awards, she’s going to need a new showcase:

• WCC Player of the Year
• WCC Defensive Player of the Year
• All-WCC First Team Player Selection
• 6 Time WCC Player of the Week
• Becky Hammon Player of the Year
• AP All-American Honorable Mention
• Katrina McClain Power Forward of the Year Finalist
• Academic All-American

With the extra year granted to athletes that attended school during the Covid-19 pandemic, Yvonne Ejim made the decision to return to Gonzaga for her fifth year. While this is obviously amazing news for a program that has lost a number of players via graduation and transfer, I think it’s amazing that we get to watch this dynamo develop and play another year for our program.

What was your favorite Yvonne Ejim moment from the ‘23-24 season? Was it her 27-12 performance in the upset of Stanford? Was it her 25-14 explosion against UCI in the opening of the NCAA Tournament? Was it her infectious energy and smile as the roared off the bench to celebrate the team’s win in Spokane that moved them onto the Sweet 16? Was it something else entirely?