Zags Men's Hoops: Elias Harris, freshman from Germany, feels at home with Bulldogs

Some things we know about Elias Harris, Gonzaga's 6-foot-8 German forward:

He can play. He listens well. He can bang.

The thing we don't know: Can he take a hit?

"My concern now," says Gonzaga coach Mark Few, "is everybody's going to be looking for Elias on every blockout or every post move."

Let's back up. Harris — pronounce the first name ee-LEE-us — has quickly served notice he's not only the most riveting piece in a turnover of talent at Gonzaga, but one of the nation's premier freshmen. He and his teammates will meet Davidson at 4 p.m. Saturday in the annual Battle in Seattle at KeyArena.

Harris, 20, is averaging 11.8 points and a team-leading 7.1 rebounds, and has surprised a lot of people with skills at getting to the basket to go with a hard edge inside. He burst onto the scene with 17 points and nine rebounds at Michigan State, and his 24 points and 12 rebounds helped rescue a victory against Washington State.

Then came Wake Forest, with his father in Spokane watching him play in the U.S. for the first time. Few and his staff, concerned about some team laxity that had set in on the defensive boards against WSU and in the game against Wake Forest, had just harped on the need to block out.

Right about then, that's what Harris did to Wake Forest's Chas McFarland. As a three-point shot went up, Harris pivoted and forearmed McFarland in the neck. McFarland tumbled backward, Harris was assessed a flagrant foul and ejected and Wake swung the momentum toward an eventual 77-75 victory.

"I just think it's somewhat confusing to him," says Few, who took issue with the ejection. Meanwhile, Harris said afterward, "My feeling is, I did nothing wrong."

Now the question is whether the incident will precede Harris and he'll be the target of officials' scrutiny.

"I'm sure he will be," said Zags assistant coach Tommy Lloyd. "But it's never been an issue for him before, and I don't think it will be again. I think he's already ready to put it behind him."

It was Lloyd who uncovered Harris in Germany, benefiting from coaching friends in the country where he played professional basketball in 1999.

"There really weren't very many schools involved," said Lloyd. "It didn't bother me."

Harris is from Speyer, Germany, a city of 50,000 on the Rhine River. He developed a bond with Lloyd and saw Spokane as closer in size to his hometown than some schools recruiting him to bigger metro areas.

One of those was Washington, along with Cincinnati and Delaware.

"From the first day on, I had a good feeling talking to him," Harris said earlier this fall. "I didn't have the feeling he was lying or telling me things that weren't true.

"Something told me I better go to Gonzaga."

Zags fans who wrote off a miserable performance last February against Memphis at Spokane Arena didn't know about a silver lining. Harris was taking a visit and was impressed by the passion of the crowd.

"I think I picked the right game," he said. "The atmosphere, it was crazy. Me coming from Germany, I never saw that atmosphere, or that many people coming to a game."

As Harris tells it, there's no information shortage overseas on U.S. programs.

"If you play basketball in Germany, you know a lot about American basketball colleges," he said. "I knew who Cincinnati was, and Washington."

As for Gonzaga, Harris said, "Of course, everybody knows [about] Adam Morrison or Ronny Turiaf or Derek Raivio, and Dan Dickau."

Similarly, in this country, they're fast getting to know about Harris. Gonzaga hopes time will show it's for all the right reasons.

Note

• Matt Bouldin is expected to be in the starting lineup Saturday. Bouldin, Gonzaga's leading scorer, bumped heads with an opposing player during the first half of Wednesday's game and did not return to action.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com