Colorado will have some familiarity with Eastern Washington's new head coach.
The rest of the Eagles will be completely unfamiliar.
The CU men's basketball team opens its 2024-25 season Monday night with a home date against Eastern Washington at the CU Events Center (7 p.m., ESPN+). Both teams sport overhauled rosters, Eastern Washington even more so than the Buffs.
The Eagles won the regular season crown in the Big Sky Conference last year before getting upset in the league tournament, but former coach David Riley parlayed that success into his new job as the leader at Washington State. Eastern Washington turned to veteran coach Dan Monson, best known for his time at Gonzaga who also is coming off a 17-year run at Long Beach State, which fired Monson last spring despite leading Long Beach to the Big West tournament championship and the NCAA Tournament.
Monson is the all-time winningest coach at Long Beach State (275) and owns 445 Division I wins overall. Monson led Gonzaga to the 1999 Elite Eight with a staff that included CU assistant Bill Grier, who is set to begin his ninth season with the Buffs.
As has become typical in college basketball, Monson takes over with a completely revamped roster that doesn't include any of the top seven scorers or rebounders from last year's regular season Big Sky championship.
"Bill Grier and Dan Monson, they both coached together at Gonzaga. They know each other," CU head coach Tad Boyle said. "Coach Monson is a hell of a coach. He's won a lot of games at the Division I level. So they'll be ready. They'll compete. They'll show some things. We've just got to be ready for anything.
"Early in the season, you don't know what they're going to do. So we have to be ready for everything. That's why it won't be probably perfect. We'll have to adjust, we'll have to adjust on the fly."
The Buffs' three graduate transfers -- Elijah Malone, Trevor Baskin and Andrej Jakimovski -- are all but certain to make their CU debuts against Eastern Washington. Buffs fans might also get a glimpse of the team's three true freshmen (Sebastian Rancik, Felix Kossaras, Andrew Crawford) in addition to redshirt freshman Courtney Anderson, whose preseason has been limited by a groin injury.
"This will be a work in progress," Boyle said. "Again, we've got a lot of depth on this team. I had individual meetings with all these guys (last week) and talked to each player about kind of where I see them now and today. Now, where they are now and today might be completely different than where they are two weeks from now, or a month from now. What I want the freshmen to do is just come to work every day and learn and grow and get better. I don't know how much they'll play early. We'll see.
"Now, I'm going to try and play 10 guys, maybe 11, on Monday. But we'll see. I may get down to eight."
Eastern Washington features a pair of staff members with close ties to Boulder. Assistant coach Ben Beauchamp is a former standout at Monarch High School who was the 2014 BoCoPreps boys basketball player of the year. Another assistant is Will Turgeon, who spent the past two years as a graduate assistant with the Buffs.
The Buffs' most recent game against Eastern Washington was a 60-57 win at home on Dec. 8, 2021. Hammond, then a freshman, scored three points in 13 minutes off the bench. ... Colorado is 86-35 all-time in season openers, with wins in the past eight in a row. ... Jakimovski, a four-year player at Washington State, goes into the season needing 145 points to reach the 1,000-point mark for his career. ... One of Eastern Washington's many new transfer additions is guard Sam Stockton, the son of Hall of Famer John Stockton. A graduate transfer, Sam Stockton spent the past four seasons at Division III Lewis-Clark State College in Idaho.