The kid seems pretty good at basketball, huh?
With the 2023-24 season long since in the books, let’s take a few moments to look back at the performance of each member of YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles this year. While we’re at it, we’ll also take a look back at our player previews and see how our preseason prognostications stack up with how things actually played out. We’ll run through the roster in order of total minutes played going from lowest to highest, and today we focus the penultimate installment of our saga at Gary Parrish’s little homie from Memphis…..
Kam Jones
Junior – #1 – Guard – 6’5” – 200 lbs. – Memphis, Tennessee
* — Notes a top 100 national ranking per KenPom.com
** — Notes a top 200 national ranking per KenPom.com
*** — Notes a top 400 national ranking per KenPom.com
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
I’m not going to say that we should expect Kam Jones to lead Marquette in scoring again in 2023-24, because that’s setting him up for failure if he doesn’t. Given the talent around him — hello, Mr. Big East Player of the Year Tyler Kolek — it’s entirely possible that Marquette is just as successful as they were last year if someone else ends up atop the scoring chart at the end of the year.
However, it does feel like another 15 points per game season is well within Jones’ reach. Whether that’s good enough to lead the Golden Eagles in scoring, that’s up to everyone else. Same for 3.6 rebounds, 2.0 assists, and 1.4 steals per game. That was last year’s output from Jones, and those aren’t wild numbers by any stretch of the imagination. It was what was necessary to win a Big East title last year, it feels like it’s going to be necessary again this year to win that title again.
With that said: There’s a version of this season where Jones is a little bit less than he was a year ago and Marquette is still just as great. It’s hard to ignore the fact that the T-Rank algorithm is projecting him at 11.5 points, 3.5 rebounds, and 1.8 assists per game. It’s also projecting his minutes to go down, falling from the 73.4% he played last season to just 69% this year. If Marquette can get a little bit more from Sean Jones and Chase Ross, if Marquette gets worthy contributions from freshmen Tre Norman and Zaide Lowery….. well, then that’s less playing time and thus less output from Jones. It’s not a problem if Marquette’s winning, it’s just a different way to get to the result that the team as a whole wants.
Why You Should Get Excited
Do you realize that there’s a non-zero chance that Kam Jones is the 2024 Big East Player of the Year?
I’m going to let that set in. Read it again, if you want.
We’ll talk about it in a bit of detail when we get to Tyler Kolek’s preview, but history says it’s unlikely that Tyler Kolek wins a second straight POY trophy. Therefore, obviously: That means someone else is going to be POY in this league this season. There are worse choices for POY than a guy who leads a team ranked in the top 10 all season in scoring. There are worse choices for Player of the Year than the guy who leads the regular season champion in scoring. There are worse choices for Big East Player of the Year than the guy who leads the regular season champions and the entire league in scoring. Yeah. That’s on the table for Jones, after finishing at 15.1 points per game last year, 2.1 behind UConn’s Adama Sanogo.
It won’t be easy for Jones to take a run at the league’s scoring title this season. Of the nine men who averaged more points per game than him last year, four of them return for this season. Two of them — Creighton’s Ryan Kalkbrenner and Providence’s Bryce Hopkins — are early season candidates for Player of the Year already, largely because both men have a little bit more impact on the floor than Jones does…. although there’s a very real case that Jones is underrated outside of his scoring abilities.
Does this mean that Marquette’s success as a team is almost as important to Jones’ case for POY in March as his individual performance, if not more so? Yeah, almost assuredly that’s the case. But don’t think for one second that Shaka Smart hasn’t said all of this to Jones already. After all, this is the guy who challenged Tyler Kolek to lead the country in assists last season. He’s not afraid of challenging his players with big individual stuff while showing them how it could benefit the team at the same time.
One last thing: How terrifying of a scorer is a Kam Jones that 1) gets to the line more and 2) hits 70% or 75% of his free throws when he’s there? He didn’t get to the line all that much last year relative to how many two-point attempts he shot, and when he got there, Jones only connected on 66% of his freebies. That feels an awful lot like free points being left on the table for the Golden Eagles and for Jones on an individual level.
Potential Pitfalls
The book is out on Kam Jones.
Don’t get me wrong, he’s a hell of a talent and it very much seemed that if the book existed, Vermont didn’t get a look at it before the NCAA tournament started. But the guy taking people a little bit by surprise by going from 7.4 points per game as a freshman to 15.1/game as a sophomore doesn’t exist any more.
With that in mind, the question stands whether or not Jones is going to be able to perform at the level that he did last season. Let me use this as an example:
In 2023-24, according to Sports Reference, there were 34 guards in the country who shot .640 or better on two-point attempts, and Jones was one of them at .643.
Only three of those 34 played for a high major team, with Duke’s Ryan Young and West Virginia’s Kobe Johnson joining Jones on that list.
Only three of those 34 averaged more than 10 points per game, with Campbell’s Jay Pal at 12.3 and Northwestern State’s Jalen Hampton at 10.2 joining Jones on that list.
In other words: It feels like it’s not likely that Jones does that again. Maybe it’s just because he doesn’t get favorable bounces on the rim, maybe it’s because teams figure out a way to slow him down on the way to the rack after a year of seeing him burn people over and over with his scoop shot. What does that mean for Jones and for Marquette in general if he’s not able to be so effective going downhill any more? Is he going to be trying to force the issue? Is the rest of the team going to be able to function as well on offense if they’re not getting that kind of production from Jones?
Well, bad news, everyone: Kam Jones did not shoot 64% on two-point attempts in 2023-24, just as I warned may not happen. Thus, he had to settle for shooting “only” 59.6%, which was “only” the #217 best shooting percentage in the country. In the words of Bugs Bunny, what a revolting development.
GOOD NEWS: Kam Jones balanced out shooting a lower percentage of two-pointers by shooting nearly 50% more twos than he did as a sophomore AND he cranked up his three-point shooting percentage to up over 40% while shooting a few less triples. End result: Jones boosted his effective field goal percentage up over 60% for the year and ranked #72 in the country in that department according to KenPom.com. That’s pretty dang good, especially for a guy who was at just under 58% and #142 the year before.
Jones also boosted his true shooting percentage up over 61% this season, thanks in part to shooting 72% from the free throw line. That’s not world beating type of stuff, but it’s a boost from his 66% as a sophomore. You’ll take that every single time, even if Jones didn’t get to the line quiiiiiiite as much more this past season as we perhaps thought he could/should/would.
The point of all of this is to say that Kam Jones found a new level of effectiveness in his scoring abilities and techniques. He even boosted his assist rate, which in turn nudged him up to 2.4 assists per game. Heck, all of Kam’s per game averages are sliiiiiiiiightly depressed this season, because he had that home game against Seton Hall where he should not have played on his bad ankle. He played just five minutes there, making his only three-point attempt in the contest. That 3 in the scoring column and zeroes everywhere else when working out the per game averages drags everything down just a little bit, and so when you say “he raised his scoring and assist averages,” you have to acknowledge that they should have been a little bit higher than they actually are.
Why is this important to point out? Because even with the slightly nicer looking stat lines than the year before….. Kam Jones didn’t even get so much as an All-Big East Honorable Mention. Our guy averaged 17/3/2/1 with a shooting split line of 50/40/72 and couldn’t even sniff being named one of the 14 best players in the Big East. Now, that is perhaps fair, at least in the hierarchy of Marquette players earning all-conference honors. No one is questioning whether or not Tyler Kolek or Oso Ighodaro deserved their spots in the top 11, and at some point, there’s only so many spots on the ballot. Did UConn and Creighton each get three guys in the top 14? Yep, and all three of the Bluejays are in the First and Second Teams. Is it fair to ignore a guy who was the leading scorer on a team that was in the top 10 of the AP poll for almost the entire season and ended up a #2 seed in the NCAA tournament? It feels a liiiiiiiitle bit unfair, doesn’t it?
By the way: We kiiiiiinda didn’t even see the full extent of Kam’s powers and abilities this season. We saw him excel in his role on this team, yes, 100%, can’t question it. But his ceiling as a basketball player is higher than that. Look no further than the six game sample when Tyler Kolek was out of the lineup:
20.8 points, 4.7 assists, 4.5 assists, 1.5 steals, shooting splits of 51% overall, 46% from behind the three-point line.
Kam was doing that without the bonus of the defensive attention that Tyler Kolek draws away from him. He was arguably more the focus of the opponents’ defensive approach, and Jones was tearing it up in a big, big way. You could argue that six game set got him up and rolling for big plays in the NCAA tournament, too:
22.0 points, 2.7 rebounds, 1.3 assists, 53% from the field, 38% from long range.
BEST GAME
If you wanted to, you could limit this conversation to merely what Kam Jones did after his ankle injury caused him to miss a game. His scoring went through the roof regularly after he returned to the lineup, so it’s an easy case to make. Four 30 point games from February 3rd onward, but only one of them was critical for Marquette. At some point, putting in 34 against DePaul is just showing off, y’know? Anyway, the critical one was his 30 point road performance against Xavier. That was without Kolek in the lineup and coming off of back-to-back losses to Creighton and UConn. No shame in losing to those guys without Kolek, but MU needed to go to Cincinnati and handle things to not make the NCAA selection committee start to ask questions. Jones went 12-for-17 from the field and just missed a double-double with nine assists, plus he added five rebounds. Kam had nine points on shots from the field in the final five minutes alone to make Marquette lock up the 86-80 win. Great stuff.
Do you want to argue that Kam’s 28 points on 10-for-16 shooting along with two rebounds, two assists, and a steal in the NCAA tournament against a frisky Western Kentucky team was more important? Not going to argue with you. He had seven points in the first seven minutes of the second half in that one, which was kiiiind of critical because MU went into the locker room down seven.
SEASON GRADE
Junior Year Kam was better than Sophomore Year Kam on the balance. My biggest concern for him in 2023-24 was going to be that he wasn’t going to be able to maintain what he was doing, and that was definitely not a problem. In fact, we have evidence to show that his role on the team was putting a ceiling on what exactly he’s capable of doing. I can’t go allllll the way over with this because in the eyes of the Big East coaches, this was apparently not a blow your socks into the next county kind of season, but I absolutely can give Kam Jones a 9 for his campaign. Wait, should that be Kampaign?