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Did everyone’s favorite Milwaukee native have a good season?
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 dive deep into the guy holding down the only change in the starting lineup from the year before…..
David Joplin
Junior – #23 – Forward – 6’8” – 225 lbs. – Milwaukee, Wisconsin
*** — Notes a top 300 national ranking per KenPom.com
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
Now we reach junior year, fresh off of Joplin taking home Big East Sixth Man of the Year honors last season. He’s projected to be a starter now, taking the place of Olivier-Maxence Prosper now that OMax is drawing guaranteed paychecks from the Dallas Mavericks for the next few years. This isn’t just me saying that Joplin’s the new guy in the starting lineup, this is head coach Shaka Smart saying that during preseason press availabilities. Not just that he’s the likely starter, but that he’s solidified his starting spot over the summer.
But if Joplin’s been pretty much the same player for the past two years, just with more minutes making his stats go up, then what’s a reasonable expectation for him? If he goes from 19 minutes a game to 25 minutes a game as the starter, that’s roughly a 33% increase in minutes. So, the correlating jump in stats would be 12.2 points, 4.3 rebounds, 1.1 assists, 0.8 steals per game? Are you good with that? Heck, the BartTorvik.com projection for Marquette doesn’t even go that far, pushing Joplin more towards a hard hat kind of a player than a scorer for the Golden Eagles: 10.5 points, 5.0 rebounds, 1.3 assists. Somewhere in there is the reasonable expectation for him.
We all love The Jopwagon, but if he’s just going to keep being the same guy, then we’re just going to get the same guy with even more minutes. That’s probably good for Marquette, but that’s the reasonable approach that we have to take here.
Why You Should Get Excited
Shaka Smart won’t shut up about David Joplin’s work on the VersaClimber in the offseason. Are you familiar with the VersaClimber? It’s a StairMaster, except it’s a ladder instead of just stairs. You get an arm workout along with a leg workout. Joplin had a weeks long training program on the Climber in the offseason, him and walk-on Cameron Brown as a training partner, and in Smart’s words, Joplin has transformed his body.
That’s not going to show up in his listed measurements on the roster page, in fact, Marquette lists Joplin five pounds heavier than he was a year ago. But if Joplin’s in better cardio shape, if he’s leaner, if he’s stronger than he was last season, those are all things that are going to benefit his play on the court.
What does a leaner, meaner, hungrier David Joplin look like? Is that the guy that Shaka Smart has said repeatedly that would lead the Big East in scoring eventually? Is that the ceiling for Joplin 2.0 here?
Potential Pitfalls
If Joplin is taking over for Prosper in the starting lineup, he has to at least move in the direction of defending like OMax did for the Golden Eagles.
Last year’s defense with Prosper on the court, according to Hoop Explorer: 93.8 points per 100 possessions, adjusted for competition.
With Prosper on the bench: 101.6 points per 100 possessions.
Last year’s defense with Joplin on the court: 98.2 points per 100 possessions, adjusted for competition
With Joplin on the bench: 93.9 points per 100 possessions.
There’s only so much that Marquette can do to make their offense better than it was last season when KenPom.com had them with the 7th most efficient offense in the country and they were the best in the Big East by more than a point per 100 possessions. There’s an argument to be made that the offense will be worse this season just because it’s hard to maintain that kind of success. That means the defense will have to be better to balance out for that… and if Joplin’s replacing a guy who was, to a certain extent, singlehandedly responsible for a nearly eight points per 100 possession difference when he was on the court versus on the bench….. man, that means Joplin’s gotta step up in a big way on that end of the floor. Hitting the shots will do a lot of things to help Marquette win games, but if Joplin’s contributions on defense don’t pick up, the Golden Eagles are going to have to win a lot more track meets than Shaka Smart really would want to find his team playing.
I don’t want to go so far as to say that David Joplin’s junior year was bad. That’s not correct.
But I also don’t think it was a resounding success.
His offensive efficiency took a dip, falling from 104.6 per KenPom.com as a sophomore to 101.9. His usage went notably down, but he also cut his turnover rate way down, so there’s a little bit of a usage drop built into that improvement at protecting the ball, and he wasn’t bad there to start with. Joplin’s per 40 minute stats took a beating in general, with his scoring falling from 19.4 points per 40 minutes to 15.6. He didn’t seem to get a boost from playing more often or at least more consistently, going from 19.0 minutes per game to nearly 28 a night.
Joplin’s three-point shooting took a little bit of a tumble and to make matters worse, he was shooting it less per 40 minutes of action that he was the year before. As a sophomore, he was letting it fly 9.8 times per 40 from behind the arc, and connected on nearly 40% of his attempts. Junior year? Just 7.9 attempts per 40 minutes, and Jop’s conversion rate fell to under 36%. He wasn’t a bad shooter, you’ll take 35.5% from distance…. it just wasn’t what we could have pictured in our heads for him.
Even worse? Joplin was at his worst in Marquette’s most important games, or at least against MU’s toughest opponents. Yes, he shot 37.6% in MU’s 20 game Big East schedule, and that’s great….. but that’s being propped up by a 6-for-8 at DePaul and 8-for-16 in two contests against Georgetown. 14-for-24 (58.3%!) in three contests against truly awful opponents….. and 27-for-85 (31.7%) in the other 17.
Oof.
It gets worse.
That dials out to just 29.7% against what KenPom.com calls top 100 opponents…. and 24.1% against top 50 foes. CAVEAT: Both of those numbers are remarkably dropped by Joplin closing out the year with an 0-for-7 against NC State in the Sweet 16 when the entire team couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, and an 0-for-6 against UConn in the Big East title game didn’t help, either. But it still wasn’t good by that point of the year, anyway.
In the preview, we talked about Joplin’s need to get better on the defensive end of the floor, as that was a particular strength of Olivier-Maxence Prosper and Jop was taking his starting spot. GOOD NEWS: Hoop Explorer says that Marquette was better on defense with Jop on the floor than the Golden Eagles were the year before, allowing 95.7 points per 100 possessions. David Joplin’s probably never going to be regarded as a defensive savant, but MU needed him to be better, and it appears that he was. Heck, did you expect Joplin to turn into the #258 block rate guy in the country, as KenPom.com says he is? I didn’t! That’s great, even if maaaaaaybe it’s unrepeatable next year. Anyway, 95.7 per 100 possessions isn’t the world’s greatest defense, but Joplin was a huge plus on the offensive end, so you can absolutely win basketball games when he’s getting better on defense.
Was Marquette better on defense when Jop was on the bench?
Yeah, they were. It’s not a perfect world. MU was also notably worse on offense, dropping more than 10 points scored per 100 possessions. That’s a bigger drop off than the improvement on defense with Jop taking a breather, so it’s up to you to figure out which version of Marquette you really wanted to see on the floor.
In short: David Joplin is a land of contrasts.
BEST GAME
I mean, it’s hard to ignore the 21 points — tied for his season high! — on 6-for-8 long range shooting in the road trip against DePaul. David Joplin loves himself some Wintrust Arena for whatever reason. Marquette never quite got it into gear after taking a 19 point lead with six minutes to go in the first half, and honestly, Joplin’s a big reason why. He picked up his second foul as Jalen Terry heaved a prayer at the rim at the end of the half, and then snagged foul #3 less than three minutes into the second half. The numbers for his 26 minutes are pretty good, but Joplin’s limitations in the second half are a big reason why MU couldn’t pull away from a galactically awful DePaul team.
So I turn my attention to two other possibilities. Joplin picked up his only KenPom.com MVP of the season in the home game against Georgetown on December 22. He had 20 points on 6-for-11 shooting, just barely missed a double-double on nine rebounds, and added a block and two steals. MU won by 30, so I don’t know if we want to give his best performance of the year there.
I am inclined to hand the trophy over to what Joplin did in Omaha with Tyler Kolek and Oso Ighodaro out of the lineup. MU went to visit #12 Creighton knowing they wouldn’t have Kolek, but Ighodaro’s illness was a game day surprise for the Golden Eagles. Marquette needed a big game from everyone if they wanted to find a way to win, and I think Joplin got there. 21 points on 8-for-13 shooting, and he pounded the Bluejays inside to get there, going 6-for-10 on twos. Joplin added five rebounds, an assist, and a block, and MU had a chance to win with four minutes left. Yes, Baylor Scheierman ran wild and pushed the Jays away from the Golden Eagles at the end of the show, but Joplin came up big when MU needed him to do just that. Hard to beat that as his best job of the year.
SEASON GRADE
David Joplin was a useful and competitive starter playing 28 minutes a night for a team that spent all but three weeks of the season in the top 10 of the Associated Press poll and earned the program’s second straight — and second ever — #2 seed in the NCAA tournament. Like I said at the top: This was not a bad season for Joplin. It also maybe didn’t rise to the level of what we could call obviously successful, or going above and beyond expectations.
Jop did Jop Things, but maybe not as much of them as we would have liked to see from him. A 6 feels very wrong, but so does an 8. So, I guess I’m stuck with a 7 for Joplin’s season grade by default, huh?