Can the nearly 7-foot tall New Zealander make the jump from Key Bench Guy to Big East Starter this year?
The 2024-25 college basketball season is right around the corner, so let’s dive into the Marquette men’s basketball roster and take a look at what to expect from each player this season. Going forward in these Player Previews, we’ll be going in this order: The two true freshmen in alphabetical order by last name — skipping past Josh Clark who is not expected to play this season — then the redshirt freshman, then the returning players in ascending order of average minutes played last season.
We’re going to organize our thoughts about the upcoming season as it relates to each player into categories, as we always do:
- Reasonable Expectations
- Why You Should Get Excited
- Potential Pitfalls
With that out of the way, we move along to a guy who needs to have a big season if Marquette is going to have the kind of year that people think that they can have………
Ben Gold
Junior — #12 — Forward — 6’11” — 235 lbs. — Wellington, New Zealand
Through two seasons in Milwaukee, Ben Gold has gone from “well, let’s see what he can do” to “hey, he’s got something good going on here, let’s see what it develops into” and then along to “okay, he’s a definitive contributor on this team, it’s good to have him coming off the bench.” Even though his minutes more than doubled going from freshman year to sophomore year, his scoring numbers weirdly did not make that jump with him, as he went from 2.7 points as a freshman to 5.0 per game last year. He raised his shooting percentages both inside and outside the arc, so there’s not a complaint about how Gold was getting what he was getting, it’s just a little surprising to not see that same “more than double” going on.
This is important to point here, because I think most people if not everyone paying close attention to the Golden Eagles heading into the 2024-25 season think that Ben Gold is going to start at center for head coach Shaka Smart. That’s notable, because starting at center might end up meaning that he comes close to re-doubling his minutes after averaging 16.8 per game last season. I’m not going to tell you that he’s definitely going to average nearly 34 minutes a night, but “starting” usually means somewhere between 25 and 32, right? What’s going to happen when that minute boost comes again this year?
Reasonable Expectations
I don’t think we’re stepping out of line to say that if Ben Gold is going to start for Marquette this year, then he has to play starter’s minutes. We’ll see what the rotation actually looks like when the rubber meets the road against Stony Brook on November 4th, but the minutes are what’s the key here. The fact of the matter is that Ben Gold is probably not best suited to be a traditional 5 in a college basketball rotation, but it looks like that’s going to be his role. Set screens, score in the post, rebounding like crazy…. maybe not the best use of his skills, so Marquette’s going to have to find a way to make Gold an efficient center. He’s probably a better-than-you-realize rebounder after finishing last year with the second best defensive rebounding rate on the team per KenPom.com, but given Marquette’s overall rebounding problems under Shaka Smart’s direction, it’s hard to look at Ben Gold and say “yep, there’s the solution to the problem.”
So on top of the idea that he’s going to have to produce in order to justify the starter’s minutes, Gold is also going to have to be able to stay on the floor. For each of the past two seasons, the big Kiwi has averaged more than four fouls per 40 minute per KenPom. That’s fine when you’re averaging 17 minutes a night, go wild. But if MU needs Gold to stay on the floor for 25+ minutes a night, getting in foul trouble is going to make it hard to get to that point. In addition, merely picking up fouls is going to make it a little bit harder for Gold to be an effective defender. Once you get 2, the risk of 3 is present, and you get the idea here. Why is that important? Because Gold wasn’t a net positive defender for Marquette last season, according to Hoop Explorer. Yes, a little bit skewed by Gold mostly playing backup minutes to Oso Ighodaro and his defensive wizardry, but 99.6 points per 100 possessions against top 200 opponents is middle of the road type of stuff.
I know this is coming off a lot like the Potential Pitfalls portion of the program where I introduce the possible problems that await a particular player. But of everyone on the roster, Gold is perhaps the only one who is seeing a major reconfiguration of what’s being expected of him. The guys we’ve talked about before now are either completely new to the team or at least to the active roster or looking to get a chance to expand their roles. The guys we’ll talk about after Gold have established roles as leaders that we’ve already seen and can believe in. Neither of those two categories apply to Gold, so part of the Reasonable Expectation for him is to break past these possible barriers in front of him.
“God, Andy, just give us the Torvik algorithm expectation already, come on!” Yeah, I know, I wanted to set the tone first….. because the algorithm isn’t super exciting. 5.5 points, 4.5 rebounds, 1.1 assists in a little more than 21 minutes a night. See? You were expecting more from Gold in your head, weren’t you?
Why You Should Get Excited
Marquette is going to have to find a way to be an efficient offensive team this year without the passing touch of both Tyler Kolek and Oso Ighodaro. What if the solution is merely “the big man setting screens for Kam Jones is an effective at worst three-point shooter?” We know that Marquette’s offense runs wild when it’s Ighodaro and his complete lack of outside shooting threat attached to setting screens on the perimeter.
What happens to the offense when it’s Ben Gold setting all those screens and he’s a 36% shooter like he was last season? What happens if he gets a little bit more comfortable and a little bit more in rhythm because he’s playing more? What do defenses do about Marquette’s cutting and passing in space when they’re playing 5-out because Gold can rain it in from anywhere?
An even better question: What if Marquette’s coaching staff gets it through Ben Gold’s head that his ability to drive to the rim is going to get him even more wide open three-point attempts? Even though Gold’s minutes more than doubled, his two-point attempt average didn’t move at all from freshman year to sophomore year. In Per-40-Minutes terms, Gold went from 4.6 two-point attempts to 2.1. We saw Gold use that “get the closeout in the air, drive past him to the rim” kind of regularly as a freshman, but it kind of disappeared as a sophomore in favor of more three-pointers. Now, Gold was connecting on more threes, so that’s not a huge problem, but it’s a circular issue: If Gold starts driving more, the closeout has to start respecting the drive more, so the threes get more open, and that makes the closeout go harder, which makes it easier to drive past them…. you see the loop here. Show of hands: Who wants at least one “Ben Gold rim-rattling dunk on a baseline drive” per game this season? Hey, look, everyone’s hands are in the air.
Not for nothing, but do you know what will fix that two-point attempt drop off as well? Offensive rebounding. I don’t know how often Gold will end up in a good position to be there for that if Marquette does play a lot of 5-out with him on the floor, but easy putbacks is a fun way to get a lot of two-pointers.
Potential Pitfalls
Parts of the opening section sounded an awful lot like the Potential Pitfalls, so you’ve already filled in a lot of the problem here. With Caedin Hamilton at least showing a little bit of learning by practicing against Oso Ighodaro all last year, then we have to at least acknowledge the possibility that Hamilton might fit the 5 position on the floor better than Gold. Not just because of the skills by the way, but also because Hamilton visually appears to be a more physical inside presence than Gold has shown himself to be and/or than Gold visually appears to be.
If Hamilton can defend inside better than Gold and he can provide some of the offensive threats that Ighodaro did…. then what is Gold’s role on this team? Is it just what he was doing last year, floating back and forth between backing up David Joplin and playing a little bit of center here and there?
Shaka Smart has said in the past that part of what the coaching staff is doing with Gold is trying to get him to believe he can be as good as the coaching staff believes he can be. At some point, you’ve pushed a guy along as far as you can push him along. If he doesn’t take the final jump on his own and actually produce the way you need him to, you have to start searching for other options, right?