Shaka Smart thinks the sophomore from Missouri has made a jump. Can he make The Jump?
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 that Shaka Smart seems high on heading into his sophomore year……..
Zaide Lowery
Sophomore — #7 — Guard — 6’5” — 200 lbs. — Springfield, Missouri
I think it’s safe to say that Zaide Lowery had roughly the kind of freshman season that everyone was expecting him to have. With Marquette’s schedule kicking into high gear pretty early in the season, Lowery didn’t have a chance to play his way into the rotation, which meant that he didn’t really play much at all until Chase Ross started missing time with his shoulder injury. Lowery acquitted himself nicely with a run of five straight games with at least 13 minutes of action, and it seemed that being pressed into service did help him get a few more minutes along the way as the season went along. But, much like classmate Tre Norman, ultimately that meant a brief appearance in MU’s first NCAA tournament game and then no minutes at all in the next two.
But that’s fine! The whole question for Lowery last year was whether or not he could steal minutes from any of the returning guys. It’s not a knock on Lowery that he couldn’t, it’s a compliment to the high level of play from Chase Ross and Stevie Mitchell and so on that they needed to keep their minutes. Sometimes the minutes just aren’t there for freshmen, and you wait to see what they become as sophomores.
Reasonable Expectations
Let’s just say it: BartTorvik’s algorithm projection for Marquette in 2024-25 doesn’t have Zaide Lowery as one of the top 10 projected contributors.
Part of that is the continued existence of Kam Jones, Stevie Mitchell, and Chase Ross. Part of that is the addition of top 100 prospect Damarius Owens, because history says that guys with Owens’ recruiting profile contribute X amount to the team right out of the gate. So part of “not one of the top 10” is just a numbers game. Much like last year, who do you take minutes away from to get Lowery onto the floor?
The answer in this case might be Sean Jones. The algorithm says that Jones is projected to play over 25 minutes a game…. and last we saw, he’s not even practicing with the team as he recovers from ACL surgery in January. Those minutes are going somewhere else…. but they won’t be going to Lowery, at least not directly. Lowery’s not a point guard like Jones, so that means the point guard minutes are going somewhere else, and if that’s the case, then someone can’t play the role that the computer says that they’re going to play.
In other words: Is there space in a backcourt/wing rotation for Lowery to play the roughly 10 minutes per game he averaged a year ago? Yeah, probably. Is he going to have a starring role on this team this year? Almost definitely not, but……..
Why You Should Get Excited
…… but head coach Shaka Smart went out of his way at the Open Scrimmage in early October to mention how much Lowery’s game has grown in the offseason. Smart said that we would all be impressed with Lowery’s development as a basketball player. That’s a pretty high compliment, particularly since there was nothing wrong with Lowery as a player last year, he just didn’t get a lot of minutes.
If he has in fact made notable strides forward — the best thing about freshmen is that they become sophomores, right? — then that means that Lowery should, in theory, be undeniable in terms of earning solid regular every night rotation minutes at worst. Keep in mind, Lowery didn’t average much of anything in terms of full season numbers last year, so playing 15 minutes a night and chipping in 5.0 points and 2.5 rebounds would actually be a huge step forward for him. That is about what he averaged when Chase Ross was hurt last year, so it’s clearly in him to do that on a limited run. We just need to see it for a full 31 game season, and the head coach seems to inclined to think that Lowery’s capable of doing it.
Potential Pitfalls
Shaka Smart said that about Lowery in the pre-scrimmage warm-ups. Then, in the second half, after Lowery came down with a defensive rebound, Smart bolted from his spot on the sideline to bark something at Lowery. I presume it was something in the vein of “get your butt in gear out there,” because two seconds later, Lowery was at the rim, twisting through traffic to score.
I don’t think it’s a great sign for Lowery’s season that Smart had to bark at him to get him to become authoritative as a player, especially after Smart was giving Lowery his flowers before gameplay started. I also don’t think it’s that good to find out after the game that the aforementioned layup in transition was one of just two buckets for Lowery on five attempts while playing every single minute of the scrimmage.
To put it another way: Al Amadou finished with the exact same number of made baskets, and Big Al made a three-pointer as well, something that Lowery did not do on three attempts. There’s a very real chance that what Smart shouted was some variation on “hey, you’re making me look bad out there after I complimented you.”
In terms of “performances directly after the head coach talked about how great you were,” this was one of the worst that you’ll ever see. If Lowery has in fact made the progress that Smart said he has, then there shouldn’t be a requirement of Smart running out onto the court to motivate Lowery’s play. Because of the departure of Tyler Kolek and the questionable status of Sean Jones, Marquette may need a lot from Zaide Lowery this season. If he’s not ready to grab onto that opportunity, someone else is going to grab it instead, one way or another.