Let’s get our postseason recaps up and running with a look at the redshirt freshman on the Golden Eagles’ roster……
With the 2024-25 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’ll start off our run of reviews everyone’s favorite redshirt freshman…….
Caedin Hamilton
Redshirt Freshman — #35 — Forward — 6’9” — 250 lbs. — Santa Maria, California
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
Let’s start with this: BartTorvik.com doesn’t include Hamilton in the algorithm’s top 10 projected contributors for Marquette this season. This should not immediately make you say “oh, well, he’s not going to do anything for MU this year.” That’s the nature of a computer system looking at a completely unheralded big man recruit coming out of a redshirt first year of college. I get where the computer is coming from here. Everything about Caedin Hamilton on paper says “developmental project, will take time to be a role player, much less an impact player.”
But Marquette needs someone to be the backup center on this team. Ben Gold is ostensibly the starting center, and there’s very little about Gold’s game that says “yes, is a proven 30 minute a night post defender.” Size-wise, sure, but that’s about it. There is a way for Hamilton to earn minutes on the floor as a backup big man, giving Gold a chance to chug a cup of Gatorade and catch his breath. Is it a lot of minutes? Maybe not, but there’s a role to be had for someone here, and why not Hamilton? Heck, there’s a possibility that there’s minutes to be earned playing alongside Gold, as the big Kiwi might have a better future as a stretch 4 than a 5 man.
Why You Should Get Excited
I want to repeat a couple of lines that I wrote in August 2023 after watching approximately 60 seconds of Caedin Hamilton footage on the internet.
I can’t speak to the level of competition, but am I seeing some proto-Ighodaro in what Hamilton’s doing here? Yeah, I think that’s safe to say.
I feel incredibly smart right now. Proto-Oso Ighodaro is what I saw from Hamilton at the Open Scrimmage in early October. Here’s what I wrote in my notebook from the scrimmage:
First and foremost: Caedin Hamilton, even though he’s listed at 6’9” and 240 pounds, is far from being a traditional back-to-the-basket center. He’s not exactly Oso Ighodaro either, but there’s a more than a tinge of Oso in his game. At the very least, practicing against Oso all of last season has rubbed off on Hamilton a bit. I saw him throw a bounce pass into the lane from the top of the key to hit a cutter for a layup, and I saw him drive (!) from the wing to the middle of the lane, spin (!) away from the defenders, and hit Zaide Lowery on the baseline for a cut to the rim, and I saw Hamilton drive (!) to the post, stop short, and then body Josh Clark in an attempt to score but ended up drawing the foul.
He’s clearly not at Senior Year Oso Ighodaro levels of contributing to the offense, I want to make this 100% obvious. The fact that 1) Hamilton is trying these things and 2) that they’re reasonably successful means that 1) the coaching staff wants him playing like this and 2) he’s comfortable doing them, too.
Does this mean instant and heavy minutes for him? Hardly, but if your friends suddenly start asking you “who the heck is this big man who came out of nowhere for Marquette,” well, just remember that I pointed this out to you first.
Potential Pitfalls
I can’t help but wonder if Hamilton’s offensive skills that were on display at the Open Scrimmage are a by-product of playing against his Marquette teammates. How much of it was merely there because he has figured out that he can beat Josh Clark to a spot on the floor, and if that’s the case and we know Josh Clark is Not Ready For Prime Time, then how ready is Hamilton for minutes against Creighton’s Ryan Kalkbrenner or even UConn’s Samson Johnson?
The flipside of that is the fact that Josh Clark was running wild in the second half of the Open Scrimmage. Look, the Marquette offensive structure is designed to force big man defenders into making coverage decisions that allow for alley-oops and one-step dunks. To a certain extent, Hamilton might have been making the defensive read that the coaches want him to make, and Clark going nuts isn’t his fault. But then again, when the game turns into the other team’s center hammering dunk after dunk after dunk, well, that’s probably a little bit your problem, right? And if Hamilton’s not ready to defend Josh Clark….. well, you see the problem, right? Especially on a team where the coaching staff is already telling everyone who will listen that the 2024-25 roster has to buckle down and defend harder than ever.
I think we can say that the writing on the wall for what Caedin Hamilton’s first season of action for Marquette was going to turn into as Marquette turned the corner from their November 15th game at Maryland to their November 19th home game against Purdue. through the first three games of the year — all against buy game type opponents — Hamilton came off the bench to chip in 12 or 13 minutes, score a bucket or two, and grab a rebound or two. Exactly what you’d expect to see a head coach do with his project big man in his first three Division 1 games. Let him get his feet wet, go from there.
That brings us to the game against Maryland, and the minutes remained the same for Hamilton. Grabbing four rebounds and handing out two assists? Great! Missing all four shots — one two, one three, two free throws — that he attempted? Bad! He subbed out for the last time with 12:37 to play against the Terrapins and didn’t play again. That’s not really a problem, that was a tightly contested road game against a pretty good Maryland team, that’s not exactly “let your project big man figure it out against Derik Queen” time.
But y’know, reasons for optimism.
Right up until the Boilermakers took the floor in Milwaukee. Marquette was up seven at the half and up 14 with five minutes to go….. and Hamilton played two minutes.
Next time out was the Bahamas game against Georgia…… three minutes.
Hamilton didn’t crack double digits worth of minutes for the rest of the season unless it was 1) a buy game or 2) a game that was decided by double digits.
Now look. Long term for his time in blue and gold, none of this is a problem. Hamilton was a late add to the recruiting class as essentially a zero star prospect, and this was his first action at the D1 level after taking a redshirt year to get him to the point where he could even contribute what he was contributing this year. Getting a minute here or there as a freshman is going to pay off long term for Hamilton and the Golden Eagles, off in the far flung future of the spring of 2028.
But it meant that he wasn’t going to be a particularly impactful player in 2025.
In fact, according to Hoop Explorer, Marquette was better on both ends of the floor with Hamilton on the bench. Some of that is just “hey, he’s figuring it out,” but at the end of the day, if the coaching staff can’t say “look, we know we’re getting a huge boost on [insert end of the court] from him,” then it’s going to be hard to argue that Hamilton should be taking minutes away from anyone.
That’s the math of it, at least. The optics of it? I can’t help but wonder how much different that things would have gone for Hamilton this season if he had a little bit more lift. More than once (or twice or thrice) it felt like Hamilton was getting beat for rebounds because he wasn’t getting into the air to go after the ball. To be clear: He finished the year with the best offensive rebounding rate on the team per KenPom.com, and if he had the minutes to qualify, that 11% would have been top 200 in the country at least. There’s reasons to be pleased with what he was doing…. it’s just that there could have been a few more if he had gotten both feet in the air, and more rebounds gained leads to more playing time, and you get the picture. If I’m allowed to make prescriptions for summer workouts that might be beneficial to the player and the team for 2025-26? Can we get a whole lotta box jumps for Caedin Hamilton in between summer classes?
Quite honestly, I’m not quite sure that we ever really saw that Caedin Hamilton that I described in the Get Excited section of the preview last fall. Instead, it was a lot more towards the Pitfalls section. That’s not the best thing to have happen, but that’s why we write this things out in advance.
BEST GAME
I think this is safely the home game against Stonehill. Six points on perfect 3-for-3 shooting, three rebounds, four assists, and a steal, all in 13 minutes. What’s not to like?
SEASON GRADE
At the end of the day, while it wasn’t a star-in-waiting performance from Hamilton, it was a “get out there and play some minutes here and there” season. Expecting more than that wasn’t a smart idea to start with, so we can’t knock his score down over that. He met the target score of “let Ben Gold sit down and have some Gatorade,” so I think that means that we can’t do any better or worse than a 7.
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