The Golden Eagles look to stay unbeaten in Big East action when they visit the Musketeers in Cincinnati.
#9 Marquette Golden Eagles (10-2, 1-0 Big East) at Xavier Musketeers (8-4, 0-1 Big East)
Date: Saturday, December 21, 2024
Time: 11am Central
Location: Cintas Center, Cincinnati, Ohio
Marquette Stats Leaders
Points: Kam Jones, 20.3 ppg
Rebounds: David Joplin, 5.4 rpg
Assists: Kam Jones, 6.3 apg
Xavier Stats Leaders
Points: Ryan Conwell, 17.0 ppg
Rebounds: Dailyn Swain, 4.5 rpg
Assists: Dayvion McKnight, 4.6 apg
Xavier Injury Update: Mega-senior forward Zach Freemantle suffered a leg injury late in Xavier’s 68-65 loss to Cincinnati on December 14th. He’s out indefinitely after starting the first 11 games of the season and averaging 16.9 points, a team high 7.7 rebounds, 2.5 assists, and 1.5 steals per game.
KenPom.com Rankings
Marquette: #8
Xavier: #59
Game Projection: Marquette has a 63% chance of victory, with a predicted score of 78-74.
This Season So Far: I put this section in the preview every time that we encounter a Big East team for the first time just as an opportunity to review what the team in question has been up to so far. Unfortunately, this section is nearly useless to us because of the aforementioned injury to Zach Freemantle. Anything we say about Xavier from their first 11 games of the season just does not apply to Xavier for this game because the Musketeers have no choice but to be a completely different team than they were up til Freemantle’s injury. He’s second on the team in field goal attempts, barely trailing behind Ryan Conwell by 0.4 per game and Conwell’s 13 FGAs last time out didn’t exactly tip the scales there. Freemantle is the only guy averaging over five rebounds a game, and he was a really great defensive rebounder for a team that has been hovering in the vicinity of being elite at that task all season. Freemantle is second on the team in assists, second in steals, and tops in blocks per game at 0.8 per game. He did a metric ton for them this season, and they’re going to need a collection of guys doing a variety of tasks to make up for what Freemantle brought to the table.
And then they put together a 12-2 run to lead #11 UConn 69-64 with less than five minutes to play at the XL Center in Hartford in their Big East opener. And Dante Maddox hit two free throws with nine seconds left to pull into a 78-all tie and push the thing into overtime after Solo Ball missed a three at the horn on the other end.
Yes, they lost, 94-89. They were also heavy underdogs on the road and they made the #11 team in the country buckle their belts and put on their working boots in order to put them away.
And now they take the sting from that performance/result combination and apply it to hosting the #9 team in the country.
I want to be clear about this: Xavier has looked Not Good at multiple points this season. They were trailing Texas Southern at the half in their opener and needed an 18-3 second half run to take a 12 point lead — do the math there — on their way to a nine point win. They gave up a 19-3 run against Michigan before letting the Wolverines close out a 25 point victory with a 19-2 run. They immediately handed all 12 points gained from a 14-2 run right back to South Carolina State with less than five minutes left and needed to gut out a 61-59 lead with a minute to play. All of that was with Freemantle in the lineup. There are reasons why they are nowhere close to looking like an NCAA tournament team at this point of the season.
None of that means that this specific 40 minute contest will be a walk in the park for Marquette.
Tempo Free Fun: I mentioned him in the UConn paragraph there, so let’s start with Dante Maddox. Before the UConn game, the 6’2” transfer from Toledo was averaging 5.0 points and 2.7 rebounds in 15 minutes a game and shooting 30% from behind the three-point line. Against the Huskies, he turned into a superweapon, coming off the bench to go 5-for-9 behind the arc on his way to a season high 22 points in 35 minutes. No, he is probably not going to shoot 55% from three for the rest of the season. However, he did connect on 42% of his threes in two years at Toledo and 34% in two years at Cal State Fullerton. That outburst against the Huskies raised his season shooting percentage to 35.9%, but in what KenPom.com marks as top 100 games, Maddox is shooting 42% behind the arc.
Why does this matter? Because Xavier is shooting 40.7% from behind the arc this season. KenPom.com has them as the #8 most accurate three-point shooting team in the country at the moment. Perhaps most importantly to the nature of Saturday’s game: Losing Freemantle only makes them better at it. Freemantle was shooting a woeful 8-for-30 (26.7%) on threes at the time of his injury after playing as a 35% shooter in his first four campaigns with the Musketeers. No Freemantle means more shooting time for Marcus Foster (47%), Ryan Conwell (46%), Dayvion McKnight (44%), so if Marquette doesn’t mind their p’s and q’s when it comes to rotations and closeouts, they’re going to watch shots fall on their head all game long. Xavier is #11 in the country when it comes to putting an assist on their field goals, scoring off the pass on over 64% of their buckets. Having good shooters get wide open is pretty much the quickest path to stacking up assists.
The catch here is that Xavier doesn’t actually shoot threes that much. Long range attempts are less than 39% of their total attempts on the season, and for context: Marquette’s “dunks and threes only, please” offensive mindset has the Golden Eagles getting over 46% of their attempts out there. MU ranks #44 in the country in that rate per KenPom.com, while Xavier’s down below #200. This is weird, because Xavier’s not a great two-point shooting team. 50.9% isn’t bad at face value, obviously, but it’s #189 in the country. McKnight and Foster both take more shots inside the arc than outside — it’s a 70/30 split for the 6’0” McKnight, believe it or not — so Marquette finds themselves in the difficult position of getting these guys to settle for three-pointers being somewhat of a mistake when it comes to how many points go up on the scoreboard.
It appears that Marquette’s offense is going to go largely unimpeded by XU’s defense, at least in terms of whether or not a shot gets to the rim. Xavier is currently ranking just inside the top 200 in terms of turnover rate, so they’re not going to be doing much when it comes to popping the ball free from the Golden Eagles. They block shots even less frequently — remember when I said Freemantle led the team with less than one per game? — so that’s not much of a worry, even when MU takes it inside. The question becomes exactly how Marquette goes about getting their shots. Xavier is elite at running teams off the three-point line, coming in at #36 in the country at pushing teams to shoot twos instead of threes. That’s not necessarily a problem for MU — the Golden Eagles are much better in terms of national rank at shooting two pointers (#24) than they are at shooting threes (#210) — but Xavier is a really good two-point shooting defense team even if they aren’t blocking shots. I get the sense that they are a terrible closeout team because they’re a very bad three-point shooting defense team AND they’re even worse at allowing assists on made baskets. That seems to indicate that they give up a ton of catch-and-shoot threes, and if that’s the case, we might be starting this game with Kam Jones on double-double watch for points and assists.
That’s not just me being boastful about the mid-season All-American candidate in blue and gold, either. Kam had 30 and 9 last season in the regular season finale at Cintas Center with Tyler Kolek injured as MU scuffled together an 86-80 victory, and last year’s Xavier team had the same “giving up assists” problem. I suspect that Shaka Smart would like to see a bit more defense for the Golden Eagles this time around in Cincinnati, as MU had to shoot 13-for-16 in the final 13 minutes in order to get that win.
Marquette Last 10 Games: 8-2, alternating losses and wins in their last four contests.
Xavier Last 10 Games: 6-4, but all four losses have been in the last six games including each of the last two.
All-Time Series: Marquette leads, 59-27
Current Streak: Marquette has now won four straight in this series after picking up the season sweep a year ago.