The Golden Eagles welcome the Blue Demons to Fiserv Forum in need of snapping a three game losing streak.
#18 Marquette Golden Eagles (18-6, 9-4 Big East) vs DePaul Blue Demons (11-13, 2-11 Big East)
Date: Tuesday, February 11, 2025
Time: 7:30pm Central
Location: Fiserv Forum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
The Stakes: Marquette is trying to avoid tying the longest losing streak since Shaka Smart was hired as head coach, as well as avoid the longest Big East regular season game losing streak since Smart took over.
Marquette Stats Leaders
Points: Kam Jones, 19.2 ppg
Rebounds: David Joplin, 5.2 rpg
Assists: Kam Jones, 6.0 apg
DePaul Stats Leaders
Points: CJ Gunn, 12.1 ppg
Rebounds: N.J. Benson, 6.0 rpg
Assists: Layden Blocker, 3.0 apg
DePaul Injury Notes: Conor Enright is actually the team’s assist leader at 6.2 per game. However, Enright was ruled out for the rest of the season for shoulder surgery before DePaul’s most recent game. He was wearing a shoulder brace for the January 14th game against Marquette, so this isn’t that much of a surprise. Enright was averaging 7.5 points and 3.3 rebounds in 30 minutes a night to go with his assists. He had 11 points, three rebounds, and 11 assists in the first meeting against Marquette.
In addition to Enright, DePaul was without Troy D’Amico and David Skogman last week against Villanova, with both sitting out with foot injuries. It was the first game all year that D’Amico had missed, and he had started in 22 of his 23 appearances while averaging 5.6 points and 2.9 rebounds. It was the third straight missed game for Skogman after missing three games earlier this season as well. He maxed out at 20 minutes played in the six games in between the two stretches of missed time, and is averaging 6.6 points and 5.1 rebounds. Skogman didn’t do much against Marquette in the first game in nine minutes, but D’Amico had 10 rebounds, two assists, and a steal.
KenPom.com Rankings
Marquette: #22
DePaul: #130
Game Projection: Marquette has a 94% chance of victory, with a predicted score of 81-64.
Last Time Out: Marquette jumped out to a 21-10 lead, but trailed at the half in the first meeting with DePaul down at Wintrust Arena this season. Coming down to less than a minute to go, MU trailed by four, but got threes from Kam Jones and Chase Ross on either side of a hilariously bad turnover by Conor Enright, but didn’t get in Enright’s way on his way to the rim to score right before the horn. That sent the thing on to overtime, where David Joplin rained in a pair of threes out of the gate, and MU was up eight with less than 90 seconds to go, and by 10 with 1:02 left.
Except Isaiah Rivera went NUCLEAR HOT and scored 12 points in 43 seconds, 1 point game, seven seconds to go. Kam Jones splits two free throws, Ben Gold trapped up Jacob Meyer on the sideline, no foul called, Marquette wins, 85-83. It was not what you would call a fun experience.
Since Last We Met: That loss dropped DePaul to 9-9 on the year and 0-7 in the Big East. By default, going 2-4 since then is an improvement for the Blue Demons. The wins are at Georgetown and at home over Seton Hall, which aren’t crazy amazing wins, but it’s two more wins than they had on New Year’s Day, so there’s that.
DePaul also hasn’t played poorly. Yes, they got roasted by Creighton and Butler. They were also up 37-29 on Connecticut at the half at the XL Center in Hartford, and their 10 point home loss to Villanova was a competitive contest with five minutes to go. That was the most recent game on the Blue Demons’ schedule, so they’ve been off for almost a week before Tuesday’s game.
Tempo Free Fun: Normally Tempo Free Fun is trying to figure out where the opponent can cause problems for Marquette, and in the case of a second meeting of the season like this one, it’s for seeing what did and didn’t work against the team in question the first time around.
But we’ve got more important things to discuss. Let’s start with what Marquette’s Game Score chart looks like as of Monday morning on BartTorvik.com.
The precise math of how Game Score is calculated isn’t critical here. 100 = perfect game, 0 = absolute trash fire game. Don’t worry too much about the black dotted line, that’s the Five Game Rolling Average. We’re really just paying attention to the thick and thin yellow lines here, which is MU’s average Game Score and full season trend respectively.
The thing has been on a notable downward slope maybe since the loss to Dayton (the second pink circle from the left), but for sure going on a slide after the home win over Creighton. Two sub-par performances in wins — vs Georgetown and at DePaul — and two truly wretched performances in losses — vs Xavier and vs UConn — are outweighing pretty good outings against Seton Hall, Villanova, Butler, and even the loss to St. John’s. It’s important to remember you can play well and lose and play poorly and win here. To put it another way: You’d much rather have games where you say “well, what are you going to do, sometimes you lose games to good teams, oh well,” than have games where you say “we won, but I don’t think anyone’s feeling good about it.”
To put a point on it: Using the BartTorvik.com data filter, Marquette has been playing like the #63 team in the country since wrapping up the win over Creighton on January 3rd. #77 on offense, #66 on defense. MU is nowhere close to missing the NCAA tournament, they’ve got too many wins in their back pocket for that to be the case, and the Torvik Ranketology Now projection slots them in as a #5 seed. But the fact of the matter is that for the past month-plus, MU has not been playing like an NCAA tournament team.
It’s not even a particularly complicated problem: They stink at two-point baskets on both ends of the floor. The Torvik data filter gives us national ranks for shooting: #282 on offense inside the arc, #295 on defense. They can’t get easy buckets at the rim and they’re giving up way too many buckets at the rim. Whatever positivity you can glean from MU’s efficiency is being entirely propped up by their turnover numbers, as the Golden Eagles have been elite in the last nine games at both keeping the ball (#11) and taking it away from opponents (#7).
Shaka Smart started the year off talking about how the 2024-25 Golden Eagles needed to have a Goon Mentality if they were going to win ballgames this year. The short version of what that means is that MU doesn’t have two truly special offensive players in Oso Ighodaro and Tyler Kolek on the floor, and they’re going to have to buckle up every single night and grind out wins on both ends of the floor if they want to be successful. One of two things happened in November as Marquette started off the year 8-0: They were really good at buckling up every single night OR things started coming surprisingly easy to them. First eight games Marquette certainly looked every part of a Big East title contender and maybe a little bit of a national title contender.
As of late, it certainly looks like MU either forgot to keep buckling up every single night or they started thinking that they were going to be better than expected and thus didn’t need to keep buckling up as hard as they did to start the year.
And now, with all of the tribulations of the last month-plus weighing on them, as well as carrying the first three game losing streak since Christmas/New Year’s 2021/2022, Marquette has to host a DePaul team that outscored them 73-64 for the final 39-ish minutes of their overtime contest back on January 14th. That’s a DePaul team with head coach Chris Holtmann showing his guys the still frame of the Blue Demons holding a 65-61 lead with 50 seconds left in regulation.
Yes, DePaul’s short handed with Conor Enright out for the year and maybe both Troy D’Amico and David Skogman out with injuries. Yes, DePaul’s NET ranking has collapsed from #89 on New Year’s Day to #131 on Monday morning. Yes, DePaul is not a good basketball team.
They’re also going to be completely convinced that they should have beaten Marquette the first time AND that Marquette’s on the ropes right now. Tuesday night’s game isn’t must win in any way for either team relative to what they’re trying to do this season, not with this much season left to go. But for Marquette, it absolutely is a “we have to prove that we can play like we need to play to win games in March” game. Lock in. Be violent, in the words of Shaka Smart. Get stops. Make the extra pass. All the cliches. Get the win.
Marquette Last 10 Games: 6-4, and riding a three game losing streak.
DePaul Last 10 Games: 2-8, with losses in four of their last five games.
All-Time Series: Marquette leads, 86-50.
Current Streak: Marquette has won five straight and seven of the last eight. DePaul hasn’t won in Milwaukee in front of fans since January 2016.
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