The Golden Eagles return to Milwaukee after a trip out east for a Friday night encounter with the Wildcats.
#10 Marquette Golden Eagles (16-3, 7-1 Big East) vs Villanova Wildcats (12-8, 5-4 Big East)
Date: Friday, January 24, 2025
Time: 6pm Central
Location: Fiserv Forum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Marquette Stats Leaders
Points: Kam Jones, 19.1 ppg
Rebounds: David Joplin, 5.3 rpg
Assists: Kam Jones, 6.5 apg
Villanova Stats Leaders
Points: Eric Dixon, 24.9 ppg
Rebounds: Enoch Boakye, 6.6 rpg
Assists: Jhamir Brickus, 5.6 apg
KenPom.com Rankings
Marquette: #13
Villanova: #53
Game Projection: Marquette has an 81% chance of victory, with a predicted score of 78-68.
This Season So Far: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Villanova lit most of their postseason potential on fire by suffering absurd non-conference loss after absurd non-conference loss.
Two years ago it was Temple and Portland. Last year it was Penn, Saint Joseph’s, and Drexel. This year, it’s at home against Columbia, on the road against Saint Joseph’s, and a neutral site 70-60 loss to a Virginia team that might not have been ticketed for anything all that great even before head coach Tony Bennett bounced to retirement in mid-October.
A neutral site loss to a pretty good Maryland team dropped Kyle Neptune’s Wildcats to 3-4 overall, and if you had written this particular preseason KenPom.com top 25 team off for dead at that point, no one would have blamed you. Still, they won their next five, including their league opener against Seton Hall, and after losing by seven on the road against Creighton (not a big deal, really), they won three more, including toppling UConn at Finneran Pavilion to move to 11-5 overall and 4-1 in Big East play.
Signs of life? Sure, but those dim candles started fluttering in the breeze after a 12 point road loss to St. John’s and a road loss to Xavier. The Wildcats snuck past Providence to end their skid, but this past Monday evening, Villanova blew a 13 point lead and ended up with a 64-63 loss to Georgetown.
They built an uphill climb early in the season, started climbing, and like Sisyphus, they have slid back down to the bottom of the hill again.
Tempo Free Fun: Look, I know that the heading on the category is Tempo Free Fun. The idea behind it is that we’re going to rummage around in the statistics and find things that are working for or against Marquette in the game. Maybe a certain amount of “hey, what’s going on with this team lately” or when we’re on our second go-round with a Big East foe, figuring out what’s been working for the opponent since the first meeting is important to think about here.
And yet, the very first thing that we have to talk about here is the world’s most simple statistic: Individual player points per game.
Why? Because as of games played on Tuesday night, Villanova’s Eric Dixon is leading the entire country in points per game at 24.9 a night. Memphis’ PJ Haggerty is #2 at 22.1, so we’re not that far from Dixon having a full three point lead on every single other player in the country. He’s one of just 16 guys averaging at least 20.0 points per game this year.
It’s not that Dixon is leading Villanova or the Big East or even the country in scoring, by the way. It’s how Dixon’s going about that. Over the past three seasons, he’s been a three-point shooter that other teams have had to respect, connecting on 37% of his 2.9 long range attempts. The thing is that Dixon was largely playing as Villanova’s center on those rosters, even though he’s only listed at 6’8” tall. It worked out because he’s also at 265 pounds and his diversity of talent set made him an interesting matchup. That also meant that, generally speaking, Dixon was still an inside-the-arc player, and his three-point attempt rate was sitting at less than 29% of his shots for the past three years.
This year, Villanova has Enoch Boakye starting and using his 6’11”, 255 pound frame to patrol the middle. That means Dixon is now more of a stretch four type of player, and his three-point shooting shows it. He’s up to 137 attempts already this season after posting a career high of 159 last year, which means Dixon pops off from behind the arc more than seven times per game. Of course, it only matters if you make them, and he’s definitely making them. Dixon is hitting over 46% of his attempts, way better than each of the last two years. He connected on over 48% in 2021-22, but that was on less than one attempt per game. In other words: He might have always had this in him, and now the Wildcats are actually asking him to do it.
Now, that’s the other part of what kind of a threat Dixon is. He’s #15 in the country in usage according to KenPom.com, #14 in percentage of a team’s shots, and in league play, Dixon leads the Big East in both categories and his usage is up over his season long marks. He’s shooting 46% against KenPom’s top 100 opponents and an even 50% (16-for-32) in VU’s four games against top 50 opponents, so it’s not like it’s a bad idea to ask him to do all of this. But if you can find a way to bottle him, it’s going to cause downstream effects on the rest of the team. No one else on the team shoots more than 10 times per game on average, with Miami transfer Wooga Poplar leading the way at 9.9 attempts per game to get his second-best-on-the-team 13.9 points per game. Poplar, Jordan Longino, Jhamir Brickus, they’re all north of 36% from long range, and Brickus is just barely under 50% on just under four attempts per game. They make the shots when you let them shoot them, it’s just that they’re not asked to shoot them all that much.
The Wildcats hit shots, they don’t turn it over much, and they’re pretty good at pulling in a second chance on the rare occurrence that they miss a shot. All put together: That’s the #12 most efficient offense in the country according to KenPom.com. In league play, they’re second best, trailing only UConn so far this season.
“But wait,” you say. “Didn’t you say that the KenPom algorithm has Marquette favored by 10 points in this game? Surely home court advantage isn’t enough to tip the scales that heavily if the Wildcats can score it so well.” An excellent point, well spotted.
Villanova stinks out loud on defense.
#180 overall in efficiency on KP right now. They effectively do not force turnovers, they will let you hit the open man for a three over and over again, and they’re not so hot at stopping you from getting to the line, either. In their nine Big East games, Villanova is allowing teams to shoot an effective field goal percentage of over 51% thanks to 37% long range shooting. They are dead last in the league in three-point attempt rate and assist rate on defense.
Georgetown beat Villanova on Monday because people not named Eric Dixon shot 5-for-15 on threes and because the Wildcats turned it over on nearly 26% of their possessions. Dixon had six of VU’s 16 turnovers all by himself, and Brickus accounted for five more. If you can throw the slightest of speed bumps in front of Villanova’s offense, it is enough to counter them because they can not stop you. Georgetown scored 1.03 points per possession while shooting 11-for-32 (34%) on two-pointers.
Now, was part of VU’s problem the fact that Wooga Poplar got ejected after eight minutes for taking a swing at Thomas Sorber? Absolutely, and it appears as of Wednesday afternoon that he’s not going to get suspended for that, perhaps because he missed, and it’s silly to suspend someone for failing to actually fight someone else. But that happened in the first half, and Nova was still up 63-55 with three minutes left. They blew it, partially because they can’t get stops at a high enough rate.
Make life hard for Dixon, frustrate the other guys into sloppy mistakes, punish them on the other end, both in transition and in the half court. Seems simple, right?
Stat Watch #1: Kam Jones needs three field goals to pass Butch Lee for the fifth most made field goals in Marquette history. He needs four to pass Lazar Hayward for fourth.
Stat Watch #2: David Joplin needs two three-pointers to become the 11th man in Marquette history with 200 made three-pointers in their career.
Stat Watch #3: Kam Jones needs 20 points to pass what used to be George Thompson’s Marquette record for points in a career. That is currently the 4th best scoring total in MU history.
Marquette Last 10 Games: 8-2 after bouncing back from their first Big East loss by beating Seton Hall on Tuesday night.
Villanova Last 10 Games: 6-4, with losses in three of their four games after beating UConn at home.
All-Time Series: Villanova leads, 27-19.
Current Streak: Marquette swept the season series each of the last three years, and a win in the Big East quarterfinals last season moves the winning streak to seven straight against Villanova. That is an all-time series record for the Golden Eagles.
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