I Went To The Marquette Men’s Basketball Open Scrimmage

Just because the scrimmage was open doesn’t mean we got to see everyone play….

Back on Saturday, YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles men’s basketball team held an open scrimmage at the Al McGuire Center. Did we learn a lot about the 2024-25 team? Well, that’s open to interpretation. I took notes during the scrimmage, and so I’m going to run through what I saw and what I thought here for you.

• The team warmed up with a series of drills with the roster split in half. One half would do one drill and the other half would be on the other end doing a different drill, then they would switch, then they would change the drills and repeat. There was an offensive rebounding tip out/second chance OR drill, a defensive rebounding/blocking out drill, a drive/pass/shoot drill, a post defense drill, and an assortment of “run this action/make this pass” drills.
• While the drills were going on, head coach Shaka Smart went one-by-one and introduced everyone on the roster, all the way from the walk-ons to Big East Preseason Player of the Year candidate Kam Jones. Along the way, Smart provided us with some injury updates on the squad.
• Three men would not play at all in this scrimmage. Junior guard Sean Jones was not dressed to do any kind of participation here as he is still recovering from his ACL surgery in January. Freshman forward Damarius Owens was participating in drills, but an injury — later confirmed to be a groin injury by Ben Steele from the Journal Sentinel — has kept him from practicing yet, but he was expected to be cleared on Monday. Junior guard Tre Norman was late arriving to the court for drills because he was receiving — literally in front of us, you could see him holding the controls — electro-stimulation therapy for a shoulder injury suffered when, in Shaka’s words, he ran into a brick wall named Stevie Mitchell in practice.
• There’s a fourth injury to mention, although this one probably won’t even be obvious by the time we get to the season opener against Stony Brook. Junior forward Ben Gold dove for a loose ball in practice and scuffed his head on the floor. As a result, he needed nine stitches to close the wound and is wearing a protective facemask while the stitches are in.
• Because of the injuries, Marquette had just 10 scholarship players available for the scrimmage, and as such, they elected to play four seven-minute quarters. That’s only 70% of a full college basketball game, but not that far off from the kind of minutes that you have to play as a starter in the Big East. Obviously those aren’t consecutive minutes, but neither were these given quarter breaks and so on.

Blue Team: Stevie Mitchell, David Joplin, Zaide Lowery, Al Amadou, and Caedin Hamilton, with Neill Berry and Cody Hatt coaching

Gold Team: Ben Gold (obviously), Kam Jones, Chase Ross, Royce Parham, and Josh Clark, with DeAndre Haynes and Nevada Smith coaching

• With Blue playing Amadou and Hamilton together the whole time and Gold playing Gold and Clark together the whole time (well, almost, we’ll get to it), I don’t know if there’s anything you can take away from any of this scrimmage as to how Marquette will actually look on the floor this season. Think of it this way, along the way of answering a question I got on Instagram: I think everyone thinks the starting lineup is Kam, Mitchell, Ross, Joplin, and Gold, right? Okay, well, with that in mind, how much is Ben Gold going to slide over and not play center this season? Is there really a world where Gold and Hamilton play 10 minutes a game together? Not really, right? Clark’s not going to play at all, or at least that’s the plan, and that’s who Gold was paired with here, so that combination is definitely not going to happen, and so it’s weird to think that we saw a Ben Gold that we won’t see in November…… but that’s what this was, to a certain extent.
• When he was doing introductions, Shaka Smart called the Blue Team the “toughness and energy” team. Apparently they heard him as they started off on a 6-0 lead and made five consecutive stops on the defensive end.
• Remember when I said the Gold Team almost played the same five guys together the whole time? Yeah, so, Division 3 transfer and walk-on Jack Anderson subbed in for the Gold team midway through the first….. and immediately hit two three-pointers, including a nifty pump-fake/side-step move on a kickout. This led to Anderson being the only player on the Gold Team with more than one basket when the first quarter came to an end with Blue holding a 13-11 lead thanks to a Joplin three at the horn.
• Yes, Jack Anderson was leading a team with Kam Jones and Chase Ross in scoring, and yes, he did it in less than three minutes of action. No, he didn’t shoot again much less score again in less than 10 total minutes of playing time, which made the “wait, is Shaka going to end up using Anderson and his nearly 20 points per game average at Keystone as a shooting option this season if he can do this?” conversation that I had with my son very stupid in retrospect.
• During the break between the first and second quarter, public address announcer Mike Jakubowski ran through the recent weekly team award winners, which gave him a chance to explain the new awards that aren’t immediately obvious as to what they are for.

Ant Man Award: Most explosive player (presumably named for Anthony Edwards)

Multiplier Award: Most efficient player

Jrue Holiday Award: Most screens set (I think, definitely something to do with screens, this is what happens when I’m writing and trying to listen at the same time)

• Remember what I said about Blue being the toughness and energy team? Yeah, their lead ballooned to 23-15 and 26-17 in the second quarter, and that’s where it stood at halftime. Jack Anderson was still the Gold Team scoring leader, while David Joplin going 4-for-6 from long range gave him 12 to power the Blue team. If you do some math: That’s a 37-24 halftime score if they played a full 20 minutes instead of 14.
• The third period is where some notable tendencies in the game started to kick in for me. 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. I also saw Hamilton attempt a three-pointer, which rimmed off. Who knows if we’ll actually see that in a game, because we were promised Oso Ighodaro threes last year and that never materialized.
• In the pregame, when he was doing the introductions, Shaka Smart said we would all be impressed with Zaide Lowery’s development as a basketball player this season. At one point in the third, Lowery pulled down a defensive rebound — one of 4 in the game — and Smart, who was floating from bench to bench in the game, zipped out 10 or 15 feet on the court to bark something at Lowery. The response? Lowery hit the gas, wove through traffic, and went to the rim for his second and final basket of the game. Final stat line: 8 points on 2-for-5 shooting with all three misses behind the arc, 4 rebounds, 1 assist, four turnovers. Good performance or bad performance, I’ll let you decide.
• This was the quarter when I started to get the impression that Mike J was saying “from Kam Jones” a lot, as in he registered an assist on a number of buckets. I was not wrong, as Kam finished with 11 assists on 18 baskets that Gold scored that didn’t come from Kam himself. He also only had four at the halfway point, so business was picking up as the second half went along.
• Kam picking up the pace on the distribution was evidence that things were getting better for Gold Team on the offensive end, as they won the third period 20-10 and took a 37-36 lead into the fourth. Royce Parham was leading Gold in scoring at this point with 12 points, while Joplin was still stuck on 12 to lead Blue. The guy who pushed Gold over the line into the lead? Josh Clark, who had at least two, maybe three late buckets in a 5-for-5 quarter after not scoring at all in the first half.
• If you were wondering where Al Amadou fits in the rotation as a sophomore after only playing in closeout minutes of blowouts last year, I don’t have a great answer for you here as he finished with five points and four rebounds. But he did hit a three-pointer in the fourth quarter to put Blue up 44-42, and if that’s a thing he can do, Amadou’s athleticism and tenacity — he was tremendous as “I’m going to bust my ass to get these walk-ons chances to score” guy last year — will earn him minutes to hit open threes.
• It was tied at 44 with 3:37 left on the clock, and shortly thereafter Stevie Mitchell had to take a break as he started bleeding under the eye after a foul at the rim on Blue’s defensive side. Shaka Smart has talked about the team needing to have a Goon Mentality this season, and Stevie playing defense so hard in a scrimmage that he gets cut open is kind of exactly what Shaka’s talking about.

• There was A LOT that happened in the final 3:37, as Gold outscored Blue 13-7 from that 44-all tie to pick up the 57-51 victory. In a regulation amount of minutes? That’s a score of 81-72. You know what there was a lot of in the fourth quarter? JOSH FRIGGIN CLARK. He went 3-for-4 in the fourth, and they pretty much all looked like this, one way or another:

• Clark ended up with 17 to lead his team in scoring, although he had just one rebound in over 21 minutes of play. Joplin went for 20 to lead all scorers in the scrimmage, and he got there by shooting 6-for-10 from long range. We can quibble about his activity level if you want, but I don’t think two rebounds, two assists, and a steal quite hits the Chicken Wing metaphor that Shaka Smart laid out for him.

• Kam Jones had 15 points to go with his 11 assists, and he had five rebounds and a steal as well. Royce Parham stayed on 12 through the fourth quarter, while Stevie Mitchell got to 10 to be the final double digit scorer. The leading rebounder was Caedin Hamilton, who finished with six….. which is the same number of fouls that he committed. Gonna need you to clean that up, big man.
• Here’s the full box score from the scrimmage if you’re interested in perusing it. I did the Four Factors breakdown off of that if you’re curious:

Points per possession

Gold: 1.21
Blue: 1.09

Effective Field Goal Percentage

Gold: 60.2%
Blue: 62.5%

Turnover Rate

Gold: 17.0%
Blue: 29.8%

Offensive Rebounding Rate

Gold: 34.8%
Blue: 35.3%

Free Throw Rate

Gold: 18.2%
Blue: 16.7%

• The one that is most curious to me is the Free Throw Rate. Marquette was #344 in the country at 25.5% last season, aka 19th worst in the country. Here, both teams were sub-20%….. but it’s also entirely possible that Shaka Smart instructed the referees to swallow their whistles to teach the team to fight through adversity of the physical variety.
• That, and no one wants to watch free throws in an open scrimmage.
• After the scrimmage wrapped up, five fans got brought out onto the court and they got to pick a Golden Eagle to shoot a half-court shot to win the fan a custom made NIL jersey from the Spirit Shop for that player. So, when you’re choosing, you’re picking “what player do I want” and also “who’s most likely going to hit this shot to win?” With that in mind, the five fans were limited to Kam Jones, Stevie Mitchell, Chase Ross, David Joplin, and Ben Gold as their options. A sign of who the starting five on Opening Night will be? Maaaaaybe? In any case, the order went Stevie, Kam, Joplin, Ross, and Gold with Joplin hitting but looking like he was shooting from 30 and not 45 feet, and Chase Ross banking it in as the only two winners. Kam Jones fired an airball and that prompted a “Really?” reaction from Shaka Smart. The three who did not win the jersey did end up with a prize pack and a $50 gift card to the Spirit Shop, and Shaka did point out that while he would have preferred to see all five fans win, the coach in him is more than happy with 40% shooting from half court.

And that’s an empty notebook! Got questions about anything that I didn’t cover? I’d be more than happy to try and answer them in the comments.