Can Kam Jones become Marquette’s second ever 2,000 point scorer?
By now, you should be more than familiar with our series of regularly updating leaderboards for various Marquette Golden Eagles sports accomplishments. Keep checking back to that link in the previous sentence for our charts as the seasons continue to churn through history and MU’s various teams continue to create new memories and accomplishments.
This time around, we’re going to be discussing the Marquette men’s basketball all-time scoring chart.
We’re not going to be dealing with that record this season, not even close. Since Markus Howard finished with 2,761 points, there is now an entire respectable Fan Favorite career — 776 points — between Howard and Jerel McNeal’s former record of 1,985 points. In fact, there’s an entire 1,000 point scoring career between Howard and Kam Jones’ current station of 1,655 points after Marquette’s game against Xavier on December 21st.
And that brings us to this Fun Fact, which probably rolled into your mind as you started doing some rough math a second ago: Kam Jones is currently #12 all-time in scoring in Marquette history. Look, I knew he led two straight teams in scoring, and both of those teams went to the Big East tournament championship game and advanced in the NCAA tournament. Great teams, clearly, and he was the top scorer on both. Somehow that never quite clicked in my head that he’s shooting straight up the scoring chart like a rocket.
Jones is currently on pace to finish Marquette’s guaranteed games — 18 more Big East contests and one conference tournament game — with 649 points in total for the year. This means that — and again this is shocking information to me because I didn’t really reckon with this fact until starting to type out this update — Kam Jones is on track to become the second 2,000 point scorer in program history. Kam Jones and Markus Howard. That’s it. That’s the list.
He’s on track to get to 2,040 points, so as I said at the top, we’re not going to be dealing with the record. Jones would literally need to start scoring 40 points a game for the rest of the season to have a shot at Howard’s 2,761. It’s not happening, in other words. Still, passing each of the 10 men between Jones and Howard — Marquette legends, one and all — is on the table, especially if the Golden Eagles get going on an extended post season run.
We also have to track what David Joplin does for the rest of the season. Joplin’s 19 points against Xavier on Saturday moved him past 1,000 for his career, making him the 54th man to ever score that many points in MU history. He also scooted past Lloyd Walton and into a tie with Jajuan Johnson for the 52nd most points in program history right now. Joplin’s on pace to take a run at 1,300 points if he picks up the pace and/or MU plays more than one Big East tournament game in the postseason. 1,300 even would get Joplin one point past Michael Wilson and into 27th place all-time, and Ron Glaser sits at #25 with 1,330. On the table, to be clear.
Let’s also add Stevie Mitchell to the list. His current rate of 11.3 points per game is precisely enough to get him to 1,001 career points by the end of Marquette’s guaranteed Big East tournament game. Getting into the top 50 all time is within sight for him with some postseason effects, as Dwayne Johnson and Tony Miller are tied for 49th right now with 1,027.
Here’s the list as it stands after Marquette’s December 21st game against Xavier.