Today, we turn our attention to the three women who come to the Golden Eagles with D1 experience but without a connection to Cara Consuegra.
Our 2024-25 Marquette women’s basketball season preview continues!
Before we get to part 2 of our look at the six newcomers on the roster, why don’t you wander back and check out part 1 where we looked at the two junior college players and the transfer coming up from Charlotte alongside new head coach Cara Consuegra? There’s also our rundown on the six returning players from last season, and there’s some important context for this article therein.
With that out of the way, let’s get into it! There’s two juniors and a sophomore in this group, so we’ll go in that order with alphabetical order breaking the tie on the two junior transfers…….
Jaidynn Mason
The 5’6” guard comes to Marquette after playing two years at Southern Illinois. She mostly came off the bench as a freshman, starting four times in 31 appearances, and then that became 21 starts in 23 appearances as a sophomore. She had quality numbers, going for a respectable 7.5 points, 2.4 rebounds, 2.2 assists, and nearly two steals per game in her first year, and then getting up to 14.0 points, 3.6 rebounds, 3.6 assists, and a whopping 2.7 steals a night last season. I think it’s reasonable safe to say that just repeating those kinds of sophomore year numbers for a full season — Mason missed five games early in the season and another two in late February — would be perfectly welcome at the McGuire Center.
However, we have to say that while the numbers are totally fine and veering on over into good, it’s the way that Mason got there that wasn’t so hot. She’s a career 35.9% shooter, and if I meant three-pointers, that would be great. I don’t. I mean over all, and she’s a career 19% three-point shooter. The problem here, as you can guess, is that Mason was #35 in the country in usage rate according to Her Hoop Stats. BartTorvik.com’s brand new women’s basketball maths show Mason as a sub-85 Offensive Rating player in each of her two seasons with the Salukis, and quite honestly: It’s not because she turns the ball over too much. Her turnover rates are maaaaaybe a little bit high, but the sheer volume of missed shots was a much worse problem.
If Mason’s going to play a notable role for Marquette this season — and I thought she was the most noticeable player at the open practice in early October even though she’s not projected as a starter — then she’s going to have to find a way to get more efficient with the ball. It’s possible that merely playing on a team that’s not going 23-39 like SIU did the past two seasons could do her some favors in that regard. How much of Mason leading SIU in field goal attempts last season have to do with the fact that the Salukis needed her to be taking that many shots, and if MU has more options around her, then how much better does she get without the pressure to shoot inefficient shots?
Kennedi Perkins
While Jaidynn Mason gets a little bit further away from her home in Kansas City with her move from Southern Illinois to Marquette, Kennedi Perkins is going the other direction. The 5’6” guard from Bolingbrook, Illinois, spent the last two seasons at Syracuse in upstate New York. Officially, she averaged 10.0 minutes per game in 52 appearances for the Orange, and across that stretch, she chipped in 2.7 points and 1.1 rebounds per game. She did get up over 11 minutes per game as a sophomore and that helped her to average exactly one assist per game as well.
I said “officially” because those are the average numbers. However, if you look at her individual game logs, you can see that Perkins’ playing time was kiiiiiinda all over the map when she was at Syracuse. The start of last season is a perfect example:
- 18 minutes against Lafayette & Central Connecticut
- 19 minutes while starting against Coppin State
- 2 minutes off the bench each of the next two games against Maryland and Northern Iowa
- Didn’t play at all in the next two games against Iowa State and Alabama.
I’m not going to go game by game from there, but five games later, Perkins is playing 27 minutes against Notre Dame……. and then just five minutes on the road against the Irish in late January. I’m not saying I know what’s going on here, but I’m saying that if Perkins was looking for a fresh start with a different coaching staff close to home after this, I understand.
With relatively little playing time — just 522 minutes spread across two seasons — it’s hard to say anything for certain about how Perkins can help the Golden Eagles immediately. What I can say for certain is that when Cara Consuegra switched the open scrimmage around to have her team go against the practice players, Perkins was one of the first five women she put on the floor. That was almost a month ago now, so it’s definitely possible that things have changed….. but for now, it’s probably best to consider Perkins a likely starter for the Golden Eagles.
Perkins is a career 29.2% three-point shooter, and so we have to be wary of what might happen with her there this season. She shot 3-for-15 in admittedly limited opportunities last season, so maybe she just needs regular playing time to find a rhythm and get that figured out. The flipside of that argument is that Perkins was 4-for-9 as a freshman in even less minutes. I will happily sign right now for Perkins as a 44% shooter for the next two seasons, but for now, I can’t say I’m comfortable in believing that it’s going to happen.
Jada Bediako
I think we have to pull the ol’ chestnut about freshmen becoming sophomores out of the closet to talk about Jada Bediako. Last year, in her one season at Georgia Tech, she played a total of 57 minutes spread across nine appearances. Only one of those appearances came after New Year’s Day.
This did not happen because Georgia Tech was having a great season and head coach Nell Fortner didn’t have the free time to let Bediako shake off freshman mistakes in ACC play. In fact, the Yellow Jackets went 17-16 overall with a 7-11 mark in the ACC, lost their first conference tournament game, did not play any postseason games, and that was that for their season. In any case, the 6’3” Canadian forward is in Milwaukee now instead of Atlanta, and she’s getting a fresh start with a head coach that might be motivated to try anything to figure out a way to win games in Year One.
For the time being, the plan seems to be Bediako in the starting lineup as MU’s starting center. That’s the conclusion to draw from Bediako playing along side Skylar Forbes when it was time for the MU players to team up against the practice players in the open scrimmage. The good news is that Bediako was good enough to play for the Canadian junior team three times, twice in her age group’s World Cup and again in the FIBA Americas U16 tournament. I hesitate to say it was bad news that Bediako averaged 1.7 points and 1.3 rebounds at the 2023 FIBA U19 World Cup, but that does tell us that she was not one of the stars of the team at the very least. Nothing wrong with that, it still makes her one of the 12 best Canadian women under the age of 19 at the time…. it just means that playing her a lot and feeding her the ball was not an optimal path to success for the coaching staff.
It would seem that a certain amount of Consuegra’s offensive plan for this coming season is to feed Bediako the ball in the post. That seemed to be a lot of the offensive game plan when she was on the floor. There also seemed to be a lot of poorly thrown lob passes to her. That’s an intended critique of the passers, not of Bediako. She wasn’t necessarily playing the pass poorly, she never had a chance to haul some of them in. Consuegra herself said that the open scrimmage was just their fourth full practice as a team. Maybe that’s just a lot of unfamiliarity with each other working itself out……. but if the team is devoted to getting Bediako the ball because that’s their best option, and they can’t actually get her the ball, that’s going to be a very frustrating thing to watch over and over again.
One thing to watch to see what happens with Bediako is her rebounding. Obviously, if you’re the starting center on a basketball team, you should probably be doing some rebounding. But I want to point out that Georgia Tech was a top 90 defensive rebounding team last season according to Her Hoop Stats, and they did it without a truly dominant rebounding force. This obviously was a focus in practice for the Jackets last season, so we’ll have to see how much of that work 1) pays off for Bediako in real minutes this season or 2) translates to what Consuegra and her staff want Bediako to be doing when it comes to cleaning the glass.