The Golden Eagles host the Red Storm for the only meeting of the season between these two teams.
It’s a time worn phrase: Progress is not a straight line.
You’re usually not going to go straight to your goal from your starting point, in a metaphorical sense. If you’re actually physically moving from one place to another, it’s actually pretty literal. You’re going to have to go around something, even if it’s just the island in your kitchen in order to go from the couch to your fridge to get another can of Coke.
In this case though, we’re talking about Marquette women’s basketball letting their Sunday afternoon game against Villanova slip away from them by way of a bad 13 minutes in the second half. They did a decent job holding the line after the Wildcats flipped a Marquette lead to a Villanova lead, but a rally wasn’t in the cards.
It would have been neater for the story to see Marquette go out and beat Villanova, it’s cleaner to see the Golden Eagles move to 7-3 to start Cara Consuegra’s first season in Big East play than it is to see them fall to 6-4 through 10 games. It would have been a much bigger sign that the team is truly coming together, etc., etc., you get it.
But that didn’t happen, and that’s fine. If we’re being super honest about it, it’s not like Marquette’s playing for an at-large berth to the NCAA tournament here. That possibility was pretty much shot in the non-conference portion of the schedule when they opened the year with a loss to UCF and then tacked on that road loss against Bowling Green. That’s fine, that’s not really what the point of this year was for Consuegra and this set of players that had never really played together in a real game before this season started.
The point was to build a base for Consuegra to continue to grow the program going forward. Sometimes that means a little bit of a bump in the road like Sunday’s loss to Villanova. It’s a learning opportunity for everyone in blue and gold, and as long as they come away from it with a little bit better idea of what needs to be done to get a win in the next game, and the one after that and so on, then it’s a net positive for the Golden Eagles.
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Big East Game #11: vs St. John’s Red Storm (13-9, 3-8 Big East)
Date: Wednesday, February 4, 2025
Time: 6:30pm Central
Location: Al McGuire Center, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Streaming: FloSports
Live Stats: Sidearm Stats
Twitter Updates: @MarquetteWBB
Bluesky Updates: @AnonymousEagle
Marquette is 22-13 all time against St. John’s. The Golden Eagles have won nine of the last 12 meetings and 13 of the last 17, but the Red Storm come into this one after taking the season sweep a year ago.
It brings me no pleasure whatsoever to tell you that St. John’s entire season has collapsed through a trap door. The Red Storm started out the year at #78 in the BartTorvik.com rankings. Not great, not awful. They ran off six straight wins to start the season, wandered up into the 60s, took a weird loss on Thanksgiving afternoon to a Harvard team that’s now top 50 in Torvik, and then won four more games, including downing Penn State, Wake Forest, and Fairfield, all top 100 squads. That’s 10-1 to start the year, and they slid up to juuuuuust short of the top 50 at #52 in T-Rank heading into their next game, which happened to be their Big East opener.
Then they lost eight of nine and slipped all the way down into the 80s in T-Rank. There’s that trap door. 1-8 to start Big East play, and the NCAA tournament is officially off the table for the Johnnies. Unless a massive turnaround is about to happen — and they have won their last two contests, although no credit for beating Xavier at home by 11 AFTER TRAILING BY 11 LATE IN THE FIRST HALF — it’s hard to think that St. John’s will be playing in any kind of postseason at all this year.
It’s up to Marquette to do their part to make sure that the Red Storm wrap up the year after the Big East tournament.
Suffocating the St. John’s offense is the #1 task on the table. The Johnnies are one of the slowest paced teams in the country, and so making them come up with empty possession after empty possession will be crucial. Forcing turnovers is probably not the way to get there, as STJ is pretty good with the ball control, but they don’t rebound it well at all on the offensive end. That’s probably mostly a choice, as Torvik has them as a top 70 defensive efficiency squad, but it’s good to know that you can one-and-done the Red Storm offense pretty regularly.
If Marquette can limit the impact of Lashae Dwyer and Ber’Nyah Mayo, St. John’s might struggle to score. Those are STJ’s only two double digit scorers, and Dwyer is leading the team at just 12.9 per game. She’s also the only player averaging more than nine field goal attempts per game, so get the ball out of her hands and make St. John’s rely on someone who they don’t like relying on regularly. That said, if all you do is trick Dwyer into shooting threes, you’re probably going to come out ahead. She is averaging a team high 3.6 long range attempts per game, but connects less than 23% of the time.
This is where I wonder what on God’s green earth head coach Joe Tartamella is doing. Joe. Skye Owen (43%), Ariana Vanderhoop (40%), and Jaliyah Donald (37%) are cashing threes like crazy…… when they shoot them, which is less than three times per game each. Part of that is STJ’s general tempo issue, but part of that is also Tartamella coaching the team towards a completely pedestrian middle-of-the-road three-point attempt rate. #136 in the country per Her Hoop Stats isn’t cutting it when you’ve got three great shooters like that, Joe. COME ON.
Marquette is going to have to be careful with the ball in this game. The Golden Eagles are ranked #201 in the country by Her Hoop Stats in offensive turnover rate as they cough it up on about one possession out of every five. St. John’s, on the other hand, is coming up on prying it free on one out of every four. In other words, if both teams have a sub-par day in that department, St. John’s still wins, because MU’s turning it over 22% of the time then. Lashae Dwyer is going to be the one to watch carefully here, as she’s averaging 2.9 steals per game. Because of the pace that St. John’s plays at, that means she’s #8 in the country in steal rate. That’s really good!
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