The 2025-26 college basketball season is right around the corner, so let’s dive into the Marquette men’s basketball roster and take a look at what to expect from each player this season. Going forward in these Player Previews, we’ll be going in this order: The four true freshmen expected to play this season going in alphabetical order by last name — skipping past Sheek Pearson who is projected to redshirt — then moving on to the redshirt freshman, then the redshirt junior who missed last year, and then going through
the returning players in ascending order of total minutes played in 2024-25.
We’re going to organize our thoughts about the upcoming season as it relates to each player into categories, as we always do:
- Reasonable Expectations
- Why You Should Get Excited
- Potential Pitfalls
With that out of the way, we wrap up our looks at the four active roster freshmen this season with the guy who seems to have the easiest pathway to immediate minutes……
Adrien Stevens
Freshman — #10 — Guard — 6’4” — 210 lbs. — Potomac, Maryland
Adrien Stevens was the fourth of the four freshmen that we expect to see this season to commit to Marquette when he announced for the Golden Eagles in August of 2024. At the time, he committed to the Golden Eagles over a Final Six that included Georgetown and Villanova, so keep that in mind as his time in Milwaukee continues. Stevens’ commitment wasn’t particularly surprising in and of itself, if I remember correctly, but as I wrote at the time, it was a sign that Marquette was going to move ahead with the new House settlement roster limits, not to mention the idea of revenue sharing with the players.
With everything coming to a rest this summer, Adrien Stevens has a claim as the top prospect in Marquette’s top 20 recruiting class. 247 Sports’ internal rankings have him at #78 in the country for the Class of 2025, and that’s best on the list of freshmen, beating out Nigel James at #86 for the top spot. They flip around if you use 247’s Composite rankings, with James going to #88 and Stevens falling to #131. On3 has Stevens at #92 in the country in their Industry Rankings, while ESPN does not have him in the top 100 even if they do call him a four star prospect.
Here’s how Marquette wrote about Stevens when he signed with the Golden Eagles last November:
Stevens (6-4, 195) is ranked as the 84th-best player in the country by 247Sports.com and has played at Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland under head coach Bruce Kelley since his sophomore season. Stevens helped the Bulldogs to back-to-back Interstate Athletic Conference (IAC) regular season and tournament titles and scored a team-high 14 points in the championship matchup as a junior, earning conference player of the year accolades in the process. He was named All-IAC and first team all-metro by the Washington Post after averaging 14.4 points, 4.0 rebounds and 3.0 assists per game. He played on the UAA circuit for WeR1.
And here’s what Marquette head coach Shaka Smart said about Stevens in that same press release:
“Adrien’s a lot like Stevie (Mitchell) as a person,” Smart said. “Incredible student, incredible leader. Very, very thoughtful, very, very smart. He cares about his teammates. He’s got toughness, similar to Stevie. It’s not like we were saying, hey, we’ve got to find a Stevie clone, but if we had said that, this is about as close as you’re going to get, Adrien’s a little bit bigger, a little bit thicker, probably even more physical at that age.
“He’s a guy who can play either guard position,” Smart added. “He’s good handling the ball, he can play the pick and roll and he can shoot the ball. He’s very good on the catch and shoot and defensively, he’s something else.”
Reasonable Expectations
I want to start this with what the BartTorvik.com projections say for Stevens, because we’re going to get out of pocket as to what his ceiling this season might be pretty quickly. Okay? So, listen. The Torvik algorithm says that, based on the other abilities and histories of the returning players and how the freshmen fit in around them when taking the average production of a player with the same recruiting rankings into account, that maybe we’ll see Adrien Stevens for seven minutes a game this year.
That’s rounding up on what 17% of 40 minutes is, and that’s what he’s projected to do. Seven minutes, 2.8 points, 1.2 rebounds, maybe an assist.
Think about it: He’s probably not going to be playing a lot of point guard in place of Sean Jones or Nigel James, right? So, that means he’s fighting for playing time at the 2, maybe the 3. Chase Ross is absolutely starting in one of those places, and then there’s Zaide Lowery and Damarius Owens to try to figure out the other spot. After that, there’s fellow freshmen Ian Miletic and Michael Phillips to compete with for minutes. You can see why the algorithm isn’t 100% fired up about Stevens as a major contributor here.
Now, there’s a certain amount of reason to believe that Stevens is going to play more than this season, and we’re going to talk about those reasons in the Get Excited section. I think those are valid reasons to at least believe that Stevens is going to play more than seven minutes a night. How much more? Well, we’ll have to wait and see, but…. okay, let’s just get into it, shall we?
Why You Should Get Excited
I’m going to wander back to Ben Steele’s report in the Journal Sentinel from Marquette’s open practice at the end of July.
But the biggest freshman eye-opener was Stevens, the 6-foot-4 guard who was not afraid to mix it up defensively. He led the team in deflections over the summer, a sure way to get playing time for Smart, and also in total wins in all the drills that MU coaches track.
Led the team. Not the freshmen, the team. Not just in deflections, but in wins in drills, however that’s counted from drill to drill.
Shaka Smart, talking to the media about what they saw from Stevens in the practice:
“He’s got some real toughness and physicality and a great body for a freshman,” Smart said. “He can get his hands on the ball.
“He’s really done a good job, particularly in the second half of the summer, buying into the advantages for him that he can press on a daily basis. Heat on the ball. Physicality on the ball. Getting his hands on the basketball. And being someone that, even though he is a freshman, uses his body to his advantage.”
Chase Ross, who knows a thing or two about making a steal here and there:
“I hope Stevie don’t watch this, but I think (Stevens) can be (as good) if not better than Stevie,” Ross said. “And y’all seen what Stevie did last year.”
Okay, so. Expecting First 30 Games Of College Basketball Adrien Stevens to instantly be better than Last 34 Games Of A 135 Game Career Stevie Mitchell is a bit much. I’m going to presume that Ross’ point was that Stevens’ ceiling is ultimately higher than Mitchell’s. Down the road. Eventually.
buuuuuuut also Stevie Mitchell had a steal rate of 3.6% as a freshman according to KenPom.com, and if he had the minutes to qualify, that would have been top 90 in the country. The way to get on the court for Shaka Smart is to play defense. It seems very clear that doing that is not going to be a problem for Adrien Stevens. The question is what his freshman year ceiling is on that end of the floor, and if he’s the guy leading the team in deflections over the summer AND Chase Ross thinks he has a brighter future than Stevie Mitchell on defense….. well. I’m very curious to see what we get from Stevens in 2025-26.
Potential Pitfalls
A whole summer’s worth of being the most pesky defender and biggest drill winner is indicative of Stevens’ abilities relative to his teammates. That’s probably a sign that things are going to work out for him. If he’s beating out the rest of the team, then that should push him towards minutes, right?
The flipside of that coin is that he’s putting up these deflection numbers and drill wins against his teammates. That’s not the competition that he has to be able to defend to actually get minutes, and the fact of the matter is that we’ve seen guys look interesting and possibly successful in the open practices/scrimmages before and then they don’t quite pan out to a notable role on the team, or even come close to what we thought was their best case scenario. Getting familiar with your teammates’ abilities and finding ways to beat them over and over again in summer practices isn’t a perfect indicator of success, and if Stevens can’t get it done against Indiana and Maryland in the third and fifth games of this coming season, it might be a minute before we see him again.
Part of the reason Shaka Smart said the things about Stevens that we listed up above is because that’s what he saw from him in his high school and club circuit games, not just what he did this summer. That should be encouraging, but until we see the rubber hit the road in November, we have to acknowledge the possibility that maybe this doesn’t quite work out this year.
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