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 start off the week with our first Player Preview for a guy who actually played minutes for the Golden Eagles last season……..
Caedin Hamilton
Redshirt Sophomore — #18 — Forward — 6’9” — 250 lbs. — Santa Maria, California
The writing was on the wall for what we were going to see from Caedin Hamilton’s freshman year with Marquette pretty early on in the season last year. No, I don’t mean 12 or 13 minutes in each of Marquette’s first three games, and I don’t even mean the 12 minutes against Maryland. Although, technically, I kind of do mean that. He finished 0-for-2 from the field but he did grab four rebounds and hand out two assists in the narrow victory over the Terrapins. Ultimately, though, that led to an offensive rating for the game of 72, and when 100 is completely average, you can see how the rest of the year is going to go.
Blips of appearances in the next two games, Purdue and Georgia, double digit minutes against Stonehill and Western Carolina, a blip against Iowa State. And so on. If Marquette ended up running up the score on someone, that gave Hamilton a shot at more than a handful of possessions, but that was his role.
This isn’t a judgement against him, just saying what happened. After all, last April, I gave his season a 7. That’s fine! When you’re a developing project big man as a redshirt freshman, the best thing you can do is get out there and see what Division 1 basketball in the Big East is like.
But that was last year, his first year of action after a developmental year. Now it’s time to take a step forward and do some stuff.
Reasonable Expectations
The simplest way forward here is to expect more from Hamilton this season. Last year was 1.5 points and 1.2 rebounds while averaging 6.3 minutes in 29 appearances. In conference games, that was 1.0 points and 1.3 rebounds in 5.7 minutes in 15 appearances.
We’re going to need to see more from him. With the departures of Kam Jones, David Joplin, and Stevie Mitchell, pretty much everyone who’s coming back from last year need to step up a bit. How much is dependent on each guy and the role they project for this season, and for Hamilton, the bare minimum is more than what he did last year.
From there, the expectations for him are somewhat situationally dependent. Based on what we saw last year, Hamilton is a 5 in the eyes of the coaching staff. If that’s still the case this year, then how the staff decides to approach “who’s playing center?” affects what to expect from Hamilton. If Ben Gold is the starting center and exclusively the 5, then Hamilton is fighting with Joshua Clark for the remaining 10-12 minutes a game. If it’s Gold starts but floats over the 4 as Hamilton and Clark occupy a decent chunk of minutes, then things get much easier for Hamilton to take a big step forward.
And finally…..
Why You Should Get Excited
What if the staff likes what they’re seeing from Caedin Hamilton and Joshua Clark in preseason competition? What if the plan becomes let them split 30 minutes a night at center, with minutes varying depending on who’s having a better night, and slide Ben Gold over to the 4, where I suspect he might be better suited anyway?
Then we’re talking about 10-12-15 minutes a night for Hamilton, maybe/sometimes as the starter at center, or if not the starter, then at least the primary guy in the middle.
Am I imagining this pretty much straight out of thin air? Yeah, probably. I don’t have anything to back this up, merely theorizing about what kinds of lineups we might see this year and how experimental Shaka Smart might get.
Potential Pitfalls
Last year, Caedin Hamilton shot 38.6% from the field. He attempted seven three-pointers, all misses, so we’ll cut him slack on those shots since obviously he was encouraged by the staff to shoot it if he was open and comfortable. Pull those seven out, and that’s 45.9% from the field on two-pointers.
If you’re going to be a big man on this roster, that’s not good enough.
Ben Gold last year: 60%
Royce Parham last year: 58%
Oso Ighodaro as a senior: 58%
Ben Gold as a sophomore: 75.8%
You get the point.
Part of the issue is Hamilton clearly did not have much in the way of lift off the floor in his game. In and of itself, that’s not a problem, Davante Gardner wasn’t much of a jumper, or at least a standing still jumper. He had touch and footwork around the rim to use angles and bounces to get the ball to go down. Hamilton didn’t have that or the lift. He’s had an offseason to work both, and you can do enough drills and exercises to improve both things in one offseason. I don’t really care which one it is, but as long as I don’t have to see him getting swallowed up when trying for a putback — Hamilton quietly had an 11.3% offensive rebounding rate last year, which would have been top 200 in the country per KenPom.com if he had the minutes to qualify — then I don’t care how he gets it done, just that it is getting done. If it’s not, Marquette has to find other answers.
Beyond that, there’s just the general “you gotta play defense, my man” catch for every young player on Shaka Smart’s roster. Last year, MU was worse on both ends of the floor when Hamilton was on the floor. At least one of those has to get up to a neutral level if Hamilton’s going to play notable minutes, and he was closer to being helpful on defense than on offense.
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