With the 2025-26 season long since in the books, let’s take a few moments to look back at the performance of each member of YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles this year. While we’re at it, we’ll also take a look back at our player previews and see how our preseason prognostications stack up with how things actually played out. We’ll run through the roster in order of total minutes played going from lowest to highest, and today we move along to one of Marquette’s two disappointing seniors……
Ben Gold
Senior — #12 — Forward — 6’11” — 235 lbs. — Wellington, New Zealand
* — Notes a top
400 national ranking per KenPom.com ** — Notes a top 110 national ranking per KenPom.com
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
The worst case scenario for Ben Gold this season is repeating what we saw from him last year. If that’s all he does, it won’t be a terrifically fun season to review in April, but it’ll be hard to say anything bad about Gold. Last year, he put up 7.4 points, 4.3 rebounds, and just under an assist per game while shooting a career best 37% on threes on a career high volume of shots. He also added a little bit short of a block per game, because as we discussed in his review: Ben Gold was a perfectly fine rim protector. Great? No. Fine? Sure.
“Play it again, Sam,” is the worst case scenario. Because there’s too many questions for this year’s team, we need to see more from him. It doesn’t have to be a lot more. If it’s just a couple more minutes per game and a slight boost to his per-40 minute averages, which have been roughly the same the past two years? Great. I don’t know if I want to go so far as to expect what the BartTorvik.com algorithm projects for Gold, which is 13.1 points, 6.5 rebounds, and 1.4 assists per game in nearly 31 minutes a night. That’s starting to veer into “Ben Gold is Marquette’s leading scorer” territory — Chase Ross is the projected leader at 14.1, just barely ahead of Gold — and as you saw last week Friday, that’s not even an idea that crossed my mind. Ben Gold as leading scorer falls into the category of “well, if it’s making Marquette an obvious NCAA tournament team, I’m not going to complain,” but it doesn’t feel like something we should expect, y’know?
It’s reasonable to ask more from Gold in the rebounding department, and I don’t just mean going from last year’s 4.3 to the Torvik projected 6.5 per game. I’m talking about a defensive rebounding rate somewhere north of 17%. Kadary Richmond and RJ Luis from St. John’s were just over that line last year according to KenPom.com and that made them top 500 rebounders in the country. I’m not asking for “is the best rebounder in the Big East.” I’m asking for “people stop blaming Ben Gold for Marquette’s rebounding problems.” Moving to “Marquette’s still bad at this, but you can’t knock Ben for that” is an improvement!
Why You Should Get Excited
What if that 13/7/1 is undershooting what Gold is capable of? What if we see the full realization of why Ben Gold was at the Australia NBA Global Academy in the first place? What if Marquette needing Gold to do more allows a career explosion for the big Kiwi because merely stepping forward into a leadership spot on the team unlocks something for him?
What if Caedin Hamilton and Joshua Clark are capable of holding down the middle for 30 minutes a night between the two of them and that frees Gold up to play a little bit more freely at the 4? He did a decent amount of that as a freshman and sophomore, playing behind Olivier-Maxence Prosper and David Joplin while spelling Oso Ighodaro in the paint a bit, too. What if Gold’s more natural position is a bit more inside/outside and that allows Marquette to do a bit more 1) with Gold and 2) as a team?
What if he can be Steve Novak with a first step to the rim? “Hey, Andy, that’s crazy!” Is it? Is 17.5 points, 5.9 rebounds, and 1.3 assists per game on 47% three-point shooting really that crazy when we’re talking about Why You Should Get Excited? That’s Novak’s senior year, and let’s be honest: That’s not that much further ahead of what the Torvik algorithm spit out for Gold. If he shoots 47% on triples, Gold had better be firing off a lot more shots and that’s a pretty easy jump from 13 to 17 at that point.
Potential Pitfalls
I think Ben Gold’s biggest problems this year are mostly out of his control. If Hamilton and Clark can’t fill minutes in the middle, that means Gold is going to have to do the job. I think that role kind of puts Gold’s light under a bushel and ultimately that reels in Marquette’s ceiling a little bit. Maybe his numbers still jump off the page as career bests while doing that, but I’m not sure it’s the best use of Gold’s skills and talents.
The other major possible problem for Gold is relatively simple: What if we are too optimistic about his growth potential? Maybe we’ve seen everything we can see from Gold, he is the kind of player that we’ve seen through three seasons, and nothing, no matter how much space to expand is there this season, is going to change anything? Maybe we’re just never going to see him have the confidence to pump fake and go past guys regularly at the arc, and so on.
Ben Gold as a starter in every single one of Marquette’s 34 games in 2024-25: 7.4 points, 4.3 rebounds, and just under an assist per game in 25.3 minutes per night.
Ben Gold as a 26 game starter in 31 appearances in 2025-26: 8.0 points, 5.8 rebounds and just under an assist per game in 27.2 minutes per night.
The Big Difference? A career best 37% three-point shooting as a junior, a career low 26% three-point shooting as a senior, and to make it worse, that was on a career high 4.5 attempts per game.
I am willing to cut Ben Gold some slack here. As we talked about, it’s possible that his best possible deployment on the court is as the power forward/#4 on the floor. Across MU’s first 11 games, that’s where he was next to Caedin Hamilton in the starting lineup. His stats: 9.3 points, 7.0 rebounds, just under a steal per game, 31.6% three-point shooting in 27.7 minutes per night.
In Marquette’s first 16 games of the season, which includes five games of Royce Parham starting at the 4, four of which had Ben Gold coming off the bench and the fifth with Gold as the starting center: 8.7 points, 6.8 rebounds, just under an assist and a steal per game, a very awful 24.4% from behind the arc in 27.8 minutes per game.
If you are asking yourself, “Hey, am I supposed to be impressed with these numbers,” that’s a good question. In theory, yes, you should be. I’m isolating these relative to What We Thought Ben Gold Could/Should Be This Year. Why? Because Gold suffered an ankle/leg/foot injury in the next game, missed the one after that, came off the bench in the one after that, and then started the rest of the way at center for Marquette. We’ll cut him slack on the injury and the bench game since that’s 13 and 15 minutes worth of action respectively. It’s intentionally limiting to his averages, right?
After Gold returned to the starting lineup, which is the overtime win over Providence and the 13 game stretch that is most recognized as “Marquette started looking better from here on out”: 7.8 points, 5.4 rebounds, 1.2 assists, a not good 28.6% three-point shooting percentage in 28.5 minutes per game.
A lot went wrong with Marquette’s 2025-26 season. You can pick and choose your spots, throw a dart, it’s a pretty good answer. One that we have to acknowledge as a massive problem is that Ben Gold just kept on being the same Ben Gold that we saw the year before, except now he couldn’t shoot AND he had one good leg for the final 14 games of the season. PLEASE REMEMBER: Gold was on crutches at the season ending banquet. If we had gotten 13/7/1 and 40% three-point shooting Ben Gold before the injury and 8/5/1 and 29% on threes Ben Gold afterwards, we could all throw our hands up in the air and say “curse you, Perry The Platypus basketball gods!”
But that’s not what it was.
We got the same Ben Gold to start the year, except with reduced and not very good three-point shooting, and then things just got worse, and then he got hurt, and it never got better.
TO BE CLEAR: I am not pinning the entire failure of the season on Gold. It’s just that it’s very clear that his failure to jump forward in his senior season was a big reason why things just did not come together in a useful way for Marquette.
I wish I could do the thing where I defend Ben Gold as a big man, and the defensive rebound rate ranking in the top 400 even with a conference play fall-off really points us in that direction. However, Hoop Explorer tells us that Marquette’s defense got a lot better with him on the bench, and very specificially, MU’s two-point shooting defense at the rim got better, too. We can’t even say, well, there’s that. It’s just not there. It’s a rough day for trying to find an upside here, because I don’t know where else to look.
BEST GAME
Picking one out here is a perfect example of “Hey, maybe Ben wasn’t so great this season.” We could go with his 17 points and seven rebounds to get his only KenPom.com game MVP of the season, which sounds really neat…. except that was the overtime win over Valparaiso and he didn’t score in overtime, so that’s a little hard to say “hey, great job.” 3-for-5 on triples during regulation though, that’s something? We could go with his season high in scoring, which was 19 points along with seven rebounds, two assists, a block, and a steal…. in Marquette’s 79-73 home loss to Seton Hall where Gold played 36 minutes off the bench before fouling out — Caedin Hamilton started and played five minutes, you see what happened here — but he had zero impact on the final three minutes of the game, at least on the stat sheet, as the Pirates went on a 13-0 run to close the game and flip the result. Yay for 19/7/2/1/1…. but nothing when it mattered in a horrible loss.
I’m going to go with the Valpo game, because part of the Seton Hall loss was Gold shooting 1-for-7 on threes, and that’s just indicative of his entire season and it doesn’t make me feel good.
SEASON GRADE
In a season where a lot was going to be asked from everyone who was returning, Ben Gold ultimately didn’t answer the bell. Because of the three-point shooting, his senior season actually comes off looking worse than his junior year, even though I can’t help but think that his busted leg caused a lot of his shooting woes down the stretch. I don’t think this season was a complete disaster for Gold, but it’s clear that his role on the team drastically changed midway through as well and that probably had an impact or two on how things went for him on a personal level.
Given that we kind of just got “bad shooting junior year” here and there just wasn’t the growth as a player that we hoped we might see, I can’t do better than a 4 as a grade for the season. At the end of the day, injury or not, Ben Gold took steps backwards as a contributor, and that means we can’t give him the “met expectations” grade.
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