As we’ve already talked about in the 2025-26 Marquette men’s basketball season preview series, there’s a lot of questions facing the Golden Eagles heading into the year. It’s reasonable to say that there’s more
questions facing Marquette than any other season that head coach Shaka Smart has been in charge of so far, and yeah, I’m including his first year there. Having Justin Lewis stick around and seeing Smart bring in Darryl Morsell and Kur Kuath went a long way towards pointing us in a direction to the start of the year. If it’s the most question filled preseason for Smart, then it’s the first question filled preseason for Marquette in a very long time.
With that in mind, I want to bring back a thing that I used to do, and it’s a really simple idea. We’re just going to look at the three primary statistical categories that help dictate how a team is performing — points, rebounds, and assists — and just ask the question: Who’s going to lead Marquette this season?
We already did assists in this series, and in the interests of holding off the big one to the end, let’s ask this question today:
Who’s going to lead Marquette in rebounds this season?
Candidate #1: Ben Gold
If you’re the top returning rebounder, you should probably be the top guy on this list, right? The big Kiwi averaged a career high 4.3 rebounds per game last season to end up third on the team behind David Joplin (5.4/game) and Kam Jones (4.5) and just ahead of Stevie Mitchell (4.1). In terms of rebounding rate — the percentage of rebounds available to you because you can only grab rebounds while you’re on the court — Gold was second on the team in defensive rebounding rate (14.4%) amongst regular rotation guys to only Joplin at 15.6%.
If Gold is going to start and play 30 minutes a game this season — he averaged only 25.3 minutes per game last year — then it would certainly make sense that a guy near seven feet tall playing that many minutes would have a notable advantage to winning this battle. The question then becomes how much of his playing time is going to be spent within a foot or two of the rim, as Gold’s three-point shooting (37% last year, 36% the year before) is a thing that Marquette has to make use of on a regular basis. If he’s playing those minutes but he’s at the 4/power forward and not the 5/starting center position, then that opens the door to someone else. Heck, even if he is the starting center, that was his position last year and Joplin still beat him out. Therefore……
Candidate #2: Royce Parham
It seems reasonable that if Ben Gold keeps the spot as the starting center, then Royce Parham’s the most likely candidate to replace Joplin in the starting lineup, right? Parham’s roughly the same size as Joplin (same listed height, Parham’s slightly heavier) although he strikes me as a little bit more of a lanky forward than Jop, and if that’s the case, maybe a little bit more wingspan helps him pull in some rebounds that even Joplin couldn’t bull his way into last year.
The catch here is that Parham didn’t immediately show an obvious ability to haul in rebounds really well last year. He ended up averaging just 2.2 per game, and when extrapolated out to per-40 minutes numbers, he’s 8th on the team behind even Tre Norman. His rebounding rates got a little bit better in Marquette’s 20 regular season Big East games, which might indicate that he was figuring things out as his freshman season went along last year. This may be the category where Parham most needs to improve from his freshman year in order to keep his playing time on an upswing, so perhaps he’s not the best possible candidate here.
Candidate #3: Caedin Hamilton
We didn’t see all that much of Caedin Hamilton in his redshirt freshman season last year as he averaged just 6.3 minutes per game. He did pull in 36 rebounds in that time though, and as a result that makes him Marquette’s best rebounder last year in terms of caroms per 40 minutes at 7.8. He was also MU’s only player last year, returning or otherwise, to post rebounding rates in double digits on both ends of the floor according to KenPom.com. Royce Parham was second best on the team at offensive rebounding at 8.0%, while Hamilton was actually better at offensive rebounding at 11.3%, besting his own defensive rebounding rate of 11.0%.
To be clear: 11.0% on the defensive end of things is not a great number, but if you can make up for that by generating second chances and extending possessions, that’s a decent tradeoff. 11.3% would have been top 150 in the country or so if Hamilton had the minutes to qualify last year, and it would be great to see that happen this year. However, that’s going to require Hamilton to earn those minutes, and part of that process might be a tactical choice by head coach Shaka Smart. Are the 80 minutes at the 4 and the 5 going to mostly go to Ben Gold and Royce Parham to the tune of 30 minutes each or so? If that’s the case, it’s going to be hard for Hamilton to get the playing time he might need to have a chance to lead the team this year.
But if the minutes get split with Gold playing a bit more at the four and Hamilton playing a lot of the 5, then that opens the door. Heck, if Gold plays almost exclusively at the 4, then that opens another door to…..
Candidate #4: Joshua Clark
If Ben Gold is your starting power forward on this roster in order to activate his shooting in the best possible way, then maybe that means a lot of minutes in the middle for both Caedin Hamilton and redshirt freshman Joshua Clark. The Texan has a notable advantage here as he’s the tallest guy on the roster at 7’1”, and you can do a lot worse than picking the very tall guy to lead the team in rebounding.
It’s possible that Clark will end up leading Marquette in rebounding rate by the end of the season, much the same way that Hamilton had those double digit rates on both ends a year ago. It seems unlikely that a redshirt freshman project big man coming off his developmental first year is going to make that big of a splash and shoot straight to the top of the leaderboard here.
But if it works, it works, right?
Candidate #5: Zaide Lowery
I’m throwing Zaide Lowery in as a wild card entry here. Why? Because when I sorted last year’s stats by per-40 minute rebounding totals, Lowery was #2 on the team behind Caedin Hamilton. He also wasn’t very far behind Hamilton at 7.7, just 0.1 back.
Is that repeatable? I don’t know. Maybe if his role didn’t change other than the minutes he played, I could see it working out. I’m pretty sure Zaide Lowery is going to be asked to do more this coming season, and “doing more” is probably easiest qualified as “doing different things with more minutes” and that will probably cause his rebounding average (3.0 per game last year) to go up but his per-40 rate to go down. Still, though, someone needs to grab rebounds for Marquette, and it would be great if Marquette grabbed a lot more rebounds overall on both ends of the floor this season. Why not a very athletic 6’5” guy ending up at the top of the chart with lots of guys doing a little bit to improve the overall team profile?
Is it someone else? Do you have a theory? Vote in the poll and sound off in the comments as needed…..
Follow Anonymous Eagle on social media
Facebook: AnonymousEagle
Instagram: AnonymousEagleSBN
Bluesky: AnonymousEagle
