With 2:29 left in the first half, Royce Parham hit a three-pointer for YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles. It was the team’s eighth three-point make on 11 attempts to that point of the game, and combine that with Seton Hall shooting just 43% from the field heading into Parham’s make, Marquette found themselves up 37-28 at the Prudential Center. A nice first half, heck, a very good first half against the Pirates’ outstanding defense, and Nigel James hit two free throws in the final minute to make it 41-33
at intermission.
And then Seton Hall opened the second half on a 12-3 run to take a 45-44 lead. Marquette would lead just one more time, off a Chase Ross layup right after that run ended. SHU answered with the next two buckets of the game, and the Golden Eagles were officially chasing the game after leading by nine just nine game minutes earlier.
This isn’t to say that Marquette didn’t have a chance to win the game. Seton Hall never led by more than five points, and a Nigel James layup with just over four minutes to go tied the thing up at 60. It was tied against at 62 and against at 64 with just 1:46 to go. AJ Staton-McCray hit a three with 1:18 left, and that obviously left Marquette with more than enough time to have a crack at a win.
But the Pirates tangled up Nigel James just inside the free throw line, Adrien Stevens hustled the ball out of his hands instead of shooting a mostly open three, and Royce Parham coughed it up. Marquette even got another chance in transition with less than 15 seconds left, but James went to the rack and missed, even with Stevens floating down the sideline in theory waiting for a kick to shoot it. Didn’t happen, no bucket, SHU rebound, and that’s that.
That’s how Marquette let their chance to win at the end slip away from from them, but their real chance to win slipped away by not approaching the second half with the intensity of a thousand exploding suns. Instead, they let Seton Hall punch them in the face, metaphorically speaking, and as we’ve seen time and time again, this team doesn’t have a second trick to show you after their first trick gets dismantled. The thing I kept thinking about in the second half as Marquette shot just 6-for-16 (38%) inside the arc? “Boy, watching that 31 point lead against Creighton dwindle all the way down to just 15 points sure feels a lot worse now than it did then, and I didn’t like it on Tuesday night, either.”
Nigel James finished with 16 points, and combine that with seven for Chase Ross, and I think that’s going to make James Marquette’s new leading scorer when the stat sheets officially update. He also had six rebounds, three assists, and two steals…… and six of Marquette’s 16 turnovers. Royce Parham matched James for the team lead in rebounds, and he had 17 points to actually be the scoring leader in this game. Adrien Stevens got 60% of the way to the mythical 5 by 5 with nine points, five rebounds, and five assists.
Highlights, such as they are, courtesy of GoMarquette.com and NBC Sports/Peacock:
Up Next: Time off, which I think we all want from thinking about this team right now. Marquette gets one of their byes in the Big East rotation in the front half of next week, and so they will return to the court for National Marquette Day on Saturday, February 7th. That will be against Butler, and tipoff on FS1 is scheduled for 1pm Central. The Bulldogs have dropped two in a row since beating Marquette at home on January 23rd, and they will follow up their 77-64 loss at home to Georgetown on Saturday with a road trip to Providence on Wednesday before coming to Milwaukee.
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