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 move along to check in a guy who hasn’t shown consistent promise to break through with the Golden Eagles….
Tre Norman
Junior — #5 — Guard — 6’4” — 205 lbs. — Boston, Massachusetts
Year One of Tre Norman in Milwaukee can be summed up as “yeah, well, he was a freshman on a team with a stacked up backcourt, he got minutes after Sean Jones got hurt, so that’s something, but I mean, how much was he supposed to do?”
Year Two of Tre Norman in Milwaukee can be summed up as “uh, so, Sean’s missing the whole year and, uh, shouldn’t this be a great chance for Tre and…. huh.”
And here we are going into Year Three for the former top 100 prospect, and it’s a struggle to be optimistic about what he can provide for the team this season. If he was a point guard option that head coach Shaka Smart trusted to deliver, we would have seen some of that last season. If he was a scoring option that could be trusted, I feel like we would have seen that. We didn’t. The writing was on the wall for what was going to happen last year when Marquette was in a battle with George Mason at the McGuire Center until the final six minutes. Norman played just seven minutes in that game, the lowest total of anyone who got on the court, and not at all in the second half.
He’s shown no reliability as a three-point shooter, landing at just 18.8% for his career through his first 69 attempts. His playing time last season was marred by turnovers, ending up with a rate north of 20% overall and north of 25% against what KenPom.com calls Tier A (top 50 adjusted for location) opponents. His on/off splits from 2024-25 show him as essentially neutral on defense against top 200 opponents according to Hoop Explorer and a 10 point per 100 possessions negative on MU on the offensive end.
That’s what Tre Norman has been to this point. I hate that I have to write all that out. But we’re previewing what could be/should be for this season, and we can’t do that without setting the table with what’s come before, and that’s what it is for Norman.
Reasonable Expectations
BartTorvik.com projects Tre Norman to play nearly 15 minutes a game while averaging 4.5 points, 2.8 rebounds, and 1.1 assists per game.
Yeah, we’re not going with that. A 50% jump in his minutes, a 100% jump in his points, rebounds, and assists? Yeah, no. Sorry, but no. That is not going to be what we are reasonably going to expect from him.
How about this for a reasonable expectation: Tre Norman turns into a reliable Big East rotation player. He hasn’t been that yet. We’ll keep it generic that way. No stats attached, just “hey, he’s doing stuff and I like what I see when he’s out there.” Regular playing time. Positive impact on the team. That kind of thing. I want to be able to come back to this preview in the spring when it’s time to write the Player Reviews and be thinking, “hey, things worked out for Tre this year, cool.”
I’m not even going to go as far as to say “The light goes on for Tre Norman.” That’s way too far past what we need to see from him in 2025-26.
Why You Should Get Excited
In the words of Olivia Rodrigo: It’s a bad idea, right? F*** it, it’s fine.
WHAT IF THE LIGHT GOES ON FOR TRE NORMAN?
This is a season with way too many question marks for Marquette. Pretty much everyone wearing a uniform needs to step up and improve their contributions in one way or another. Veterans need to be better or do more, freshmen need to make an impact, and so on. The table is set for an offseason of hard work from Tre Norman paying off and he shows up on November 3rd against Albany as the player that the coaching staff thought he could be when they recruited him.
Potential Pitfalls
I hate to say it, but Tre Norman already fell into that pit. The odds seem to indicate that we’re going to get a third season from him like the first two, just in this case with at least two of the freshman possibly zipping past Norman in the playing time pecking order. He’s already deep into the possible problems that he could encounter this season, so the good news is that he can only climb out of the pit, not fall any further deeper into it.
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