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 turn our attention to the biggest lightning rod of the entire season……
Caedin Hamilton
Redshirt Sophomore — #18 — Forward — 6’9” — 250 lbs. — Santa Maria, California
WHAT WE SAID:
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.
We have to break this into pieces. We’re going to talk about Caedin The Starter, which is going to be from Opening Night through the road loss at Creighton. We’re going to talk about Caedin The Sub, which is everything else after that. Yes, he still started four more times in that range, but in the first two, he still played less than 10 minutes, which indicates that Shaka Smart had figured something out. In the other two, he played less than half the game and he only started because Ben Gold was out or limited.
Caedin The Starter averaged 4.7 points and 4.5 rebounds while shooting 42% from the field in 18.8 minutes per game.
Caedin The Sub averaged 1.7 points and 1.8 rebounds while shooting 44% from the field in 8.9 minutes per game.
Starter definitely hits that “we need more from everyone” thing I was talking about back in the preseason. Sub does not. However, Marquette was 5-8 in those 13 games to start the season where Hamilton was the starter and playing notable minutes. That’s 0-8 in games that would have helped Marquette build an NCAA tournament profile, with all eight qualifying as some variety of horrific loss. Did the record get outrageously better as Shaka Smart altered his rotation and eventually permanently removed Hamilton from the starting lineup? Not that much better, no, but it didn’t really matter because the season was already dead in the water.
Why?
Marquette was bad with Hamilton on the floor. Using the same time frames and limiting it to top 150 opponents so we’re not blinded by performance against Albany and Little Rock:
103.5 points per 100 possessions on offense with him on the floor, 104.1 without.
104.8 points per 100 possessions on defense with him on the floor, 112.9 without.
Here’s the dilemma of the entire situation: The defense got really REALLY bad when Caedin Hamilton sat down during the first 13 games of the season. I can understand how the coaching staff might have seen that data and said “well, obviously that’s working.”
Except it wasn’t. 104.8 points per possession isn’t good. Hoop Explorer says it was just #89 in the country for that time frame. That’s not good enough, it’s only better than the other way around. To make matters worse: MU was underwater. You can give up nearly 1.05 points per possession if you’re scoring 1.10 on the other end. That was not happening, MU was actually scoring less than they were giving up, and part of the reason why is that Hamilton was shooting 42% from the field on nearly four attempts per game. No, the offense wasn’t relying on him, but at no point did a single defense facing Marquette in the first 13 games of the season have to care in the slightest about double teaming the Golden Eagles’ starting center if just to make him work 1% harder. He was probably going to miss anyway, so why put the effort in?
Once Shaka Smart pulled the trigger on changing his lineup, the impact was obvious. Yes, in Hamilton’s now limited minutes, the Golden Eagles were scoring 108.9 points per 100 possessions and allowing just 91.9 on the other end. But going without him: 116.7 for, 104.6 against. You can make an argument that the differential says that Hamilton should be playing. We’re talking about +17 with him and +12 without him. The math is what the math is….. except part of MU’s offensive boost came because MU turned the ball over less when Hamilton was off the floor….. and their offensive rebounding got better, too. Just a little, but if one of the things he was actually good at — that 9.9% offensive rebounding rate is roughly top 250 according to KenPom.com in the country if he had the minutes to qualify — was just a touch better when Hamilton was on the bench waving a towel…. then yeah, he’s got to sit, right?
And here’s the other part of all of it: I think Shaka Smart kiiiiiind of only played Caedin Hamilton when he felt it was actually working once he made the lineup change. Using CBB Analytics’ lineup tool:
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Look at everything from the Creighton game on December 20th downwards. Hamilton was regularly getting first half minutes after getting pulled from the starting lineup. However, if Shaka Smart didn’t like the impact of his first half minutes, there wouldn’t be second half minutes, or very many of them at least. There’s situational noise here and there, fouls on Ben Gold and Royce Parham might be impacting the true sense of the numbers. The point is, I’m seeing enough here to at least ask if that +17 per 100 possessions from Hoop Explorer is partially because Shaka Smart was only giving Hamilton minutes if it was working. To be clear: That’s good coaching and game management! It just means that the on/off data isn’t 100% truthful about what kind of impact Hamilton was actually having once the lineup shift happened.
There’s at least enough data here to suggest that one of the reasons that Marquette was only “obviously better” and not “actually good” after the lineup change is because Shaka Smart was handcuffed when Hamilton wasn’t giving him something to work with on the floor. If he could give you a minute or three in the second half, that was a little bit less that Gold and Parham had to play, and a little less fatigue makes them better players, especially when Gold was playing on maybe 1.5 good legs in the second half of the season. If Hamilton couldn’t give you quality minutes, then Gold and Parham had to suck it up and that’s not a productive way to win basketball games.
This won’t impact how I’m evaluating the season I just watched, but since I am writing this in May: Ask yourself how Marquette’s going to play in 2026-27 with an unimproved Caedin Hamilton as one half of the only backup that Sananda Fru has available. Now ask yourself how Shaka Smart feels about having a guy he may have literally been giving “well, let’s seeeeee, NOPE” minutes to as the guy that’s now Fru’s backup with Sheek Pearson off to Saint Louis. Interesting, isn’t it?
BEST GAME
You have to stick with me here for a second. W can’t give this to his high scoring game for the season, because I can’t respect a 12 point output when it came with just two rebounds in 21 minutes against Southern. It can’t be his only other double digit scoring game of the season, because 10 points against Indiana is kind of useless next to four turnovers in 21 minutes as Marquette got blown out.
However…. did y’all notice that Caedin Hamilton played 18 minutes against UConn in the home finale? The upset of #4 UConn? Four points, two rebounds, an assist, just two fouls, and at a glance at that CBB Analytics chart, Marquette won most of the minutes he had on the floor? Which means he was probably slowing down Tarris Reed, who had 16 points on 7-for-10 shooting and 10 rebounds, too? And MU pulled off their biggest win of the year? It’s not a jump off the page Best Game, but given everything else that we’ve been talking about here, it’s kind of hard to ignore.
SEASON GRADE
On the upside, playing Caedin Hamilton was generally speaking good for Marquette’s defense. On the downside, playing Caedin Hamilton broke the offense in very bad ways, most notably making MU’s inability to score at the rim look even worse. At face value: His 43% shooting on two-point attempts was very bad. From a visual impact level: It made you notice Zaide Lowery and Sean Jones both shooting under 44% on two-pointers a little bit more and made you feel a lot worse about the entire enterprise before the lineup change.
At the end of the day, the reasonable expectation for Hamilton was “everyone has to do a little bit more to make up for what Marquette is losing,” and not only did he fail at that, he failed at that so hard that Shaka Smart had to cut him nearly all the way back to what he was doing the year before just to salvage something useful out of the season. The best I can say is “points for effort” and give Hamilton’s redshirt sophomore year a 2.
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