On Tuesday night, Marquette men’s basketball lost 79-73 to a Seton Hall team that’s just a shade outside the Associated Press top 25. If you want to think and talk about that, please head on over to our recap of the endeavor.
What happened after the game ended is something that happens after every game ends: Head coach Shaka Smart speaks to the collected media at the game. However, in this case, it was slightly different, as this was the first time that Smart had stepped to a microphone since 1) Zaide
Lowery left the program and 2) The men’s basketball Twitter account kiiiiiiiiinda said that there was some sort of altercation involving members of the program. Maybe involving Lowery, maybe involving assistant coach Cody Hatt, but by attempting to shoot down a post by a noted troll account, the phrasing of said attempt at least made it seem like something happened for sure.
And so, Smart’s press conference, archived on YouTube.
The video is 10:01 in length. The Zaide Lowery conversation starts at the 2:02 mark, after the conclusion of Smart’s opening statement. I made use of YouTube’s transcription service to get you the words that Smart said here, although I have edited it together because YouTube does it in bursts, as well as for clarity because the speech to text isn’t 100% perfect. See also: Satan Hall at the 1:01 mark.
Ben Steele, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Just before we talk about the game, just with the news with with Zaide leaving, whenever that happens, it can lead to wild speculation. Just what clarity can you give for reasons for Zaide’s departure?
Shaka Smart: Well, one piece of clarity I can give is, what was speculated on social media is 1,000% inaccurate. What we put in our release is really what it is. Zaide is no longer part of the program. Zaide’s a good kid. Again, what was speculated on social media is untrue. I’ve talked to Zaide a couple times in the last several days. So yeah, that’s not true.
Steele: Was it his decision or was it mutual?
Shaka Smart: It was something that we we spent a lot of time talking really over the last few weeks. Ultimately stuff like this is never an easy decision. But it became clear that it was the best thing for him and the best thing for the program.
And that’s it. That wraps up at the 3:16 mark according to the YouTube transcript timestamps, and the rest of the six-plus minutes is discussion of the Seton Hall game.
Okay, so let’s get into it.
Smart said that the speculation on social media is “1,000% inaccurate” and “untrue” and “not true.” The most forgiving reading of his answer is that what should have been posted by the official team Twitter account was something to the effect of “1,000% categorically false.” We can’t ignore the fact that Smart never said “altercation” and he never said “fight.” I’m not going to jump on his head for that, because when things go from “started and played 23 minutes in the season opener” to “came off the bench for 12 minutes in a blowout loss” to “did not play at coach’s discretion” to “did not travel with team” to “not on team,” I’m pretty sure there’s at least one interaction between Zaide Lowery and someone on the administrative side that could be classified as a fight. Given that, I’m not going to say that Smart did something wrong by refusing to say “there was not a fight.” If there was any stern conversations that anyone other than Smart and Lowery know about, then it’s best to keep the statement to “1,000% inaccurate” and move on.
With that said, in between the team Twitter account blowing everything up on Sunday and tipoff on Tuesday, someone at Marquette — it doesn’t have to be in the athletic department, you can get the university side communication team involved here, go to an outside contractor that specializes in PR management, I don’t care — needed to sit down with Smart and craft a statement that was better than the first seven sentences that Smart offered on the topic. Not just for something better than what he said, but so that Smart didn’t “um” and “y’know” his way through it, too.
One thing I skipped over in the speculation discussion is whether or not Lowery was dismissed from the team. After all, the team Twitter account said that the altercation was inaccurate, not the dismissal. I skipped it because Steele’s second question gets to that point. Based on Smart’s answer, I think we can say that calling Lowery’s departure a dismissal is not correct. Smart doesn’t directly answer Steele’s question, but calling it best for both sides indicates that Smart and his staff were not trying to convince or cajole Lowery to stay. When the end result of the ongoing conversation is “well, if that’s how you feel, then I feel it’s best that you’re not here, do you agree,” that’s not a dismissal.
However, we can’t ignore “a lot of time talking really over the last few weeks.” Why? Because here’s Smart answering Ben Steele’s questions in Omaha after the Creighton game just 10 days earlier:
Asked Shaka Smart about Zaide Lowery not making trip with #mubb to Omaha:
“Just wasn’t here for personal reasons.”
Not suspended?
“Nope”
Not leaving the team?
“Nope”
Now, that may have been true at the time, perhaps there wasn’t a final decision made. But if a conversation between Lowery and Smart had been ongoing for “the last few weeks” — presumably since Lowery’s 0-for-7 shooting performance against Valparaiso moved him from the starting lineup to the bench — then maybe “Nope” in response to a question about leaving the team isn’t/wasn’t the best answer. Probably can’t fault Smart for the answer in the moment, but the Monday morning quarterbacking on that makes it clear that “just personal reasons, that’s all” would have made more sense.
That’s all the clarity on the topic that we’re going to get, it seems. Unfortunately, there’s a much deeper post-mortem on Lowery’s departure that really should be done, but I’m pretty sure that Shaka Smart isn’t going to be willing to answer questions publicly about it in a post-game press conference, much less in a sit down interview in the middle of the season. Smart has hammered home the idea that his tenure at Marquette is built on a foundational idea of strong relationships lead to strong growth, and those two things together lead to victories. He means more than wins and losses on the basketball court, to be clear, but it applies to the games that go on his permanent record, too.
Something happened that fractured the relationship between Zaide Lowery, his coaches, and his teammates. Players have transferred away from Marquette during Smart’s time as head coach, but none of those departures are easily seen from the outside as a relationship being broken and unrepairable. Hell, one of them — Keeyan Itejere — was so far to the other side that Michael Phillips is on this year’s roster because of how much his high school coach respected Shaka Smart’s relationships with his players, no matter what was going on with them. What has happened with Lowery is something new, it seems, something that hasn’t happened to Smart in Milwaukee yet.
The question that has to be asked is whether that’s a limited circumstance, contained entirely within Lowery’s relationship with the program, or if this is merely the first sign that things are going very sideways inside the Marquette locker room and office. Is this a case where two men are just not on the same page for whatever reason or reasons, or was this the first of several time bombs to explode?
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