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 head to the penultimate entry in our player preview series and take a look at the guy who is probably going to be Marquette’s tallest starter……
Ben Gold
Senior — #12 — Forward — 6’11” — 235 lbs. — Wellington, New Zealand
So far, through three seasons with Marquette, Ben Gold has done what’s been asked of him. Freshman year: Bit part, fill in where needed, hit some open shots (he hit 39% of his threes in Big East play, don’t dig deeper!). Sophomore year: Reliable backup, floating back and forth between the 4 and the 5, produce in the rebounding department a little bit more, keep hitting those shots. Junior year: Starting center, play the minutes that’s required of that job, keep hitting shots when your number gets called. We can all have a little bit of a critique here and there of his play — personally, I’d like him to attack the rim more to keep defenses off balance — but the end result here is that Gold has continued to develop as a player and he’s stepped up every single time that the coaching staff has asked him to do something.
He’s going to be asked to do that one more time as a senior. Last year, Gold could be Just A Guy on the Marquette roster, because Kam Jones and David Joplin were going to handle the scoring and Stevie Mitchell was going to be the biggest defensive pest on the team. Gold just had to fill in around them, and he did his part in that regard. This year, there’s too many questions about what the floor and the ceiling are for the Golden Eagles and how all of these roster parts fit together. This year, Gold has to be the answer to some of those questions, and at least some of the time, he’s going to have to be a load bearing part of the structure of this team, not just a decorative addition.
Reasonable Expectations
The worst case scenario for Ben Gold this season is repeating what we saw from him last year. If that’s all he does, it won’t be a terrifically fun season to review in April, but it’ll be hard to say anything bad about Gold. Last year, he put up 7.4 points, 4.3 rebounds, and just under an assist per game while shooting a career best 37% on threes on a career high volume of shots. He also added a little bit short of a block per game, because as we discussed in his review: Ben Gold was a perfectly fine rim protector. Great? No. Fine? Sure.
“Play it again, Sam,” is the worst case scenario. Because there’s too many questions for this year’s team, we need to see more from him. It doesn’t have to be a lot more. If it’s just a couple more minutes per game and a slight boost to his per-40 minute averages, which have been roughly the same the past two years? Great. I don’t know if I want to go so far as to expect what the BartTorvik.com algorithm projects for Gold, which is 13.1 points, 6.5 rebounds, and 1.4 assists per game in nearly 31 minutes a night. That’s starting to veer into “Ben Gold is Marquette’s leading scorer” territory — Chase Ross is the projected leader at 14.1, just barely ahead of Gold — and as you saw last week Friday, that’s not even an idea that crossed my mind. Ben Gold as leading scorer falls into the category of “well, if it’s making Marquette an obvious NCAA tournament team, I’m not going to complain,” but it doesn’t feel like something we should expect, y’know?
It’s reasonable to ask more from Gold in the rebounding department, and I don’t just mean going from last year’s 4.3 to the Torvik projected 6.5 per game. I’m talking about a defensive rebounding rate somewhere north of 17%. Kadary Richmond and RJ Luis from St. John’s were just over that line last year according to KenPom.com and that made them top 500 rebounders in the country. I’m not asking for “is the best rebounder in the Big East.” I’m asking for “people stop blaming Ben Gold for Marquette’s rebounding problems.” Moving to “Marquette’s still bad at this, but you can’t knock Ben for that” is an improvement!
Why You Should Get Excited
What if that 13/7/1 is undershooting what Gold is capable of? What if we see the full realization of why Ben Gold was at the Australia NBA Global Academy in the first place? What if Marquette needing Gold to do more allows a career explosion for the big Kiwi because merely stepping forward into a leadership spot on the team unlocks something for him?
What if Caedin Hamilton and Joshua Clark are capable of holding down the middle for 30 minutes a night between the two of them and that frees Gold up to play a little bit more freely at the 4? He did a decent amount of that as a freshman and sophomore, playing behind Olivier-Maxence Prosper and David Joplin while spelling Oso Ighodaro in the paint a bit, too. What if Gold’s more natural position is a bit more inside/outside and that allows Marquette to do a bit more 1) with Gold and 2) as a team?
What if he can be Steve Novak with a first step to the rim? “Hey, Andy, that’s crazy!” Is it? Is 17.5 points, 5.9 rebounds, and 1.3 assists per game on 47% three-point shooting really that crazy when we’re talking about Why You Should Get Excited? That’s Novak’s senior year, and let’s be honest: That’s not that much further ahead of what the Torvik algorithm spit out for Gold. If he shoots 47% on triples, Gold had better be firing off a lot more shots and that’s a pretty easy jump from 13 to 17 at that point.
Potential Pitfalls
I think Ben Gold’s biggest problems this year are mostly out of his control. If Hamilton and Clark can’t fill minutes in the middle, that means Gold is going to have to do the job. I think that role kind of puts Gold’s light under a bushel and ultimately that reels in Marquette’s ceiling a little bit. Maybe his numbers still jump off the page as career bests while doing that, but I’m not sure it’s the best use of Gold’s skills and talents.
The other major possible problem for Gold is relatively simple: What if we are too optimistic about his growth potential? Maybe we’ve seen everything we can see from Gold, he is the kind of player that we’ve seen through three seasons, and nothing, no matter how much space to expand is there this season, is going to change anything? Maybe we’re just never going to see him have the confidence to pump fake and go past guys regularly at the arc, and so on.
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