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 take a look at a guy who might be the player best poised for a breakout season this year……
Zaide Lowery
Junior — #7 — Guard — 6’5” — 205 lbs. — Springfield, Missouri
If you find yourself reading through the Marquette men’s basketball roster page in order to familiarize yourself with the faces that go with the names of the new guys, and you bump across Zaide Lowery’s name, I think it’s probably a completely acceptable/understandable reaction to say “oh, hey, he’s back, that’s nice.” Looking over his career stats, I don’t think that you can much more excited about what you see at a glance from Lowery other than “hey, he shot 38% on threes last season, he should shoot more if he can do that.
Career averages so far through 62 games of 2.9 points, 2.2 rebounds, and a steal every other game. Last year? 4.1 points and 3.0 rebounds in just short of 16 minutes a night, 3.3 field goal attempts per game, not even averaging a free throw attempt per game. Not a star, not dragging things down either, just a guy who gets some minutes.
Except.
As I noted in his Player Review after the 2024-25 season, that is not the player that Zaide Lowery was for the final two months of the season last year.
Over the rest of the season, from the road game against Seton Hall through the NCAA tournament loss to New Mexico:
Lowery averaged 5.3 points and 3.7 rebounds in just short of 18 minutes a game, and he knocked down just under 47% of his three-pointers.
Lowery had an offensive rating of 130.6 and a PORPAGATU! of 2.2.
Marquette was +8.6 per 100 possessions on offense with Lowery on the floor, and +2.9 per 100 possessions on defense against top 150 teams and outside of garbage time.
That Zaide Lowery is a Contributor, not just a Guy filling in minute. Maybe not quite up to Dude status, maybe a little hard to say that when he’s playing less than half the game. But it’s at least pointed in that direction and if, say, that Zaide Lowery were to find himself in a position where a spot in the starting lineup opened up and thus create an avenue to 20, 25, 30 minutes a game? Those numbers bumped up by about 10 minutes a game work out to somewhere between seven and nine points a game, five or six rebounds? Maybe a little more just from getting long playing stretches?
Reasonable Expectations
I point out what Zaide Lowery was at the end of the 2024-25 season to create a framework of what’s a reasonable expectation for him. Continuing along that track just with more minutes now that Marquette has to find a new backcourt starter after Stevie Mitchell’s graduation is the logical starting point here. “Just keep doing what you’re doing” is a reasonable way to go about things.
The BartTorvik.com projections don’t seem to veer off from that too far, and look to be about right if you projected Lowery’s entire 2024-25 season into a bigger role for this season. 6.6 points, 5.0 rebounds, and an assist in 25 minutes a night. That’s about the low end of what I just said: seven points, five rebounds, maybe more minutes pushes that up. It all depends on whether or not Lowery’s play in the final eight weeks of last season is what he really is as a player now or if it was just Something That Happened.
Either way, the door is open for Lowery to be that kind of a player this season. It’s not even really asking him to do a lot, just keep being the guy you figured out how to be, just with more minutes.
Why You Should Get Excited
What if we ask Zaide Lowery to do a lot? What if he plays like he did towards the end of last season, but he’s not deferring to Kam Jones or David Joplin? What if Marquette asks Zaide Lowery to be The Man Around Here?
What if it works?
As I said, Marquette needs a new backcourt starter with Stevie Mitchell gone. Chase Ross keeps his spot, Sean Jones slides in as the projected point guard to replace Kam Jones. Someone has to take Stevie’s spot in the starting five, and based on what we’ve seen before, Lowery is the most likely candidate.
So if he is the guy for that role, and we know that there’s a lot of questions facing Marquette men’s basketball this season, what if a lot of them just get answered by Lowery making The Jump that nagging injuries have seemingly stopped Chase Ross from making the past two years? What if Zaide Lowery is The Prince Who Was Promised? What if Zaide Lowery is the high energy, high athleticism, dynamic scoring guard/wing this team needs? What if he can hold up the deal on the defensive end, cranking up that 2.9% steal rate in Big East play according to KenPom.com somewhere north of 3.0% for the year and pushing towards the top 100 in the country like we saw from Chase Ross at 3.5% last year?
What if Zaide Lowery is an all-Big East performer?
Potential Pitfalls
You’ll notice that I’m basing my belief in what Zaide Lowery could be on what he was for the final 16 games of last season. There’s two components to that sample size that could easily make you wary of putting a lot of stock into your Lowery basket.
The first is what he was doing before taking off in the final half of the season, and, uh, he was kind of not good.
But still, up through Marquette’s home loss against Xavier, a contest that Lowery did not play in, he was averaging 2.8 points per game along with 2.3 rebounds in 13.5 minutes a night and shooting under 27% from behind the three-point line. BartTorvik.com’s data sorter has him with an offensive rating of 102.8 for that stretch of the season, which isn’t bad, just unremarkable, just a shade north of the 100 that you’d expect to see from a completely average player. He also had a PORPAGATU! of 0.1, which is effectively his value over a replacement player at his usage rate. For comparison? Kam Jones was at 5.9 in the same time frame. Hoop Explorer shows us that against top 150 opponents, Lowery was pretty much a gigantic net negative on the team while he was on the floor. Marquette was scoring 13 fewer points per 100 possessions and giving up 16 more per 100 trips on the defensive end with Lowery as one of the five active players.
Did he have a knee issue that caused him to miss time in early December? Sure. But those numbers are for the full season to that point, and yeah, right before Lowery took off, he had two straight five minute playing time games in close contests against Georgetown and DePaul and then a DNP in a two point home loss to Xavier. He wasn’t good and Marquette needed guys who could be good, and that wasn’t him.
The other component that could make you wary is the fact that Marquette had a record of 8-8 while Lowery was looking good. There is very clearly a lot more reasons to that than “well, MU was relying on Lowery’s play and that wasn’t a good plan.” He was still just a role guy on that team, and the squad was being let down by the guys who were supposed to be carrying the load. Lowery was merely stepping up when Marquette most needed him to do it… the problem is that it didn’t have a big impact. What if he’s the guy who is supposed to be carrying the load and he’s actually doing it AND it’s also not having an impact on the team winning? As the saying goes, every team has to have a leading scorer, no matter if they’re in first place or last place, right?
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