It wasn’t much of a first season in terms of minutes played, but that wasn’t really a surprise, either.
With the 2023-24 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’ll start off our run of reviews with the only scholarship player who didn’t crack triple digits in minutes this season…..
Al Amadou
Freshman – #21 – Forward – 6’9” – 210 lbs. – Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
Is it a reasonable expectation for Amadou if it’s something that I’m going to expect all of us to be doing by the time the season comes along? We’re all calling him “Big Al,” right? That’s officially a thing, right?
As for actual on the court production, well, we’ll have to wait and see. The facts of the matter are that, with the exception of Caedin Hamilton, who just signed in August and is redshirting this season, Al Amadou is Marquette’s least heralded recruit in the Class of 2023. Combine that lack of high rankings from the recruiting services with the fact that at 6’9” and 210 pounds, Amadou is Tall Man, not Big Man, it leads to questions about what he can give to the Golden Eagles on the floor right now. Let me put it this way: He’s two inches and 25 pounds smaller than Oso Ighodaro, and two inches and 35 pounds smaller than Ben Gold. How much playing time can Amadou snipe from those two guys, purely at the 5 this season? Is it even possible? Will Gold end up sharing time with David Joplin at the 4, and that leaves some space in the lineup for Amadou…. but if he can’t handle banging around with guys like UConn’s Donovan Clingan, how much PT will he actually get?
To put it all another way: BartTorvik.com’s projection for the season has Amadou outside the top 10 contributors. He’s the only one of the three active roster freshmen to land out there. Last year, Marquette did what they did with a nine man rotation. Is Shaka Smart going to want to try to find playing time for 11 guys this year?
The reasonable way to approach Amadou’s first season in Milwaukee is thus: If he’s contributing something to the active roster on the floor on a regular basis, it’s a win for him and for Marquette.
Why You Should Get Excited
Amadou broke Springside Chestnut Hill Academy’s career record for blocked shots, racking up 235 of them.
Amadou did that in two seasons after transferring in before his junior year.
Now, it’s hard to say exactly how impressive that is. We’re talking about an ultra-athletic 6’9” young man, and sometimes it’s almost a little too easy for a guy destined to play in the Big East to go swat shots of guys who aren’t even going to make it to Division 1.
On the other hand, he did that in two seasons. Amadou averaged five blocks per game as a senior, and since they went 17-8, that means he had 125 blocks last year. He also averaged 10 points and eight rebounds, but hey, that’s just a ridiculous number of blocks. If they played 25 games in his junior year, he averaged 4.4 per game. It’s wild stuff.
If Amadou’s raw athleticism is too much for the bench to contain him, it’s hard to say exactly what he’s capable of accomplishing.
Potential Pitfalls
We hit on it in the Expectations part, because that’s part of the expectations for him this season. The roster has roles from last season that can be largely speaking left intact for this season, and good things can happen. Smart and his staff have to figure out how to replace Olivier-Maxence Prosper, but I don’t think anyone’s expecting Amadou to be carrying a heavy load of that work at any point this year.
There’s a version of the 2023-24 season that 1) goes very well for Marquette as a team but 2) goes not so great in terms of individual production and playing time for Al Amadou. That’s fine, the plans for Amadou are bigger than just this season.
27-10 overall, 14-6 in the Big East which was tied for second place, the first Sweet 16 appearance for Marquette men’s basketball since 2013. I think we can safely say that things did go very well for the Golden Eagles as a team in 2023-24, especially when you take the barrage of injuries into account.
They did that while Al Amadou played 52 minutes, and just one minute in the month of March. Things went very well for MU as a team, not so great for Amadou’s playing time and on the court contributions. That was the downside expectation for Amadou’s first year in Milwaukee, and, well, it was kind of the most likely outcome for all the reasons that we laid out in his preview back in the fall.
With just 52 total minutes played this season, less than six of the guys who played in the Syracuse/UConn 6 overtime game in the 2009 Big East tournament, it’s hard to make any definitive statements about what Amadou did well or poorly this season. As such, I’m just not going to break his game down.
What I will say about Big Al’s first season with the Golden Eagles is the biggest thing that jumped out to me every time he did get on the floor. Most of his minutes were played as the only scholarship player on the floor with the walk ons at the end of a blowout win. You might expect that to turn into Amadou trying to take charge of the situation and get some stats on the board for himself. That could not have been further from the truth, as it looked, every single time, that Big Al was going to bust his ass as hard as humanly possible to get the walk ons their best possible looks at the rim to score. Hard screens, fighting for rebounds, looking to pass to Cameron Brown or Jonah Lucas or Jack Riley or Casey O’Malley. Shaka Smart loves to talk about how relationships are the most important part of his program at Marquette, and you can see the value of the relationships between Amadou and the walk ons when they were on the floor together. Amadou played like he knew that his time was coming eventually, even if it wasn’t this year, but the spotlight was never going to be bigger or more important for the walk ons.
And he was going to do everything he could do to help them out.
It was very cool.
BEST GAME
12 minutes played, six points, four rebounds, an assist, and two blocks. Al Amadou was a production MACHINE against Southern on November 28th. It ruled, good for him.
SEASON GRADE
I’m not giving a grade to 52 minutes. That’s wildly unfair.