We have to try to assess a season that was cut short by injury in January.
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 move on to the review where we have to deal with a season ending injury…….
Sean Jones
Sophomore – #22 – Guard – 5’10” – 185 pounds – Columbus, Ohio
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
While optimism can abound for Jones and his development as a collegiate player, the fact of the matter is that the collection of guys looking to play backcourt minutes for Marquette in 2023-24 is actually bigger in number than it was last season. Not only does Jones have to contend with his backcourt mates from last season — and it’s hard to pry those Big East Championship starters off the court — now there’s also two freshmen in the form of Tre Norman and Zaide Lowery looking to get some action as the Golden Eagles chase back-to-back Big East titles.
What I’m trying to say is that if you’re putting more expectations on Sean Jones than “will make use of his speed to be a literal change of pace option in the backcourt for Marquette,” then you’re probably just setting yourself up to be disappointed in his season for no reason other than you decided it’s a thing you want to do to yourself. Jones’ pre-injury averages from last season of 4.5 points and 1.2 assists per game in 13 minutes of action might be right about where we could expect him to land. The BartTorvik.com algorithm projects Jones at just 36% of MU’s minutes, which is 14.4 per night. Not that far from last year’s 13, is it? 4.5 points, just under a rebound, just over an assist is the statline projection from the fancy T-Rank computers, and yep, like I said, that’s about what he was doing last year.
But again: Tyler Kolek, Kam Jones, and Stevie Mitchell are all still out there for Marquette, so there’s nowhere for Jones to ascend by way of an open spot in the rotation. If Jones is getting back to last year’s pre-injury numbers with Norman and Lowery potentially nipping at his heels in terms of playing time, then that’s pretty good.
Why You Should Get Excited
I alluded to Sean Jones’ footspeed a moment ago. Jones figuring out how to use that speed at the Division 1 level was always going to be the biggest part of his jump from the Ohio high school scene and the club circuit to the Big East. A year ago, Shaka Smart was lauding praise on his freshman guard for being lightning quick, but this year, the coach is going in a different direction. Not a change, but an improvement.
If Jones has figured that aspect of his game out, if he’s making big steps, then that adds dimensions to what the coaching staff is trying to do with this year’s version of the roster. If they can trust Jones for one extra minute per game, that’s one extra minute per game that Tyler Kolek gets to rest. That’s one extra minute per game off of Kolek’s workload as the season goes along, one extra minute of reserve energy in the All-American’s legs when the already bright spotlights get a little bit brighter in March.
Jones won’t be asked to carry a heavy load for Marquette this year, but if he is making the development that Smart says he is and can carry a heavier load than last year, that’s going to make everything flow a little bit easier for everyone.
Potential Pitfalls
Shaka Smart said Jones has “made a real step” in adjusting how he makes use of his speed since last year. I don’t know about you guys, but Shaka Smart strikes me as a gentleman who makes careful choices about the words he uses, and he deploys them on purpose.
Which means it’s a little bit interesting that Smart said that Jones has made one singular step forward from last year. Not plural steps, not a leap, not a jump, just a step. Maybe that’s just me reading way too much into things. But if Smart needs his sophomore guard to take a leap forward to give him more responsibility on the floor, then maybe Jones isn’t quite there yet.
The other thing that we have to be worried about relative to what we see from Sean Jones this year is the mere existence of Tre Norman and Zaide Lowery. My general sense of those guys is that they can’t do what Jones can do when it comes to speed on the court. However, that’s not the only thing that matters on the court. What if the things that Norman and Lowery excel at turn out to be things that Marquette needs more than Jones’ speed and quickness? It’s the coaching staff’s job to figure out how to use all the ingredients at their disposal to create the best meal possible. If the best possible version of Marquette is less Jones and more Norman and/or Lowery, then that’s the direction that they have to go.
I want to start this by making a slight accommodation for Sean Jones’ season ending injury that happened late in the “was already a disaster, this was unnecessarily mean, basketball gods” home game against Butler. Because that was on January 10th, Jones finished the year playing in just 17.6% of Marquette’s minutes this season, and as such, he doesn’t qualify for the national leaders on KenPom.com. This is important here because Jones’ assist rate of 20.4% would have been in the top 400 and his steal rate of 3.3% was just barely behind Chase Ross at #107 in the country. Both numbers are notable increases from what Jones was doing as a freshman, and I think it’s important to point out how much he had stepped up his game in Year Two, even if the existence of his injury are preventing us from seeing it at glance.
And the fact of the matter is that it looked like Jones was better than he was in Year One. His minutes were more consistent, dipping into single digits just once as Marquette blew Texas off the floor in December. That’s something we couldn’t say about Freshman Sean Jones through the first two-plus months of the season. His rim attacking was better, converting 55% of his two-point attempts. His free throw shooting was better, jumping up more than 10 percentage points to an even 75%. Jones was getting into passing lanes more and turning the ball over less, both of which is a sign that he was figuring out how to use his speed both to be disruptive and protect the ball, too. His rebounding was a little bit better, and any time you get a guy under six feet tall rebounding the ball better, you’re coming out way ahead.
In short, I think we were seeing exactly the step forward that you want to see from a sophomore, especially one who’s probably going to be handed the reins of the offense the following season. It’s just that his knee quit on him in January, a complete freak non-contact deal, and so we didn’t get to see Jones really show us what he had against most of the Big East schedule or in the postseason.
Heck, there’s a way to look at Jones’ injury and wonder if that was part of the reason why Tyler Kolek suffered his oblique injury late in the regular season. I mentioned it in Jones’ preview: Every quality minute he provides was one that Kolek didn’t have to play. No Jones = more Kolek, and who’s to say that a few extra minutes here and there didn’t cause the wear and tear that eventually led to Kolek’s muscle strain?
The real bummer of Jones’ shortened season? Not only did we not get a full look at what he could do as the schedule difficulty ramped up, the timing of his injury means we don’t actually know when we’ll see Sean Jones on the court again. If it’s an eight month recovery to full clearance, then he’s back to full speed conditioning and so on in September, before practices for 2024-25 start. If it’s 10 months, then Jones is going to be only just starting to get himself up to game speed when the ball goes into the air for the first time. If it’s longer than that? Jones and the coaching staff are going to have to have a long conversation about whether not he should play next season at all.
BEST GAME
Creighton’s Francisco Farabello canned a triple with 10:15 left in the game to put the Jays up 48-46…. and that’s when Sean Jones went to work.
Hey, remember when I said that he was struggling to shoot the ball all season? Yeah. The sophomore from Ohio made back-to-back triples for the Golden Eagles, ramrodding the lead to four, 52-48, then he drew a foul and sank his throws to make it 56-51…. and then converted a layup, 58-51, 5:59 to play. Going back to a bucket he scored with 12:18 to go, that’s a 16-8 Marquette run with Jones throwing in 12. Just from his threes onwards, that’s a 12-3 run, with Jones getting 10 and Kam Jones contributing the other two.
Creighton would not lead again.
That’s #10 Marquette’s December 30th 72-67 home win over #22 Creighton. Jones finished tied with Tyler Kolek for points in the game with 15, but that was a career high for him, getting there on 5-for-8 from the field, including 3-for-5 from long range. Jones added two steals to the proceedings as well.
SEASON GRADE
I have to give it an incomplete. Jones played in 16 of Marquette’s 37 games. That’s less than half, and it’s a little on the unfair side to assign a grade to it when we didn’t see him for the final two months-plus of the year.