The Golden Eagles starter with the most questions facing him coming into the season answered the call….. for the most part.
With the 2024-25 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 move along to the first review of one of Marquette’s starting five………
Ben Gold
Junior — #12 — Forward — 6’11” — 235 lbs. — Wellington, New Zealand
*- notes a top 500 national rank per KenPom.com
**- notes a top 400 national rank per KenPom.com
***- notes a top 300 national rank per KenPom.com
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
I don’t think we’re stepping out of line to say that if Ben Gold is going to start for Marquette this year, then he has to play starter’s minutes. We’ll see what the rotation actually looks like when the rubber meets the road against Stony Brook on November 4th, but the minutes are what’s the key here. The fact of the matter is that Ben Gold is probably not best suited to be a traditional 5 in a college basketball rotation, but it looks like that’s going to be his role. Set screens, score in the post, rebounding like crazy…. maybe not the best use of his skills, so Marquette’s going to have to find a way to make Gold an efficient center. He’s probably a better-than-you-realize rebounder after finishing last year with the second best defensive rebounding rate on the team per KenPom.com, but given Marquette’s overall rebounding problems under Shaka Smart’s direction, it’s hard to look at Ben Gold and say “yep, there’s the solution to the problem.”
So on top of the idea that he’s going to have to produce in order to justify the starter’s minutes, Gold is also going to have to be able to stay on the floor. For each of the past two seasons, the big Kiwi has averaged more than four fouls per 40 minute per KenPom. That’s fine when you’re averaging 17 minutes a night, go wild. But if MU needs Gold to stay on the floor for 25+ minutes a night, getting in foul trouble is going to make it hard to get to that point. In addition, merely picking up fouls is going to make it a little bit harder for Gold to be an effective defender. Once you get 2, the risk of 3 is present, and you get the idea here. Why is that important? Because Gold wasn’t a net positive defender for Marquette last season, according to Hoop Explorer. Yes, a little bit skewed by Gold mostly playing backup minutes to Oso Ighodaro and his defensive wizardry, but 99.6 points per 100 possessions against top 200 opponents is middle of the road type of stuff.
I know this is coming off a lot like the Potential Pitfalls portion of the program where I introduce the possible problems that await a particular player. But of everyone on the roster, Gold is perhaps the only one who is seeing a major reconfiguration of what’s being expected of him. The guys we’ve talked about before now are either completely new to the team or at least to the active roster or looking to get a chance to expand their roles. The guys we’ll talk about after Gold have established roles as leaders that we’ve already seen and can believe in. Neither of those two categories apply to Gold, so part of the Reasonable Expectation for him is to break past these possible barriers in front of him.
“God, Andy, just give us the Torvik algorithm expectation already, come on!” Yeah, I know, I wanted to set the tone first….. because the algorithm isn’t super exciting. 5.5 points, 4.5 rebounds, 1.1 assists in a little more than 21 minutes a night. See? You were expecting more from Gold in your head, weren’t you?
Why You Should Get Excited
Marquette is going to have to find a way to be an efficient offensive team this year without the passing touch of both Tyler Kolek and Oso Ighodaro. What if the solution is merely “the big man setting screens for Kam Jones is an effective at worst three-point shooter?” We know that Marquette’s offense runs wild when it’s Ighodaro and his complete lack of outside shooting threat attached to setting screens on the perimeter.
What happens to the offense when it’s Ben Gold setting all those screens and he’s a 36% shooter like he was last season? What happens if he gets a little bit more comfortable and a little bit more in rhythm because he’s playing more? What do defenses do about Marquette’s cutting and passing in space when they’re playing 5-out because Gold can rain it in from anywhere?
An even better question: What if Marquette’s coaching staff gets it through Ben Gold’s head that his ability to drive to the rim is going to get him even more wide open three-point attempts? Even though Gold’s minutes more than doubled, his two-point attempt average didn’t move at all from freshman year to sophomore year. In Per-40-Minutes terms, Gold went from 4.6 two-point attempts to 2.1. We saw Gold use that “get the closeout in the air, drive past him to the rim” kind of regularly as a freshman, but it kind of disappeared as a sophomore in favor of more three-pointers. Now, Gold was connecting on more threes, so that’s not a huge problem, but it’s a circular issue: If Gold starts driving more, the closeout has to start respecting the drive more, so the threes get more open, and that makes the closeout go harder, which makes it easier to drive past them…. you see the loop here. Show of hands: Who wants at least one “Ben Gold rim-rattling dunk on a baseline drive” per game this season? Hey, look, everyone’s hands are in the air.
Not for nothing, but do you know what will fix that two-point attempt drop off as well? Offensive rebounding. I don’t know how often Gold will end up in a good position to be there for that if Marquette does play a lot of 5-out with him on the floor, but easy putbacks is a fun way to get a lot of two-pointers.
Potential Pitfalls
Parts of the opening section sounded an awful lot like the Potential Pitfalls, so you’ve already filled in a lot of the problem here. With Caedin Hamilton at least showing a little bit of learning by practicing against Oso Ighodaro all last year, then we have to at least acknowledge the possibility that Hamilton might fit the 5 position on the floor better than Gold. Not just because of the skills by the way, but also because Hamilton visually appears to be a more physical inside presence than Gold has shown himself to be and/or than Gold visually appears to be.
If Hamilton can defend inside better than Gold and he can provide some of the offensive threats that Ighodaro did…. then what is Gold’s role on this team? Is it just what he was doing last year, floating back and forth between backing up David Joplin and playing a little bit of center here and there?
Shaka Smart has said in the past that part of what the coaching staff is doing with Gold is trying to get him to believe he can be as good as the coaching staff believes he can be. At some point, you’ve pushed a guy along as far as you can push him along. If he doesn’t take the final jump on his own and actually produce the way you need him to, you have to start searching for other options, right?
I want to start off with something that’s been bothering me kind of all season and definitely since the season ended. I’ve seen an awful lot of conversation in various commenting forms that can be summed up as follows:
“2024-25 Marquette’s real problem is that they don’t have a real big man/inside presence.”
This bothers me, probably more than it should.
So, I strolled over to KenPom.com and Google Sheets, and I assembled a sortable spreadsheet of the starting big men in the Big East this season. I had to do a little decision making on a couple of teams relative to who actually was on the court for various parts of the season, but I broke any ties or whatever you want to call it with “who played more against Marquette?” When it came to ranking the guys, I assigned 11 points to whoever was the tallest and the heaviest, 10 points for 2nd, and so on. If there were ties, I gave everyone at that height/weight the best possible number for their tie, and then skipped forward. EXAMPLE: Three guys tied for second tallest would all get 10 points, and then the next guy would get 7 points.
FACTS ONLY:
Ben Gold tied with Villanova’s Enoch Boakye as the second tallest starting 5-man in the Big East this season.
Ben Gold tied with DePaul’s NJ Benson as the fifth heaviest starting 5-man in the Big East this season.
Ben Gold ranked fifth in the Big East in combined height/weight ranking points this season, 1 point behind Zuby Ejiofor from St. John’s, and four points in front of UConn’s Samson Johnson.
Guys, I don’t know what to tell you, but Ben Gold was a perfectly average Big East starting center in terms of his physical size on the court at worst. I’d even go so far as to argue that he’s better than average because he’s taller than most of the league.
I presume that the counter-point most people would offer here is that Gold was a shoddy rebounder, ranking third on the team at 4.3 per game even though he’s the 6’11” starting center. I don’t have much to push back on that here because Gold doesn’t have outstanding rebounding rate numbers, and the obvious answer to “Marquette was a crummy rebounding team” is “they would have been better if Gold was better.” These are fair points, and all I would say in return is that sometimes one guy’s job is merely stopping the other team’s big guy from rebounding and/or opening up paths for other teammates to get the rebounds. For example: In 2015-16, was Luke Fischer a bad rebounder because he was only second on the team at 6.2 per game, or was he a good rebounder because he was occupying a bunch of space so Henry Ellenson could average 9.7 rebounds per game?
The other thing you want your big man to do is protect the rim, right? Looking at Hoop Explorer, I can’t quite get to the point that Ben Gold was obviously making an impact there. Opponents shot about the same number of shots at the rim whether Gold was in or out of the game, and they were a tad bit better — 59% vs 54.6% — at connecting at the rim when Gold was on the court. What I can say is that Gold had a second straight season ranking in the top 400 in the country in block rate according to KenPom.com, and he blocked shots at a slightly higher clip in Big East regular season games than he did overall this season, ranking 10th in the league in block rate. I can also say that Hoop Explorer tells us that Marquette was better on defense with Gold on the court than with him on the bench this year. 95.0 points per 100 trips is solid, and it’s definitely better than 100.9 points per 100 possessions when Gold was taking a breather.
I can’t defend Gold against the allegations of how he makes you feel when you watch him, but the math of what he was doing on the court is he was fine as the 5-man for the Golden Eagles this season. Could he have been better? Could he have been more dominant inside? Sure, I’m not going to say that he was having Marquette’s Best Center Season Ever or anything like that. But accusing the team of not having an inside presence is wrong, at least according to the math.
The one thing that we can probably all agree on is that Gold wasn’t anywhere near aggressive enough at trying to score around the rim. He went from averaging 2.1 two-point attempts per 40 minutes of action as a sophomore to just 2.6 attempts per 40 minutes as a junior. That’s not good enough for the guy that starts at center, and it’s particularly problematic when the guy in question is Ben Gold who clearly can take guys off the dribble from the arc. We saw flickers of it this season. Gold can get past other big men who drift out to cover his three-point shooting, and when he attacks the rim aggressively, it changes the complexion of what the Golden Eagles are doing. It’s an extra trick in the bag for the entire offense…… and Gold just seemed largely unwilling to activate it. Every single time he tried to do it, it looked pretty great and pretty successful… he just didn’t do it that much.
With that said, we have to give Ben Gold credit for being the most dangerous three-point shooter on the team this season. After a rough 4-for-21 (19%!) start across Marquette’s games against Stony Brook, George Mason, and Central Michigan, Gold shot just over 40% from long range for the rest of the season. He finished the year at 37.1% overall, which made him the most accurate shooter out of the five starters and was second on the team overall behind Zaide Lowery’s 37.5%. A very heavy portion of Marquette’s fortunes this season were determined by Kam Jones and David Joplin having abhorrent shooting seasons, both objectively and for their own careers. You can’t say that about Ben Gold, who had his best shooting season in blue and gold, both overall and in Big East play. Would it have been nice to see him add a few more field goals at the rim since he shot 60% on two-pointers as well? Yeah, absolutely, but we’re not going to spend a lot of time banging on a guy who was actually the best long range threat on the team for doing the thing that he’s doing better than anyone else.
BEST GAME
By default, we turn our attention immediately to Gold’s first ever KenPom.com MVP game. At home against Providence, Gold put up 17 points, six rebounds, an assist, and a block while shooting 7-for-9 from the field and connecting on a season high four made two-point buckets. He did all of this in just 23 minutes of action as Marquette shredded the Friars, 82-52.
I do kind of like his line from the Senior Day loss to St. John’s: 13 points, 7 rebounds, two blocks, two steals. Gold also had 14 points and 6 rebounds in the Bahamas win over Georgia, but I think I’m going to stick with the high efficiency performance against Providence.
SEASON GRADE
Ben Gold produced the way that Marquette needed him to produce. They needed him to play starter’s minutes, and he did, averaging 25.3 per game. They needed him to stay on the floor and out of foul trouble, and he cut his fouls from 4.5 per 40 minutes to 3.4. They needed him to be a three-point threat to make up for the passing loss of Tyler Kolek and Oso Ighodaro, and he was, hitting more of his threes than any previous season. They needed him to be a net-positive on defense, and he was, as the points per 100 possession numbers from Hoop Explorer tell us.
Marquette as a team clearly had a lot of problems in 2024-25, but it’s hard to say that Ben Gold was the reason for a notable chunk of them. Could Gold taking one step further in terms of player development — better rebounding rates, more drives to the rim — ended up covering up some of MU’s other flaws? Sure, it’s reasonable to think that another step forward for Gold could have gone a long way, but I’m not going to penalize a guy for not going a lot further than what we knew that the team needed from him going into the season.
I think we can all agree that Ben Gold could have been better this past season, but I also can’t say that he was remotely close to bad, and definitely not in comparison to what we were expecting from him in October when I wrote his preview. He wasn’t far and away past the expectations though, so we have to split the difference somehow. I liked what we saw from Ben this season, so I’m giving him an 8.
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