hooboy, this is going to be a rough conversation, isn’t it
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 the penultimate player review, focusing on the only rotation player that hails from Wisconsin……….
David Joplin
Senior — #23 — Forward — 6’8” — 225 lbs. — Milwaukee, Wisconsin
*- notes a top 400 national ranking per KenPom.com
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
And that’s where we get to his senior season and how things are different now.
It’s not a surprise that Marquette is going to have to figure out a way to generate offense without the passing and playmaking masterminds of Tyler Kolek and Oso Ighodaro. I’m not telling you that Joplin is going to suddenly start hitting cutters with passes or anything like that. I am telling you that Marquette does need a little bit more — whether that’s just literally more shots going in or at least one new tiny facet of his game — from Joplin this season. The Golden Eagles have to make up nearly 29 points, nearly 12 rebounds, and nearly 11 assists a game. It has to come from somewhere and Joplin’s going to have to be a contributor in terms of stepping up.
Flat out, the BartTorvik.com preseason projection algorithm says that experienced guys like Joplin historically make a bump upwards in terms of their contributions in spots like this. The algorithm projects him to improve in all three primary counting stats: 14.1 points, 4.5 rebounds, and 1.4 assists per game. He’s slotted in as the #2 contributor overall behind Kam Jones, and yep, that’s pretty much what’s going to be asked of Joplin this season if the Golden Eagles want to execute on their team goals.
Why You Should Get Excited
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Marquette head coach Shaka Smart once said that David Joplin is the kind of guy and the kind of player that can lead the Big East in scoring. The fact of the matter is that his role on the team the last three seasons has been as such where that was just not going to happen.
Well, what better time than senior year for that prophecy to come true?
It’s probably going to take a certain amount of rejiggering of roles on the team, particularly from Kam Jones. Gary Parrish’s little homie from Memphis has been MU’s leading scorer for the past two seasons, but there’s a version of Marquette this year where Jones takes a step back from scoring and puts on his Tyler Kolek distributor hat instead. If that’s what it takes to win, that’s what it takes, but it will mean that someone else on the roster is going to have to pick up the scoring slack.
That person can be Joplin, and Kam Jones finished last year as the #7 scorer in the Big East, just 2.5 points off the lead. If Jones steps back and Joplin steps forward, there’s a pathway to the Jopwagon running wild all across America this year. We already know that Joplin has to pick things up a bit anyway because of what MU is losing from last year, why not go one step further and wrap up his collegiate career on a big note?
Potential Pitfalls
I can’t help but notice that David Joplin’s Per-40-Minutes numbers were down going from sophomore to junior year. As he went from 19.0 minutes per game off the bench to 27.7 minutes per game as a starter, Joplin was actually shooting it less from both two-point and three-point land on the court. He was getting to the free throw line ever so slightly less. He was getting fewer rebounds. His assists were cut by nearly half. Because he was shooting fewer threes and taking a hit in terms of conversion rate — 35.5% is still good, it’s just not 39.9% — Joplin’s scoring went down to the tune of nearly four points per 40 minutes.
I want to be clear about this: None of what I just said made David Joplin’s junior year a disappointment on any level, nor was it a bad performance either. He was a vital and crucial contributing member of a team that spent all but three weeks of the regular season ranked in the top 10 in the country. It’s just that he was, from a certain point of view, doing fewer David Joplin Things than he was doing when he was coming off the bench in relief of Olivier-Maxence Prosper.
The point here is that this is not a year for doing less for Joplin. He’s probably going to have to play a few more minutes than he did last year for Marquette to hit their peak performance as a team, and by nature of that, we might see his stats tick up a bit. But it also has to be coming from Joplin doing more on a minute-by-minute basis, not just because he’s playing more minutes. The margins of success for this team might be slimmer than they have been in the past, and it’s going to take a big effort from a lot of guys to make it all work. Joplin is one of the most important pieces in that regard.
Oh, and, uh, we’re going to need to see him be a bigger defensive contributor, too. Hoop Explorer has Marquette doing a bit more than six points per 100 possessions better on the defensive end when Joplin wasn’t on the floor last season. To be clear: Things weren’t bad with Joplin on the floor, you can win a lot of basketball games allowing under 96 points per 100 possessions. But they were better without him, and if the offensive efficiency might take a step back without Kolek and Ighodaro, the Golden Eagles have to make that up on defense, and that’s where Joplin contributing more over there comes into play.
Alright, let’s just get it over with.
If you want to pin a healthy chunk of “why did Marquette struggle in the final six weeks of the season?” on David Joplin, you’re right in doing that.
In Big East regular season games, David Joplin shot 30.9% from behind the three-point line on a career high 6.2 attempts per game. That’s not good enough, not in a world where 33.3% is the scoring equivalent of shooting 50% at the rim. To make matters worse, that wasn’t a “oopsies, he’s in a slump” from Joplin. 32.8% in November, 25% in December, and an even 30% in both January and February. Joplin went into the final two regular season games shooting 28.3% from behind the arc against BE teams, and only steered his number back above 30% because he went 6-for-10 in a pair of losses.
Some amount of “Marquette had problems this season” has to be pinned to Joplin not living up to the nearly 40% shooting that he put up as a sophomore or even the 35% as a junior or the 38% in Big East games as a junior. I don’t think I’m saying anything that anyone doesn’t know, but if Joplin just hits shots at a rate that we had seen him be able to hit shots in the past, things go better for the Golden Eagles.
At least I think we can say that. I’m not 100% sure. Marquette lost four of their final five games of the season, and they did it while Jop was shooting 47% behind the arc. This means there were other problems than just Joplin’s shooting, but this is a Joplin review, and even though he closed up strong, we have to look at the whole thing. Looking at the whole thing makes us go “ugggggh, don’t like that.”
The bummer of the shooting thing is that Joplin actually landed right about where the Torvik algorithm projected him. Heck, he was a bit better, posting a career high 5.4 rebounds per game, which ended up leading the team. Had his shots been falling in a manner that we had grown accustomed to seeing, he would have surpassed that computer projection pretty easily, and we might be sitting here now saying “hey, wow, look at what Jop turned in for his final year, what a way to go out!”
Instead, we’re doing this, and I hate it.
Let’s talk about something nicer, and believe it or not, that’s David Joplin’s defense.
In his preview, we noted that Marquette was about six points per 100 possessions better on defense in 2023-24 with Joplin on the bench. It wasn’t bad with him out there, just clearly better without him. Using that same “vs top 200 opponents, no garbage time” filter over at Hoop Explorer, Marquette was just about exactly the same with or without Joplin on the floor. 96.5 allowed per 100 possessions with him, 95.7 per 100 without him. To be clear, this is not a mark of the squad being better with him out there, as MU was a little under 96 per 100 trips during his junior year and a little bit over it this past season. The difference is that MU didn’t get outstandingly better without him.
But that’s fine, because you have to look at the full picture. If a guy is effectively a neutral party on defense but there’s a nearly 9 points per 100 possessions difference on offense in your favor when he’s playing, you take those nine points every single time. He was more active on defense, posting a career high steal rate and a career high defensive rebounding rate. He was doing even more than normal even with his boost to a career best in minutes, and credit where credit is due there. If the worst/best thing that we can say about Joplin on the defensive end of the floor is “he held up his end of the deal,” then that’s fine by me.
BEST GAME
I’m not going to give it to this one, but are you guys aware that Joplin took home the KenPom.com game MVP for the NCAA tournament loss to New Mexico? 28 points on 9-for-15 shooting, 4 rebounds, an assist, and a steal was declared to be the best performance of the game. That’s wild! Anyway, don’t turn the ball over 8 times in a game if you want to win game MVP, that’s the lesson.
Joplin had a season high 30 points against DePaul, including critical buckets in overtime, but at this point, I don’t think we can really give him credit for being awesome at Wintrust Arena. His outing in the Bahamas against Georgia seems like a good one, as he had 29 points and five rebounds in Marquette’s win…. but also he turned it over five times.
Let’s go with the road win against Xavier. 19 points, five rebounds, and three blocks as the Golden Eagles squeaked out a two point win in Cincinnati, that’s pretty good stuff.
SEASON GRADE
David Joplin never quite burst forward as a dominant scoring figure this season, largely because his shot never quite started falling regularly enough. He met the computer’s expectation, he was competent enough on defense, there’s a lot of stuff to like…… but at the end of the day, one of the pillars of why Marquette should be able to succeed in 2024-25 was supposed to be David Joplin’s shooting, and we never saw that this season until it was kinda too late.
I think I have to land on a 6 here. I struggled with trying to figure out if a 6 or a 7 was right, but 7 just feels way more positive than what’s needed here.