The sophomore from Missouri had an nice late season push….. but we’re looking at the whole season and not projecting forward, either.
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 a guy who kiiiiiinda made a jump forward late in the season……..
Zaide Lowery
Sophomore — #7 — Guard — 6’5” — 200 lbs. — Springfield, Missouri
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
Let’s just say it: BartTorvik’s algorithm projection for Marquette in 2024-25 doesn’t have Zaide Lowery as one of the top 10 projected contributors.
Part of that is the continued existence of Kam Jones, Stevie Mitchell, and Chase Ross. Part of that is the addition of top 100 prospect Damarius Owens, because history says that guys with Owens’ recruiting profile contribute X amount to the team right out of the gate. So part of “not one of the top 10” is just a numbers game. Much like last year, who do you take minutes away from to get Lowery onto the floor?
The answer in this case might be Sean Jones. The algorithm says that Jones is projected to play over 25 minutes a game…. and last we saw, he’s not even practicing with the team as he recovers from ACL surgery in January. Those minutes are going somewhere else…. but they won’t be going to Lowery, at least not directly. Lowery’s not a point guard like Jones, so that means the point guard minutes are going somewhere else, and if that’s the case, then someone can’t play the role that the computer says that they’re going to play.
In other words: Is there space in a backcourt/wing rotation for Lowery to play the roughly 10 minutes per game he averaged a year ago? Yeah, probably. Is he going to have a starring role on this team this year? Almost definitely not, but……..
Why You Should Get Excited
…… but head coach Shaka Smart went out of his way at the Open Scrimmage in early October to mention how much Lowery’s game has grown in the offseason. Smart said that we would all be impressed with Lowery’s development as a basketball player. That’s a pretty high compliment, particularly since there was nothing wrong with Lowery as a player last year, he just didn’t get a lot of minutes.
If he has in fact made notable strides forward — the best thing about freshmen is that they become sophomores, right? — then that means that Lowery should, in theory, be undeniable in terms of earning solid regular every night rotation minutes at worst. Keep in mind, Lowery didn’t average much of anything in terms of full season numbers last year, so playing 15 minutes a night and chipping in 5.0 points and 2.5 rebounds would actually be a huge step forward for him. That is about what he averaged when Chase Ross was hurt last year, so it’s clearly in him to do that on a limited run. We just need to see it for a full 31 game season, and the head coach seems to inclined to think that Lowery’s capable of doing it.
Potential Pitfalls
Shaka Smart said that about Lowery in the pre-scrimmage warm-ups. Then, in the second half, after Lowery came down with a defensive rebound, Smart bolted from his spot on the sideline to bark something at Lowery. I presume it was something in the vein of “get your butt in gear out there,” because two seconds later, Lowery was at the rim, twisting through traffic to score.
I don’t think it’s a great sign for Lowery’s season that Smart had to bark at him to get him to become authoritative as a player, especially after Smart was giving Lowery his flowers before gameplay started. I also don’t think it’s that good to find out after the game that the aforementioned layup in transition was one of just two buckets for Lowery on five attempts while playing every single minute of the scrimmage.
To put it another way: Al Amadou finished with the exact same number of made baskets, and Big Al made a three-pointer as well, something that Lowery did not do on three attempts. There’s a very real chance that what Smart shouted was some variation on “hey, you’re making me look bad out there after I complimented you.”
In terms of “performances directly after the head coach talked about how great you were,” this was one of the worst that you’ll ever see. If Lowery has in fact made the progress that Smart said he has, then there shouldn’t be a requirement of Smart running out onto the court to motivate Lowery’s play. Because of the departure of Tyler Kolek and the questionable status of Sean Jones, Marquette may need a lot from Zaide Lowery this season. If he’s not ready to grab onto that opportunity, someone else is going to grab it instead, one way or another.
Through the middle of January, it seems that Zaide Lowery was, to one extent or another, playing like the guy that Shaka Smart had to jump out and shout at during that open scrimmage. Yes, he had the knee issue that caused him to miss a couple of games, and sure, it’s possible that it was limiting him a bit even after he got back out on the floor.
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.
You can kind of understand why Lowery had played 5 minutes in the 8 point home win over Georgetown, another 5 minutes in the overtime win at DePaul, and not at all in the home loss to Xavier. Marquette needed impact players in those games, and up to that point of the season, head coach Shaka Smart was not getting impact from Zaide Lowery. Quite honestly, this all looks like precisely the kind of performance that you’d expect to see from a guy who wasn’t projected to be one of Marquette’s top 10 contributors, which was the case with Lowery back in in the preseason as noted in his preview.
And then, apparently, it seems like Shaka Smart hollered at Lowery to get his butt in gear, at least metaphorically, to draw the comparison to what I saw in the open scrimmage.
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.
I know, it is very hard to remember this happening, or realize that it was happening in the moment, mostly because Marquette suffered eight of their 11 losses on the season in this window. He might have been part of the problem for whatever ailed the Golden Eagles in their 15-3 start to the season, but Zaide Lowery was absolutely not part of the problem as they went 8-8 the rest of the way. As a whole, what was saw from the sophomore from Missouri in the final 16 games is what we hoped that we would see for the whole season. It’s just that the jump didn’t quite matter because of everything else going on.
BEST GAME
I mean, it has to be the Villanova road game, right? Yeah, overall, for the team, it was a cartoonish loss where the Golden Eagles fell behind 17-4 in the first five minutes and didn’t get closer than eight the rest of the way. However, Lowery didn’t even check into the game until the score was 17-8, and in 26 of the remaining 32:10, he put up 25 points on 9-for-10 shooting, including making all five of his three-pointers. He also grabbed eight rebounds and snared a steal. It’s kind of a microcosm of the entire last 16 games. Marquette had a lot of problems for that two month long stretch…. but Zaide Lowery wasn’t one of them.
SEASON GRADE
On one hand, once he got it in gear, Lowery was hitting for the numbers that I thought were possible if he lived up to the praise that Shaka Smart was layering on him in the preseason.
On the other hand, it took him 18 games to get it in gear. Yes, maybe slightly injury related…. but Lowery was also kind of invisible against Maryland, Purdue, and Georgia, before that injury happened. If we had seen 5&4 and 47% shooting Zaide for 31 games, this grade would be an absurdly high number because we really couldn’t have asked for more from him, given what his role on the team was supposed to be.
But we didn’t see it for all 31. Only for the last 16, and as good as he was in that stretch, it also didn’t really help Marquette win ball games against NCAA tournament caliber opponents.
He gets a 6.
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