Preseason injuries and roster construction might have limited what we saw from the freshman from New York this season.
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 true freshman on the roster that we need to talk about……….
Damarius Owens
Freshman — #10 — Forward — 6’7” — 190 lbs. — Rochester, New York
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
The first part of setting a baseline for what we could expect from Owens this season is figuring how he fits into the Marquette rotation. There’s a slight problem in doing that this year because the departures of Tyler Kolek and Oso Ighodaro might end up shaking up the roster in terms of who plays what part, but we haven’t quite gotten a chance to see what MU looks like on the floor yet, so we have to do our best here.
My default setting is “oh, well, worst case scenario, he’s Zaide Lowery’s freshman year,” just because of the physical similarities between the two young men…. except Lowery was actually kind of unremarkable for Marquette last year. 1.6 points and 1.4 rebounds in just under 10 minutes a game was just fine for Lowery, who didn’t have as high of a recruiting profile as Owens does. Is that fine for Owens when the Golden Eagles obviously have a backcourt/wing spot in the rotation available without Kolek around?
That feels not right for this section, but BartTorvik.com’s preseason projections aren’t that far off. The algorithm says that a freshman with Owens’ recruiting pedigree dropped into the Shaka Smart system and roster will give you 3.6 points and 2.3 rebounds, maybe an assist in about 12 minutes a night. If we concede the idea that Kam Jones, Stevie Mitchell, and David Joplin are going to play as much as they want to, there’s maybe not that much space in the rotation elsewhere for Owens to jump past people in the lineup. Maybe somewhere in the middle of Lowery last year and the Torvik computers is about right for what’s reasonable to expect from a freshman coming in to a team that has clear expectations about being nationally relevant.
Why You Should Get Excited
At #63 in the 247 Composite rankings, Damarius Owens is the sixth highest ranked freshman in the Big East this season. By default, he comes in with the expectation that he won’t be an All-Freshman team performer if you figure that the five guys in front of him are favored for those five spots.
But it’s not a long jump from sixth to fifth, and that jump gets a lot shorter if Owens’ abilities earn him notable contributor minutes on a team that ends up easily headed to the NCAA tournament. I make this point because Thomas Sorber (#44) is at Georgetown and Jaiden Glover (#55) is at St. John’s. I don’t think either of those teams are shoo-ins for the NCAA tournament — Georgetown definitely isn’t — so it’s not hard to see Owens skating easily to All-Freshman honors.
I can’t go so far as to say that he’s a dark horse candidate for Freshman of the Year. Maybe he gets there, that would definitely be a reason to get excited. The fact of the matter is that UConn has Liam McNeeley, the #17 prospect in the country, and it’s his award to lose here. As long as he’s a rotation guy for a UConn team with a legitimate shot at a three-peat, McNeeley will coast here.
But maybe both McNeeley and Ahmad Nowell are Just Guys for the Huskies, and Creighton’s Jackson McAndrew isn’t quite ready for prime time? Maybe? If you squint a little bit? Maybe there’s a way for Damarius Owens to have a case?
Potential Pitfalls
I thought there was space for top 100 prospect Tre Norman to play some solid minutes for Marquette in the backcourt last season. I don’t really have a problem with what ended up happening with Norman’s freshman season — I gave him a 6 — but it wasn’t quite what you’d maybe think a top 100 freshman could/should be doing.
What if changing from high school basketball to college basketball is hard to do, and that’s ultimately just going to put a ceiling on what Owens can do this season? What if the repeated concept from that 247 Sports scouting report of “continues to develop/expand/progress” means that Owens has a much higher ceiling than whatever he is right now as a basketball player? Marquette has a veteran core of guys on the roster this year, and it’s hard to see Shaka Smart pushing someone aside to make sure that a freshman gets lots of minutes, unless it’s clearly obvious that said freshmen needs to be playing those minutes. If Owens isn’t immediately obviously one of the best eight guys on the roster, then maybe we’re just going to get a season full of growth and learning opportunities for him, and not much else.
The first thing that we have to do here is point out that everything that I just dropped in from Damarius Owens’ Player Preview right there was published on October 14, 2024. That means that I did publish it after we found out on October 5th on the open scrimmage that Owens had been missing time in preseason practice due to a groin injury. That means all of that was published well after the point where head coach Shaka Smart said that Owens was expected to be cleared for full participation.
I make this clear because Damarius Owens missed Marquette’s three games of the season with what was listed at the time as a foot injury. That’s two separate injuries, as far as I can tell. The context of “Owens got a late start to his first collegiate preseason practice” and “Owens then missed time late in preseason practice for an entirely different reason” throws a lot of light on what we saw from Marquette’s top rated freshman prospect in 2024-25.
Because what we saw wasn’t much.
Owens ended up playing double digit minutes in just 12 of his 30 appearances this season, with two of those coming in the buy game blowouts of Western Carolina and Stonehill and a third coming in the “well, we’re boned” 15 point loss at Villanova in February. Two more came in routs of Seton Hall. So, by my math, that’s seven double digit appearances in the rest of the 25 games where Owens got on the floor, and then there’s also the DNP-Coach’s Decision in the regular season finale against St. John’s.
Whether it was because his preseason injuries piled up just a little too far to help him earn a place in the rotation or because head coach Shaka Smart spent most of the season not being able to rely all that much on production out of his bench, 2024-25 goes on the board as an underwhelming campaign for Damarius Owens. Maybe we weren’t supposed to get all that much from him, as the Reasonable Expectation portion of the preview acknowledged. Honestly, he did land right in the “between 1.6 and 3.6 points per game” territory that I put out there, so that’s good news.
It’s just that everything here feels underwhelming. Some of that is not Owens’ fault. It’s not his fault he picked up two early injuries and got a little bit behind things as the coaching and training staff probably felt it was best to be a little bit more cautious with holding him out early in the year. It’s not his fault that Marquette was kind of looking around for answers for someone to step up out of the bench to make a contribution in the backcourt and never quite got it all year. Yes, he would be one of the guys that could have done that and didn’t, but he’s not the only one and the idea behind the Reasonable Expectation was that there were going to be other guys who were going to be doing stuff for Marquette…… and that kind of just never happened. It left a void to be filled, and we end up feeling like things were lackluster for Owens because he didn’t throw himself into that void.
One of the reasons he didn’t do that or perhaps didn’t get a chance to do that, as you might have guessed, is Owens’ ability to contribute on the defensive end of the floor. That’s a priority for Shaka Smart, and if you’re not chipping in to getting stops, you’re not going to get to play much. Hoop Explorer’s math tells us that Owens was a negative for Marquette on both ends of the floor during competitive possessions against top 150 opponents. 109.9 points per 100 possessions on the offensive end isn’t too bad, but when the team’s giving up the same thing on the other end and MU scores 120.7 per 100 trips when you’re on the bench AND is locking teams down to just 94.9 per 100 trips….. well, you see the problem. You can trade less than stellar defense for offensive fireworks, because that’s a net positive impact. When everything’s better when you’re not on the floor? It’s hard to justify putting you in the game, and that’s where Owens ultimately landed across the length of the season.
The good news? Things did get a little bit better during Big East play. Not enough to the point where MU was better on one end or the other with Owens on the floor, but at least he was a net positive when he was playing. You can read that as player development for a freshman as the season went along, I think.
BEST GAME
One thing I didn’t really root around in when discussing Owens’ first year at Marquette? How it all could have gone so much different if we had gotten a lot more of what he looked like at Iowa State. 11 points on 4-for-8 shooting including 3-for-4 from long range, two rebounds, an assist and a block in 26 minutes, all in a game where Marquette needed him to do something because Chase Ross rolled his ankle after 10 minutes and David Joplin was busy going 3-for-13 with three turnovers. Could have been more perhaps, if not for four personal fouls, but it’s easy to say that Marquette was tied with the Cyclones with less than nine minutes left because of what Owens gave them on that night.
SEASON GRADE
I think we have to give Damarius Owens credit for at least hitting the reasonable expectations that we set down before the season, given that he missed time in the preseason with his injuries. However, he never quite popped past that. Maybe, given what he did do against Iowa State, is partially because Chase Ross was just in front of him on the depth chart and that was that. Maybe it was just the coaching staff saw what his on/off splits were and bent in the direction that they knew was benefiting the team the most. Whatever the answer is there, I really think we can’t go better than a 6 for the grade here.
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