Marquette Basketball: Takeaways from Golden Eagles so far in 2020-21 season
By Max Marmitt
5. It’s been a tale of two halves for Marquette’s defense, but it’s severely trending in the wrong direction
Let me address the last elephant in the room in terms of the team negatives, the defense. Coach Wojciechowski does not deserve to be the scapegoat of every loss as he is frequently blamed, but it’s no secret that the two biggest weaknesses of his teams tend to be excessive turnovers and a very poor defense (combined with a great offense however).
With a 10 game sample size, I’m not going to jump to any foregone conclusions. The defense looked pretty good the first 4-5 games and rightfully drew some national praise. After that, the defense was significantly worse. I could reference a ton of advanced stats to demonstrate the decline, but first I will mention “Marquette Nation” tweeted out after the last game versus Villanova that Marquette was ranked 27th in adjusted defensive efficiency after the Wisconsin game and then became 92nd (currently ranked 87th now).
The first four games Marquette’s defense was very disruptive. The issue of generating turnovers I mentioned earlier, well Marquette did a great job being active with a lot of steals/overall turnovers. In. a small four game sample size, Marquette was averaging 7.75 steals and forcing opponents to turn the ball over an average of 14.5 times (6 steals in game #1, 7 steals in games #2/4, and 11 vs Oklahoma State game #3). MU forced 18 turnovers in the game vs Oklahoma State.
While the Golden Eagles still stole the ball a decent amount (3+ in every game besides the last two) afterwards, opponents only turned the ball over 7.5 times the next 6 games, and I as I mentioned earlier, Marquette is 312th in the country at forcing turnovers (and 269th in steal percentage still).
Many great defenses don’t heavily rely on forcing turnovers, but to do that you consistently have to force stops, which Marquette is doing less and less. In the last 6 games, Marquette conceded opponents to score at least 102 points per possession, with Creighton, Xavier, and Villanova all above 120 (132.4 points per possession against Xavier).
On the bright side about those three games is that while Marquette’s pace is much slower than usual this year (251st in tempo), their offense stayed hot enough to beat Creighton and nearly force overtime vs Xavier in a loss at the buzzer.
Generally speaking by the eye test to emphasize the main point here, the defensive rotations have been much slower after game #4, star players have completely been having their way, and way too many uncontested threes are allowed. Creighton’s Marcus Zegarowski was held in check, but Mitch Ballock, Paul Scruggs, and Sandro Mamukelashvili (among others) were able to do whatever they wanted basically all game.
In terms of uncontested threes, Xavier took advantage (especially Adam Kunkel and Nate Johnson) and Villanova really made Marquette pay (Collin Gillespie hit 6 threes). Xavier and Villanova both hit 13 threes and according to “Paint Touches:” Villanova went 7/13 on uncontested threes and Marquette is giving up more than 10 uncontested threes per game in conference play.
Marquette usually plays man-to-man the entire game and it wasn’t until game #10 where they experimented with zone. The zone looked great the first couple minutes against Villanova until they figured it out after a timeout and the zone was picked apart. The full court press for part of the second half was not really effective.
That being said, it’s probably not a bad idea to throw different defenses at an opponent throughout the game (especially if the adjustments work) but based off the Villanova game, it looks like this wasn’t the solution to “fixing” the defense.
KenPom projected Marquette to have the #39 defense this season. On paper, Marquette shouldn’t necessarily have a bad defense. Marquette possesses a ton of length (30th in the nation in average height), Koby McEwen is a great individual defender, there are multiple players who can block shots a the rim (most notably Theo John who lead the conference in blocks in 2019 and was 3rd in 2020 with a broken wrist) and there isn’t a player that is a weak link or too big of a defensive liability.
Marquette doesn’t need their defense to improve to an elite level the rest of the way, but it would help immensely if the defense evens out and becomes just average with the offensive firepower the team has.