With the 2025-26 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 move along to the ascending star freshman on the roster…….
Nigel James
Freshman — #0 — Guard — 6’0” — 185 lbs — Huntington, New York
|
Games |
Min |
FGM |
FGA |
FG% |
3PTM |
3PA |
3P% |
FTM |
FTA |
FT% |
OReb |
DReb |
Reb |
Ast |
Stl |
Blk |
Fouls |
Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
32 |
29.2 |
6.2 |
13.1 |
47.0% |
1.3 |
3.8 |
34.7% |
2.8 |
4.1 |
69.2% |
0.8 |
2.7 |
3.4 |
4.9 |
1.9 |
0.3 |
2.2 |
16.4 |
|
ORtg |
%Poss |
%Shots |
eFG% |
TS% |
OR% |
DR% |
ARate |
TORate |
Blk% |
Stl% |
FC/40 |
FD/40 |
FTRate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
106.7 |
30.5%*** |
29.8%** |
52.0% |
54.7% |
2.8% |
10.4% |
37.3%**** |
17.7% |
1.2% |
3.9%** |
3.0 |
4.6* |
31.0% |
* — Notes a top 500 national ranking per KenPom.com
** — Notes a top 100 national ranking per KenPom.com
*** — Notes a top 50 national ranking per KenPom.com
**** — Notes a top 20 national ranking per KenPom.com
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WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
The word “reasonable” is the thing that we have to hold on to here, because of the fact that James has ultimately turned into the most heralded recruiting prospect in the Class of 2025 for Marquette. By default, that should sound an awful lot like he should be at the very least a notable contributor for the Golden Eagles this fall.
Except we could have said the same thing for Damarius Owens last year when he came in as a top 70 prospect in the 247 Sports Composite rankings and he averaged less than 10 minutes a game. If I was writing a Summer Vibe Check for Marquette going into this year, I probably would have skipped Owens as a Notable Returning Player. The year before, Tre Norman was a top 90 prospect in the 247 Composite, and two years later, we’re still waiting to see him pop out as a notable contributor for the Golden Eagles.
You see my point here.
But with Marquette returning just one guard who averaged over 16 minutes a game last season and just two players who cleared that number in general, we can easily say that the door is open for Nigel James to carve out a space for himself right away on this roster. That’s even more so the case given that he is listed at just six feet tall and is therefore going to be asked to be a point guard on this team one way or another. It might be as a two point guard combination backcourt as Shaka Smart alluded to in that quote up above, but that’s still going to mean he’s playing some point guard for the Golden Eagles.
How much should we reasonable expect to see him this year? Well, the BartTorvik.com computer projections for Marquette’s roster say 30% of the minutes. In a 40 minute game, that’s 12 minutes a night with 3.8 points and 1.4 assists per game. The catch is that’s expecting 26 minutes from Sean Jones and nearly 15 from Tre Norman. Are you convinced that both of those things are going to happen? Depending on what your answer is, then adjust your reasonable expectations for Nigel James accordingly.
Why You Should Get Excited
The door is open for Nigel James to be Marquette’s starting/primary point guard. Maybe it’s not open a lot, but it’s definitely ajar.
The thing I just pointed out at the end of the reasonable expectations is the reason why you should be excited about what Nigel James can do in his first season with the Golden Eagles. If he proves to be a reliable and dependable point guard option for Marquette, then the coaching staff needs to let him run the show. I don’t usually use this section to point out the problems and question marks around the rest of the roster, but the fact of the matter is that we haven’t seen Sean Jones play in a Division 1 game since January 10, 2024. That is a LONG TIME ago, and presuming he can just be The Guy for MU is a mistake. At least we’ve seen enough from Jones to say “well, if he’s healthy and if he’s improved, then sure, I can see it,” because we can’t say that we’ve seen enough from Norman to put a big expectation on him.
Which leaves us with the chance that Nigel James grabs the brass ring and takes off with it.
You wanna just watch him throw assists for 25 minutes?
Potential Pitfalls
He has to be able to defend.
Marquette has been a top 50 KenPom.com defense the past three seasons, and top 30 each of the last two. That identity is not changing as long as Shaka Smart’s in charge. It’s especially not changing now that Marquette is going into a season without a guy that you can at least imagine will be an All-American at point guard, which is what we’ve seen the last two years. At the very least, until some roles get sorted out, Marquette is going to have to lean back on their defense to win ball games, and that’s going to mean that if Nigel James wants to play real minutes at point guard, he has to defend.
And remember: He’s listed at six feet tall. Listed. That’s the second fakest height in sports, right behind the “no one is ever going to believe you’re six feet tall” listed height of 5’11”. All apologies to our Short King friends out there, but it’s easier to defend at the Division 1 level if you’re taller. There’s just more of you to take up space! It’s physics! That’s a thing that James is going to have to overcome. I’ve seen videos of him dunking the basketball at just six feet tall, so clearly he’s got athleticism to him to help bridge the gap between size and capacity to defend.
But he has to actually do it.
Before we just get completely overboard with effusive praise for Nigel James and what the 2025-26 Big East Freshman of the Year accomplished, let’s address the possible problem for him that I raised back in the fall. Before I actually get into the numbers from Hoop Explorer for James on the defensive side of the ball, remember: No matter what the numbers were, head coach Shaka Smart had no choice but to play James because after the pair of injuries suffered by Sean Jones, there was no one else on the roster that was a competent option.
FOR THE FULL SEASON
On Defense: 102.6 points per 100 possessions
Off Defense: 99.8
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AFTER SEAN JONES’ FIRST INJURY
On Defense: 103.3 points per 100 possessions
Off Defense: 98.9
BIG EAST PLAY + CONFERENCE TOURNAMENT
On Defense: 103.6 points per 100 possessions
Off Defense: 98.0
AFTER SEAN JONES’ SEASON ENDING INJURY
On Defense: 102.4 points per 100 possessions
Off Defense: 95.7
AGAINST ALL TOP 150 OPPONENTS
On Defense: 103.0 points per 100 possessions
Off Defense: 106.9
There is obviously a lot of not good news in there relative to answering the question “Was Nigel James able to hold up his end of the deal on the defensive end?” Generally speaking, the answer is not really. It’s a little weird that the top 150 only numbers end up being the one most in his favor, especially when the 21 games of Big East play were not, but hey, that’s life.
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I’m not going to go so far as to say it’s a full blown no for a couple of reasons. The first is that James finished the year ranked #52 in the country in steal rate per KenPom.com. Maybe there’s parts about his game as a six-foot freshman guard in Division 1 that led him to have a problem or three defending some guys. That’s fine, because the value of that level of defensive turnover that (hopefully!) led to points on the other end more often than not balances that out. The second is that his On numbers aren’t awful. If 100 points per 100 possessions is a median/average number, maxing out at the worst at 103.6 is not a massive problem. It’s not what you’d prefer to see, but there are ways to work around that.
Most obviously? That’s #3 on the list of “not a full blown no” here: Getting points on the other end. In each case, Marquette was scoring a lot more than they were allowing when James was on the court. Using the top 150 numbers as an example: You’ll take allowing 103.0 when he’s out there when you’re also scoring 113.9 per 100 trips. At the end of the day, that’s winning basketball. It might be “oh my god why can we not get a stop when we need it” basketball and that can be frustrating, but knowing you can get a bucket to answer helps stem that sense of a problem.
More specifically? In each and every circumstance, Marquette was much better on offense with James on the floor. We can talk about whether or not you’d prefer to see the 116.1 vs 102.4 with James on the court or the 108.9 vs 95.7 with him off the court after Sean Jones was done for the year. There’s a sizable gap in both situations. One is scoring like crazy and defending enough to make it stand up, the other is locking the other team out of the building while putting up enough points to make it work. It’s a matter of preference, of course, but when choosing The Other Thing involves “Nigel James is not on the court,” it does make it a little bit hard to say that putting him on the bench is actually a good plan.
In other words:
A Simpsons screengrab courtesy of Frinkiac.com with Homer addressing a boardroom full of people saying “Whenever Nigel’s not playing, all the fans are asking ‘Where’s Nigel?‘”
And that’s the most important part about all of this, right? Do you remember what you thought when you first saw Nigel James check in for Marquette this season? If you watched the opener, then that was less that four minutes into the game when he subbed in for Chase Ross and played alongside Sean Jones right out of the gate. He drew a shooting foul 31 seconds in, got a steal about a minute in, and about 75 seconds in, Jones subbed out, leaving James as the point guard on the floor. It was James scoring MU’s first bucket after Jones subbed out, the first of 197 and what would eventually become a Marquette freshman record for field goals in a season.
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Yes, that’s right, Nigel James scored more FGs than Henry Ellenson, Doc Rivers, Dominic James, Bo Ellis, Damon Key, Jerel McNeal, and Markus Howard all did in their freshman seasons. In fact, Ellenson is the only other freshman to break 185.
Back to my point.
What was your immediate sense of James as a player by the end of his first 13 minutes of collegiate action when the horn sounded against Albany? Or at the end of the first game that you watched? Or after the first time he scored in traffic? Or dunked? Or whatever marker you want to put on this?
Because here’s mine: Nigel James is the point guard that the Marquette coaching staff kept promising that Sean Jones was going to be some day. This isn’t me cracking on Jones here. This is me saying that we were told that Sean Jones was going to turn into the PG that Nigel James already is: Fast, but more importantly quick; agile, but more importantly shifty; able to take over a game when needed but more than happy to set his teammates up if they’re cooking. It was evident almost immediately to me that the future of the point guard position at Marquette was going to be fine because Nigel James was already better than Sean Jones in November. For me, it was a matter of time before the coaching staff got enough minutes behind them to feel comfortable with pulling the trigger on more minutes for James and eventually a starting spot.
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As it happens, that choice was taken away from the staff when Jones suffered his shoulder injury during the Indiana game and missed the next six games. The only option in front of them was James, and he never gave that spot in the lineup back. More importantly, by the time we got to December, it would have been malfeasance by the staff to reduce James’ impact on the team. Jones suffering another injury that eventually put him out for the year just paved the way for MU to go all the way with James as the point guard of the present instead of the point guard of the future.
I think it was somewhere that they would have ended up eventually. At some point, even if the light went on for Sean Jones at some point, the impact of Nigel James would have been too much to ignore. The upside of what actually happened is that 2025-26 became a star-making turn for James. I mean this seriously, and it’s based in fact: UConn head coach Dan Hurley is probably going to vote for Nigel James as the Preseason Big East Player of the Year in the fall.
If James comes off the bench the whole season, I don’t think he wins Freshman of the Year. I don’t think he earns All-Big East Third Team honors. I don’t think he ends up as one of three all-BE honorees returning for next season. I don’t think he ends up as the clear #2 to Silas Demary as next year’s preseason POY, and because Hurley can’t vote for his guy, he’s going to vote for James.
That’s what happened this season. Nigel James went from “well, let’s see how it goes, he’s going to get the playing time” to “wait, can I logically argue that he’s the best player in the league now?”
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BEST GAME
There are a lot of options here. I am going to go with the big obvious one: At home against Villanova. A career high 31 points on 11-for-14 shooting including 7-for-9 from behind the three-point line and both misses were of the “sure, shoot that heat check” variety, six assists, three steals, and his first KenPom.com game MVP of the season. Almost more importantly than this game very much being a launching point for “oh, wait, he can be THIS good,” the precise manner in which Marquette lost this game — Chase Ross shot a very bad three at the horn — radicalized me to the side of “This is Nigel James’ team now.”
SEASON GRADE
This is where I drop in a note and point out that I’m doing these grades against what I laid out as the expectations and reasons to be excited/worried in the preview. That’s why I reprint them at the top of the review. I want you to see the context of how I am evaluating things and to remind us all what we thought were the possibilities heading into the season. I don’t reserve grades to be doled out for the whole team, there’s ways for freshmen with zero fanfare to get a 10, there’s ways for returning starters to get a 1, and so on.
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I thought Nigel James would be a positive contributor on the team. I thought there was a way for Nigel James to break through as the top point guard on the team. I did not think he would be the star of the team by the end of the season. I did not think he would be Big East Freshman of the Year, not in September when I wrote the preview, not in October when we voted on the preseason awards, not in March when I made my postseason picks.
And yet he was the star. He was Freshman of the Year. He is one of the best players in the Big East heading towards next season. Didn’t see it coming. Beyond wildest expectations.
That’s a 10.
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