2025-26 Marquette Men’s Basketball Player Review: #13 Royce Parham

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 talk about exactly how a sophomore breakout broke down…..

Royce Parham

Sophomore — #13 — Forward — 6’8” — 235 lbs. — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

* — Notes a top 500 national ranking per KenPom.com
** — Notes a top 300 national ranking per KenPom.com
*** — Notes a top 200 national ranking per KenPom.com

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WHAT WE SAID:

Reasonable Expectations

The obvious question for 2025-26 when it comes to what to reasonably expect from Royce Parham is “how much growth and development is still in there?” I think everyone would like that answer to be “a lot,” and we can start with the BartTorvik.com algorithm in terms of thinking that might happen. Can I interest you in 11.1 points, 4.6 rebounds, and 1.2 assists in nearly 28 minutes a game?

Before you get over the top with “woah, that’s a big jump from 5.1/2.2/0.4,” remember that we’re talking about nearly doubling his minutes, too. If you project that out to per-40 minute expectations, that’s going from 13.8 points last year to 16.1 points. 6.0 rebounds last year to 6.7. 1.0 assists to 1.7. It’s not that much more than he was doing, just being a little bit better — the best thing about freshmen is that they become sophomores, right? — and getting a lot more minutes. If Parham has had the kind of offseason development in the weight room and in the gym that goes along with that kind of on-court/in-season development, then I think that’s not really that big of a jump for him.

Why You Should Get Excited

Perhaps the bigger question about Royce Parham isn’t so much how much has he developed himself as a player since March, but more about exactly what his role on this team is. Last year, he was a backup big, spelling Ben Gold at center an awful lot.

What if his role this season is David Joplin’s replacement in the starting lineup? What if Parham gets to play a little more inside/outside, what if he can turn into something of a matchup nightmare: Capable of moving on the perimeter to bother the hell out of you on offense, but ready to body your big man in the paint if need be? Creating second chances in the paint with that nearly 10% offensive rebounding rate that we saw in Big East play last year, but using his size and wingspan to cut off attacking and passing lanes from the three-point line?

Expecting him to be what Joplin was last season would be wrongheaded. But do you know what David Joplin did in his first season as a starter for Marquette? 10.8 points, 3.9 rebounds, 0.6 assists in just under 28 minutes a night. Uh, isn’t that what the algorithm projected for Parham, pretty much?

And, uh, the thing to remember? Jop did that on a team playing with three NBA draft picks. That’s what he did as a #4 option. I’m pretty sure this team needs Royce Parham to contribute, not just be useful in the background. What if, because the opportunity is there, Parham steps up and becomes a big ol’ star for the Golden Eagles? Someone has to be the leading scorer, right? Why not Royce?

Potential Pitfalls

“Royce Parham grabs a spot in the starting lineup” seems like a pretty likely outcome for where this season is going. However, when outlining the positive possibilities for guys like Caedin Hamilton and Joshua Clark to get on the floor, my mind turned to “what if those guys can take most of the minutes at center, freeing up Ben Gold to play a perhaps more natural position for him at the 4?”

If that potential possibilities comes through, then Parham’s not a starter on this team. I don’t think he can slide up to the 3 and play a lot on the wing, even though Marquette going 6’8”/6’11”/7’1” with Parham/Gold/Clark at times would be an imposing look. Give you 10 seconds of a possession to cause havoc on the wing? Yes. Chase around a third guard in an opposing lineup for 25 minutes a night? Feels unlikely, right?

So, if Hamilton and Clark give you 30 combined minutes at the 5, and Ben Gold gives you 25-30 between starting at the 4 and covering some of the remaining 10 minutes at the 5…. where does Royce Parham fit into this rotation? Maybe it’s a situation where head coach Shaka Smart and his staff elect to cover the 80 combined minutes from those two positions with these four guys somehow, and that’s how Parham fits? If that’s what it is, I don’t know if he’s going to get to 11/5/1 in 28 minutes, and then how we view his season comes down to exactly how successful the team mixture was in the win/loss columns.

For about the first 11 games of the 2025-26 season, things were veering pretty heavily over into the Potential Pitfalls situation I described back in the fall. It wasn’t that bad in terms of minutes, as through all of non-conference play, Royce Parham was averaging just short of 22 minutes a night, all off the bench. As it turns out, the plan was very much not to get Josh Clark to absorb a lot of minutes last season, so that left more than enough time for Parham to get on the court in that mixture along with Caedin Hamilton and Ben Gold.

The problem was that it wasn’t a particularly productive time for Parham. Okay, maybe that’s a little unfair, because 9.1 points and 4.8 rebounds in barely over half the game is still pretty good. It’s 16.6 points and 8.8 rebounds per 40 minutes of action, and that’s clearly way better than he was doing freshman year. However, Parham was going about the scoring end of things in the worst manner possible. 40 of his 89 shot attempts in the first 11 games — 45% of them! — came from behind the three-point line, and he only hit 25% of the shots. That’s real bad, y’all. I’m not going to pin all of Marquette’s offensive woes on Parham’s shot selection here, but a guy coming off your bench shooting such a healthy dose of his shots with such unhealthy results, it’s dragging things down no matter what else is going on.

And then, in Game #12, we got Royce Parham’s first career start. It came at the expense of Ben Gold, which was definitely not the change that anyone outside of the locker room was asking for at that juncture of the season, but it did seem to unlock Parham’s play. He opened up Big East play with a 12 point, 4 rebound performance against Georgetown, including going 2-for-3 from behind the arc, and then it was off to the races for Parham from there.

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Across the rest of the season — 19 Big East games because he missed the trip to Georgetown with late developing back spasms and MU’s one conference tournament game — Parham averaged 14.4 points and 5.0 rebounds in nearly 33 minutes a night, and he was just over an assist and just under a block per game as well. More importantly, it would seem that he got a massive confidence boost from the starting assignment. Parham shot 38.7% from three-point land the rest of the way and a very scary 66.7% on two-pointers as well. For Big East regular season games, Parham finished the season with the third best two-point shooting percentage and effective field goal percentage. Even with a not-so-hot 65% on free throws, Parham was still #2 in the entire Big East in true shooting percentage. Perhaps most importantly to the entire thing: Parham was taking about twice as many twos as threes in his last 20 games of the year. 62 triples, 123 attempts inside the arc. That’s a much more profitable situation for both Parham and the Golden Eagles.

Nowhere was the evolution of Royce Parham as a Golden Eagle more evident than the home game against #4 Connecticut. As the game moved along to the second half, it was starting to become clear that the Golden Eagles were going to be able to hang with the Huskies. As the game hit 15 minutes to go, UConn pushed their advantage to 45-41. Cue Royce Parham’s Music.