The 2026-27 college basketball season is right around the corner, so let's dive into the Marquette men's basketball roster and take a look at what to expect from each player this season. Going forward in these Player Previews, we'll be going in this order: The two freshmen going in alphabetical order by last name then doing the same for the three transfers, then moving on to the redshirt freshmen. After that, it's the seven players returning from last year's roster going in order of average minutes played per game last season.
We're going to organize our thoughts about the upcoming season as it relates to each player into categories, as we always do:
Reasonable Expectations
Why You Should Get Excited
Potential Pitfalls
With that out of the way, we check in with the other guy who sat out last season, or rather he sat out part of the season……
Nash Walker committed to Marquette back in July of 2025. He was part of the Class of 2026, but because the NBA Global Academy down in Australia closed down, Walker ended up joining Marquette's roster at the start of last year's spring semester and then redshirted last season. That means he's only going to have four years of eligibility going forward because he was on campus for a season already, and that counts as one of his five seasons in a five year window.
In any case, he signed with Marquette last November, and weirdly, 247 Sports still lists him in the Class of 2026. That's not particularly useful information because 247 also has Walker as the #380 prospect in the recruiting class in their Composite rankings. Keep that #380 in your head as we roll along here.
Here's what head coach Shaka Smart said about Walker when he signed :
"Nash is a true energy giver and pure shooter with a quick release," Smart said. "His competitiveness, basketball IQ and ability to make those around him better all match very well with who we are."
And here's the press release bio on him:
Walker (6-6, 190) is a product of the NBA Global Academy, which partners with the Centre of Excellence in Australia. He played under coach Marty Clarke at the academy and coach Robbie McKinlay with CoE and the national team. He averaged 18.7 points, 3.0 rebounds and 2.3 assists during the NBL 1 playoffs and was the Male Junior Athlete of the Year for Tasmania Basketball. He has been representing Basketball Australia dating back to 2022 when he averaged 15.4 points and 3.6 assists per game at the FIBA U15 Oceania Championship in Guam and helped the team to the championship. He most recently played in the 2025 FIBA U19 Basketball World Cup in Switzerland.
You wanna watch 90 seconds of highlights from August 2025?
How about a 4 minute interview from back in January when he got to campus?
How about 6 minutes of talking to the media after the open scrimmage back in early October?
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One thing I skipped over in the tablesetting section of this preview is the fact that Nash Walker injured his right shoulder late in the season last year. It required surgery, and that meant that Walker was out of commission for pretty much the entire summer's worth of offseason training and workouts. It also meant that he was held out of the practices leading into the trip to Canada as well as all three games in the Great White North. That was in early August.
The good news for setting expectations here is that Walker was ready to go for the open scrimmage at the beginning of October. We can't say that about everyone, so that's a plus for Walker. The bad news is that he went 1-for-5 from long range in the scrimmage, and as you'll recall, Shaka Smart called him a pure shooter in that signing press release.
So, we've got a guy who's not even a top 350 prospect in his natural recruiting class in a world where it's hard to expect to see lots of activity from anyone outside the top 150, who got hurt about six weeks after arriving in Milwaukee and then was unable to practice or workout with the team until at least August, and in his first time playing in front of fans, was maybe slightly underwhelming.
If we see Nash Walker play 300 minutes this season — that's rotation stuff, 10 minutes a game for 30 games — then I'll be surprised.
Someone has to give Nigel James a chance to sit down on the bench, grab a towel, and drink some Gatorade. Right now, the biggest glaring hole on the roster in terms of roles is that one. Someone's going to be occupying that time, because James can't play 40 minutes a night every game. He's going to max out at about 30 minutes a night on average, maybe 32, so someone has to take the other minutes.
Why can't it be Nash Walker? 2.3 assists per game in the NBL1 playoffs? 3.6 assists per game in the 2022 U15 Oceania Championship? We're not asking him to be the second coming of Braden Smith or Bobby Hurley here , we're asking him to handle the ball, not turn it over, set teammates up to score, and score a few buckets if that's what defenses are giving him. If Walker's more of a shooting guard or a small forward type of player, Marquette's pretty stacked up in terms of minutes over there. It's going to be hard for him to find his way onto the floor that way this season.
But absorbing James' bench minutes? And the more effective Walker is, the more James can rest and thus be more efficient and effective in February and March? That's an incredibly valuable role, if it's one that Walker can fit into at the Division 1 level.
I think I've hit on pretty much all of Walker's problems so far. His recruiting ranking indicates that we shouldn't expect anything from him right away, his injury timeline in 2026 tells us that he might be lagging way behind the rest of the team in terms of skills development and conditioning. If he can't play point guard at this level, at least right now, he's going to be fighting for whatever minutes are left out of the 80 at the 2 or the 3 when Adrien Stevens, Nolan Minessale, and Damarius Owens are done taking what they want out of it.
When the reasonable expectation is "probably a deep bench guy, we'll be surprised to see a lot of him this year," the downside of how his first year of playing time is going to go is pretty obvious.
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