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 address the issue of a guy who couldn't play up to par last year and won't play at all until at least Thanksgiving….
I'm going to republish what I wrote for Caedin Hamilton's season grade in his Player Review after the 2025-26 season ended as a preamble to where we're going here.
On the upside, playing Caedin Hamilton was generally speaking good for Marquette's defense. On the downside, playing Caedin Hamilton broke the offense in very bad ways, most notably making MU's inability to score at the rim look even worse. At face value: His 43% shooting on two-point attempts was very bad. From a visual impact level: It made you notice Zaide Lowery and Sean Jones both shooting under 44% on two-pointers a little bit more and made you feel a lot worse about the entire enterprise before the lineup change.
At the end of the day, the reasonable expectation for Hamilton was "everyone has to do a little bit more to make up for what Marquette is losing," and not only did he fail at that, he failed at that so hard that Shaka Smart had to cut him nearly all the way back to what he was doing the year before just to salvage something useful out of the season. The best I can say is "points for effort" and give Hamilton's redshirt sophomore year a 2.
Handing Caedin Hamilton a starting lineup spot and 20-ish minutes a game was a core component of why things went bad by Christmas last season. He was rendered unplayable for most of Big East play, or at the very least reduced to "is this working tonight?" status where the coaching staff decided on the fly whether or not Hamilton got to play more than two minutes.
Now Marquette has Sananda Fru on the roster to start at center instead of an out of position Ben Gold, which means two things: 1) Head coach Shaka Smart realizes the importance of production from the starting center spot and 2) He continued out of the end of last season with the obvious mindset of not having to even think about crossing his fingers that the light would suddenly go on for Caedin Hamilton in his fourth season of college basketball counting his redshirt season in 2023-24.
This was not going to be a particularly sunny Player Preview…. and then Caedin Hamilton tore his calf at the beginning of October and will miss 8 to 12 weeks .
Sign up for a user account and get:
Improved notifications system!
Fewer ads
Create community posts
Comment on articles, community posts
Rec comments, community posts
Download the SB Nation app on iOS or Android .
Okay, first the math: As I worked out in the blog about his injury, the best case scenario has Hamilton missing five games and debuting against Chicago State on November 22nd. Worst case scenario is missing all 12 non-conference games, and maybe the first one or two of Big East play.
That's if 8-12 weeks is the timeline for healing and rehab back to 100% preparation to play basketball. If it's 8-12 weeks until he's cleared for full fledged activity, then we're still looking at a little bit extra time tacked onto the end because it's hard to get a lot of cardio fitness in when you're rehabbing your leg.
And so, I think the reasonable expectation is that we see Caedin Hamilton do anything on the court at all for Marquette this season. I don't think it's out of the question that we don't see him til January, and with half the season in the books, it's going to be very hard for Hamilton to break into the rotation that's already been established. Heck, given his history from last year, even if he heals quickly and is back by Thanksgiving, you'd have to figure that the coaching staff is going to keep Hamilton's minutes extremely limited even as he's splitting time with Joshua Clark playing behind Sananda Fru.
It can not get worse.
Last year hit "hey, why don't you just sit over there and wave that towel, champ?" levels. That message has to have gotten through, right? If Hamilton gets on the floor for the Golden Eagles at some point this year, he has to be more productive than he was last year, right?
RIGHT?
Between missing 2-3 months of preseason prep and in-season action, and fitness levels due to the rehab process, and rotations settling while he's out, and the off chance that Joshua Clark would have passed him on the depth chart anyway even without the injury….. there's a version of this year where Hamilton just never plays anything resembling important minutes for the Golden Eagles.
I'm not entirely sure that's actually a bad thing.
Follow Anonymous Eagle on social media
Facebook: AnonymousEagle
Instagram: AnonymousEagleSBN
Bluesky: AnonymousEagle
