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 wrap up our run of Player Previews with a look at the guy who has a ceiling that might (should??) be higher than merely All-Big East First Team….
A year ago, we went into James' freshman with the expectation (that turned into reality) that Sean Jones would be the starting point guard and that Nigel James would be backing him up. By default, that limited what we should expect from James as a freshman for the Golden Eagles, and there's always the "well, he's a freshman, so give me a minute before I'm sure he's going to be a contributor" part to it as well.
Four games into the season, James went into the starting lineup because of an injury to Jones, and he never let go of that role. As a starter for Marquette , James averaged 17.3 points, 3.5 rebounds (even though he's only a 72 inch guard!), 5.1 assists, and 1.9 steals per game while hitting 35% of his three-point attempts. In Marquette's 20 Big East regular season games, James hit for 19/4/6/2 and cashed over 38% of his three-pointers. He was named Big East Freshman of the Year because he was the second leading scorer in the league last season and the best scoring freshman since Carmelo Anthony in 2002-03 and for giggles on the side also was one of the best distributors in the conference. He was a unanimous pick for the Big East's All-Freshman team, and that was good enough to propel him to Third Team all-conference honors.
It went about as well as it could possibly go for him . Not so much Marquette as the Golden Eagles finished 12-20 overall and 7-13 in Big East play, mind you, but it was very clear that we were seeing a star emerge.
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You guys know the Notorious B.I.G song Mo Money Mo Problems?
It's a classic of the form, both the song and the video. We're here for not for the verses, but for the hook from Kelly Price:
I don't know what they want from me
It's like the more money we come across
The more problems we see
The accomplishments of Nigel James have shifted him from "well, let's find out what happens" as a freshman to "hey, guess who's in charge of turning this thing around from last season" as a sophomore. James was a unanimous choice for the preseason All-Big East First Team. He was one of just three guys on that five man list who were unanimous, although if Silas Demary was over there instead of isolated as Preseason Player of the Year, he would have been unanimous as well. That unanimous vote means James couldn't have been that far from the coaches' minds when voting for Preseason POY. Marquette was picked to finish fourth in the conference this year, and St. John's head coach Rick Pitino sent his first place vote — he can't vote for his own team — over to the Golden Eagles, and a notable percentage of the thinking behind those decisions are because Nigel James is great.
And so: The reasonable expectation for James is that he lives up to the weight of that thinking. I'm not trying to be unnecessarily troublesome to the young man, but the fact of the matter is that if James isn't an All-Big East First Team honoree when we convene in New York for the conference tournament, that's going to be disappointing. Therefore, the other way around is true: It's reasonable to expect him to be the guiding light for Marquette this season and get the Golden Eagles to a spot where it makes sense that he has to be considered one of the six best players in the conference. We're not going to attach stats or rankings or whatever to this. I'm not going to set myself up to say "oh, Nigel only averaged 14 points, and we said he should average 17 again, booooo." Nope. Hit the mark of First Team, whatever that takes, and we're all good here.
There's one extra level to this that comes by way of default to being included as a First Teamer in March. That makes you one of the six best players in the conference because the Big East insists on naming a six man team, mostly because they're technically doing a five man team plus the Player of the Year. If you're on that First Team, you're a candidate for Player of the Year. Maybe not the obvious choice, but at least in the conversation.
Let's walk that last part out.
If Nigel James is a First Team honoree, he's at least close to being Player of the Year in the Big East, right?
If he's close, then there's a pathway to actually being Big East Player of the Year.
If he follows that pathway to its conclusion, then it's reasonable to think that James should, at the very least, be an Honorable Mention All-American.
If Marquette has the kind of team success that goes along with their point guard getting tabbed as conference Player of the Year and earning All-American honors, that probably means that Marquette's going to be ranked for a decent chunk of the season.
If alllll of these things come together in the right way and Marquette's return from a 12-20 record to nationally ranked relevance is driven to a large extent by the mere fact that Nigel James is awesome…….
……… then how close is Nigel James to being National Player of the Year?
A lot of very good things can happen this year if Nigel's great and the team wins enough to easily skate in the newly expanded 76 team NCAA tournament, and we're all going to have fun watching all of those things. You can have a reasonable expectation of seeing this team lock up a single digit seed to the NCAA tourney with relative ease.
But the fact of the matter is the last two times we've seen Marquette play in Fiserv Forum, they beat the #4 team in the country and the #6 team in the country , even if that second one was in an exhibition game. The very top end of what's possible for Marquette, the very far end of the spectrum, the "oh, man, can you imagine if?" things, all of that might include the very top end of what's possible for both a player and a team.
You guys wanna freak out about turnovers?
Nigel James wasn't elite at protecting the ball last season, missing out on the KenPom.com top 500 in turnover rate and not managing a ranking in league play, which keeps him at least outside the top 25. He wasn't bad, well below 20%, and mixed with his assist rate (#19 in the country!) and his ability to score both inside and outside, he was ultimately fine with ball security last year.
Well, mostly fine, I guess. James had eight games last season with four or more turnovers, all of which came in Big East regular season contests. Marquette was 1-7 in those games, and hilariously, the one win was the regular season finale upset of #4 UConn. That's funny, but it does also mean that Marquette went into that one with a 0-7 mark when James committed that many giveaways, and it does mean that MU was 6-6 against Big East squads when James had three or fewer turnovers, 6-7 if you toss in the Big East tournament loss to Xavier. Not good, obviously, but also much better than 1-7.
Now, I'm not just saying any of this just to poke a hole in the dreams that we all have for what Nigel James might accomplish this season. I'm saying it as context for what I'm about to say.
Nigel James committed five turnovers in 31 minutes during the 87-60 exhibition win over Green Bay. That's five of the team's 15 turnovers.
Nigel James committed eight turnovers in 28 minutes of action during the 86-79 exhibition win over #6 Michigan State. That's eight of the team's 24 turnovers.
Now, I can't do the math by hand to tell you what Nigel James' turnover rate is, the percentage of possessions while he was on the court that ended with him coughing it up. What I can do is point out that James had a turnovers per 40 minutes rate of 3.8 overall last season and 4.2 in Big East play. I can also tell you that 13 turnovers in 59 minutes is a rate of 8.8 per 40 minutes.
So, uh, that's worse than 3.8 and 4.2, it seems. That's while playing in 74% of the minutes in those two games, which is more than his season rate last year but less than his Big East rate. It's just two games! It's just two exhibition games, and who knows how close the rotations were to what Shaka Smart will do all season long. Marquette still won the games anyway! There's a lot of caveats that I can throw over the top of all of this to say maybe there's a reason why we shouldn't be too worried about this.
But the fact of the matter is that Nigel James was kind of really bad in a particular way that led to Marquette losing a lot of games when he was bad in that way last year. Something to keep an eye on at the very least.
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