Which Marquette team will show up to play Xavier?
Good luck to anyone trying to get a feel for the Marquette men's basketball team after eight games this season.
There have been some dizzying highs, like knocking off No. 9 Creighton on the road Monday and beating then-No. 4 Wisconsin at the buzzer in an instant classic Dec. 4. The Golden Eagles are the only college hoops team that can claim two top-10 victories, so observers started thinking that MU is better than originally thought.
But then there are stretches when MU looks like a team picked to finish sixth in the Big East. MU can be an efficient offensive machine like it was in the second half against Creighton, then the Golden Eagles can suffer through bouts of maddeningly careless turnovers.
MU's roster boasts athleticism and length and, at times, the Golden Eagles appear to be the best defensive team in head coach Steve Wojciechowski's seven seasons. Then there are slow rotations or lapses in concentration that lead to easy baskets.
All those contradictions frustratingly showed up in MU's 70-63 loss to Seton Hall on Thursday. The Golden Eagles (5-3, 1-1 Big East) look to bounce back at Xavier (7-0) at 1 p.m. Sunday in Cincinnati.
“It's a learning experience for our guys,” Wojciechowski said. “The Big East, game to game, is high level. The way teams approach it might not always be the same from team to team.
“Every night is a battle and I thought (the Pirates) were tougher than we were.”
Wojciechowski has preached playing through the paint this season, either by penetration or getting the ball into the post players. The MU coach bemoaned his team settling for jump shots as they started 2 for 9 from the field against Seton Hall and fell into a 15-5 hole.
“We had talked about posting,” Wojciechowski said. “We talked about driving. We didn't really do either real well.”
The Golden Eagles' offense seemed stuck in neutral until late in the game when sophomore point guard D.J. Carton got going. He had 10 of his team-high 16 points from the 6:30 mark in the second half until MU tied the game at 61-61 on Carton's three-pointer with 1:52 to play.
But the turnover bugaboo came back to bite the Golden Eagles. They had four in the first five minutes to compound the sluggish start. Then after battling back to level the game, freshman forward Justin Lewis was called for an offensive foul and senior guard Koby McEwen was whistled for traveling. In MU's three losses, it has 56 turnovers.
On the other end, MU's defense allowed easy penetration that led to wideopen three-pointers. The Pirates shot 14 for 32 (43.8%) from long distance, well above their season average of 36.4%.
The winning basket came when Seton Hall's Sandro Mamukelashvili knifed into MU's defense and found Shavar Reynolds for a three-pointer with 34 seconds left that Carton was late to contest.
“I thought we helped them,” Wojciechowski said. “I think defensively there wasn't a lot of teeth in our defense, especially to start the game. So you give them confidence. We got better with that later, but in Big East games you have to play for 40 minutes.”
It's still early in the season and MU has several new players in key roles. The truncated offseason and a two-week pause in the preseason due to a positive coronavirus test always meant that it would take some time for the Golden Eagles to find themselves.
But MU's inconsistency from game to game is head-spinning.