Marquette’s star is a Memphis what if
Evangelical Christian School grad is leading scorer for Golden Eagles
Norton Hurd IV sensed that Shaka Smart thought he was doing Hurd a favor, for a player Smart hardly knew.
This was back in 2021, when Smart had just become the coach at Marquette and Team Thad’s program director and coach was once again trying to convince someone to believe in Kam Jones.
“Shaka,” Hurd said he told Smart over the phone, “you’re going to be thanking me.”
This week could be remembered as a “you’re welcome” moment for Jones, an Evangelical Christian School graduate who’s becoming a March Madness star despite being an overlooked one in Memphis as recently as three years ago.
No. 2 seed Marquette will play in the Sweet 16 for the first time in more than a decade when it faces No. 11 seed North Carolina State in Dallas on Friday (6:09 p.m., CBS), and Jones is the Golden Eagles’ leading scorer as a junior. There is growing buzz that suggests he will be the next player from the area to make it to the NBA.
And so, since he’s doing all this from Milwaukee instead of Memphis, he is also becoming a fascinating case study in the ongoing community discussion surrounding coach Penny Hardaway’s local recruiting agenda and the state of Tiger basketball.
What if Jones had been at Memphis these past three seasons rather than Marquette?
It’s an obvious question, especially in light of the disappointing season the Tigers just endured. Jones is exactly what Hardaway said his program is missing – a two-way guard who can fill it up on offense, lock someone down on defense, and plays with a spirit that embodies the city he grew up in.
The answer isn’t straightforward, but there is little doubt Jones has rekindled the decades-old debate whenever a local prospect thrives away from Memphis.
He was a victim, first and foremost, of the pandemic.
The offseason before Jones entered his senior year at ECS, an offseason in which he went through a late growth spurt to get to 6-foot-4 and Team Thad was scheduled to play on Nike’s prestigious Elite Youth Basketball League for the first time, was completely altered by the lack of grassroots basketball events due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“He would have blown up,” Hurd insisted.
“Had that happened,” Jones’ father, Kevin, said this week, “I don’t know where he’d be playing.”
The city’s 2021 recruiting class, in retrospect, was one of the strongest in recent memory and offers a glimpse into an alternative universe for Hardaway and Memphis.
Briarcrest Christian’s Kennedy Chandler (Tennessee), Wooddale’s Johnathan Lawson (Memphis, Creighton), Houston High School’s Mason Miller (Creighton) and Lausanne’s Alden Applewhite (Mississippi State, Portland, Murray State) were all sought after recruits.
Jones, though, was bothered at times by the lack of recruiting attention he got compared to some of his peers, his father said. At one point, Hurd noted, Jones thought he would be committing to either Belmont or Lipscomb because the high major schools just weren’t interested.
“He always felt he was just as good as all the other guys who were here locally being recruited,” Kevin Jones said. “I sat him down and just told him, ‘Your journey is your journey. Their journey is theirs. You have to focus on yours.’ ”
It eventually led him to Marquette. Former ECS coach Willie Jenkins and Hurd each had connections with former Marquette coach Steve Wojciechowski’s staff. Florida also offered Jones a scholarship. He picked Marquette because it’s the school that consistently showed interest.
Memphis and Hardaway never did, Kevin Jones said.
I asked Kam Jones about it last March when the Tigers and Marquette were both playing in Columbus, Ohio, for the 2023 NCAA tournament. He indicated “what if ” didn’t necessarily apply
to his situation.
“It was a chip on my shoulder, (but) I knew I wasn’t going to Memphis,” Jones said. “So it saved them some time, too.”
A year later, when told of this answer, his father had a different take.
“I think he said that because there wasn’t really a relationship built,” said Kevin Jones, who attended Memphis for one semester before joining the Air Force. “It could have been different had there been a relationship and they recruited him.”
Hardaway ultimately put together a No. 1 2021 recruiting class featuring future NBA draft picks like Jalen Duren,
Emoni Bates and Josh Minott. But the turmoil of that season also convinced Hardaway to pursue an older roster through the transfer portal and put less of an emphasis on recruiting high school prospects. The plan mostly worked last season with Kendric Davis and Deandre Williams. It backfired this season.
It’s easy to say Hardaway missed – on Jones, and really his entire local class. Hardaway did, through a combination of bad timing and the same, bad evaluation most of the country made on Jones.
It’s harder to say if Hardaway could have avoided the extreme roster churn
that he’s trying to overcome now if he had prioritized more local talent like Jones the past few years. It’s impossible to know if Jones would have had the same career at Memphis that he is having at Marquette.
But there appears to be a world in which Jones is leading Memphis into the Sweet 16 this week − not Marquette and the higher his star rises, the more people will wonder why anybody would have said no thank you to that.
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Mark Giannotto via email at mgiannotto@gannett.com and follow him on X: @mgiannotto