With the 2025-26 season long since in the books, let’s take a few moments to look back at the performance of each member of YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles this year. While we’re at it, we’ll also take a look back at our player previews and see how our preseason prognostications stack up with how things actually played out. We’ll run through the roster in order of total minutes played going from lowest to highest, and today we talk about a freshman who we got to see more of than maybe we expected this season……

* — Notes a Top 500 national ranking per KenPom.com
** — Notes a Top 300 national ranking per KenPom.com

Reasonable Expectations

I want to start this with what the BartTorvik.com projections say for Stevens, because we’re going to get out of pocket as to what his ceiling this season might be pretty quickly. Okay? So, listen. The Torvik algorithm says that, based on the other abilities and histories of the returning players and how the freshmen fit in around them when taking the average production of a player with the same recruiting rankings into account, that maybe we’ll see Adrien Stevens for seven minutes a game this year.

That’s rounding up on what 17% of 40 minutes is, and that’s what he’s projected to do. Seven minutes, 2.8 points, 1.2 rebounds, maybe an assist.

Think about it: He’s probably not going to be playing a lot of point guard in place of Sean Jones or Nigel James, right? So, that means he’s fighting for playing time at the 2, maybe the 3. Chase Ross is absolutely starting in one of those places, and then there’s Zaide Lowery and Damarius Owens to try to figure out the other spot. After that, there’s fellow freshmen Ian Miletic and Michael Phillips to compete with for minutes. You can see why the algorithm isn’t 100% fired up about Stevens as a major contributor here.

Now, there’s a certain amount of reason to believe that Stevens is going to play more than this season, and we’re going to talk about those reasons in the Get Excited section. I think those are valid reasons to at least believe that Stevens is going to play more than seven minutes a night. How much more? Well, we’ll have to wait and see, but…. okay, let’s just get into it, shall we?

Why You Should Get Excited

I’m going to wander back to Ben Steele’s report in the Journal Sentinel from Marquette’s open practice at the end of July.

[But the biggest freshman eye-opener was Stevens, the 6-foot-4 guard who was not afraid to mix it up defensively. He led the team in deflections over the summer, a sure way to get playing time for Smart, and also in total wins in all the drills that MU coaches track.]

Led the team. Not the freshmen, the team. Not just in deflections, but in wins in drills, however that’s counted from drill to drill.

Shaka Smart, talking to the media about what they saw from Stevens in the practice:

[“He’s got some real toughness and physicality and a great body for a freshman,” Smart said. “He can get his hands on the ball.

“He’s really done a good job, particularly in the second half of the summer, buying into the advantages for him that he can press on a daily basis. Heat on the ball. Physicality on the ball. Getting his hands on the basketball. And being someone that, even though he is a freshman, uses his body to his advantage.”]

Chase Ross, who knows a thing or two about making a steal here and there:

[“I hope Stevie don’t watch this, but I think (Stevens) can be (as good) if not better than Stevie,” Ross said. “And y’all seen what Stevie did last year.”]

Okay, so. Expecting First 30 Games Of College Basketball Adrien Stevens to instantly be better than Last 34 Games Of A 135 Game Career Stevie Mitchell is a bit much. I’m going to presume that Ross’ point was that Stevens’ ceiling is ultimately higher than Mitchell’s. Down the road. Eventually.

buuuuuuut also Stevie Mitchell had a steal rate of 3.6% as a freshman according to KenPom.com, and if he had the minutes to qualify, that would have been top 90 in the country. The way to get on the court for Shaka Smart is to play defense. It seems very clear that doing that is not going to be a problem for Adrien Stevens. The question is what his freshman year ceiling is on that end of the floor, and if he’s the guy leading the team in deflections over the summer AND Chase Ross thinks he has a brighter future than Stevie Mitchell on defense….. well. I’m very curious to see what we get from Stevens in 2025-26.

Potential Pitfalls

A whole summer’s worth of being the most pesky defender and biggest drill winner is indicative of Stevens’ abilities relative to his teammates. That’s probably a sign that things are going to work out for him. If he’s beating out the rest of the team, then that should push him towards minutes, right?

The flipside of that coin is that he’s putting up these deflection numbers and drill wins against his teammates. That’s not the competition that he has to be able to defend to actually get minutes, and the fact of the matter is that we’ve seen guys look interesting and possibly successful in the open practices/scrimmages before and then they don’t quite pan out to a notable role on the team, or even come close to what we thought was their best case scenario. Getting familiar with your teammates’ abilities and finding ways to beat them over and over again in summer practices isn’t a perfect indicator of success, and if Stevens can’t get it done against Indiana and Maryland in the third and fifth games of this coming season, it might be a minute before we see him again.

Part of the reason Shaka Smart said the things about Stevens that we listed up above is because that’s what he saw from him in his high school and club circuit games, not just what he did this summer. That should be encouraging, but until we see the rubber hit the road in November, we have to acknowledge the possibility that maybe this doesn’t quite work out this year.

As we sit here in May looking back at the 32 games of Adrien Stevens’ freshman year at Marquette, it’s easy to declare what we saw from him to be an unqualified success. That’s almost assuredly where we are going to end up when get to his season grade, but the fact of the matter is that up until the point where head coach Shaka Smart swapped Stevens into the starting lineup, he appeared to mostly just be “a freshman who was able to take on playing time right away.”

Through Marquette’s first nine games, Stevens played in all of them, landing mostly somewhere between 14 and 20 minutes with a surprise 30 minute outing in Game #9. He averaged 5.3 points, 2.1 rebounds, 1.3 assists, and 1.2 steals per game, and he was shooting just 32.3% from behind the three-point line. That three-point shooting was cratering his overall shooting percentage because Stevens was finishing at the rim really well — 7-for-11 on twos through nine games — but he had taken nearly three times as many shots behind the arc than inside of it. That 64% on twos wasn’t enough to make his overall shooting look better than 41%.

This was fine. Tell me in the comments if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember anyone clamoring for a lot more Adrien Stevens than we were getting at that point. Perhaps immediately at that moment as Zaide Lowery managed to go 0-for-7 in 15 minutes against Valparaiso and after three missed layups in the first two minutes of the second half, Lowery didn’t play again in that game and was, in retrospect, officially on his way out of the program. I can see why right at that exact moment, there may have been a “well, it’s time to let Stevens have all of Lowery’s minutes” thought, but it wasn’t a prevailing and insistent idea. Again, tell me if I’m wrong, but there’s nothing about Stevens’ 5/2/1/1 and 32% three-point shooting that said “yes, please, much more.” To make matters worse? Marquette’s defense was actually better with Stevens on the bench. The net differential between offense and defense was about the same with or without him, but through the first nine games, ignoring garbage time, the defense was better with Stevens on the bench. That’s not really a knock on a freshman in his first nine games, just saying what the numbers say, and if his defense was his calling card coming out of the summer workouts, that’s a problem.

And so, as Zaide Lowery’s departure from the program began, it was Stevens that benefitted. This may be because Smart and his staff couldn’t bring themselves to trust Damarius Owens at that point of the campaign as we discussed in his review. Going into the year, I would have figured that Stevens would be fighting with Lowery and Owens for minutes, and as we hit the 10th game of the season, neither of the other two guys had the backing of the coaching staff. That meant it was time to see if Stevens could hack it…. and I think it worked out pretty well.

Once Adrien Stevens became a starter, it seems like the more regular playing time helped him settle into playing Division 1 basketball. Over the final 23 games of the season, Stevens averaged 9.0 points, 2.7 rebounds, 1.7 assists, and 1.5 steals per game. His three-point shooting went through the roof, connecting on 39% of his nearly five attempts per game the rest of the year, and in 20 games of Big East competition, he hit on nearly 42% of his tries. That made him the fifth most accurate shooter in the entire conference based on KenPom.com’s qualifying math. Stevens was still taking more than twice as many three-pointers as two-pointers, but since he was taking more twos, his shooting percentage did come down…. to 56%, and that is absolutely better than fine when mixed with nearly 40% three-point shooting. Even his 54% in BE competition was okay because anything over 50% is super when you can hit 42% of your three-pointers.

The other part about all of it is that Stevens started becoming a big impact player on both ends of the floor. For the final 23 games of the season, Marquette was +13.6 points per 100 possessions with Stevens in the game according to Hoop Explorer….. and -2.0 with him on the bench. Stevens boosted Marquette by nearly seven points per 100 trips on offense and nearly nine points per 100 possessions on defense. I don’t know if we can quite click it over to calling the defense elite with Stevens on the court as they were averaging 100.4 per 100 possessions…. but HE says that was #37 in the country. Again, that’s probably not good enough to be elite, but you’re going to win a lot of ball games as a top 40 defense.

If we slice it down to just the final 13 games of the year, from the overtime win over Providence forward, the part of the year where we can say that Marquette looked like a competent Big East caliber team:

+20.8 per 100 possessions with Stevens playing
+6.4 without him

More importantly here though, Marquette was better on both ends with Stevens in the game. Good on offense — #59 in the country — but elite on defense. Just 98.4 points per 100 possessions, and that ranked #26 in the country in that stretch.

Stevens’ own stats in those games: 10.8 points, 3.3 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 2.2 steals in 31.0 minutes per game. 37.7% three-point shooting, 55.6% two-point shooting.

For the final third of the season or so, Adrien Stevens had turned himself into a perfectly competent if not good Big East caliber starting guard. I don’t know if there was ever really a Light Goes On moment for him, just a “we’re going to keep trusting you to do stuff, and maybe here’s some more stuff” and he just kept on doing the stuff. You really can’t expect much more from a freshman.

Adrien Stevens picked up his first KenPom.com game MVP award for Marquette’s 78-56 road win over Providence on March 4th, and it’s hard to argue with that as his best game. Season/career high 21 points on 8-for-12 shooting which including 5-for-8 from long range, four rebounds, an assist, and four steals. If you wanted to say the road win over Georgetown where he had 16 points as MU had to get through a 16 point victory over the Hoyas without Royce Parham, I’d listen to the argument. Same for his 6-for-9 three-point shooting game at home against Butler in MU’s 70-55 win that came with four rebounds, three assists, and two steals as well.

For the first — and I presume not last! — time this season, we have to ask the question “How high is too high?”

We started out the year thinking “well, there’s obviously a way for him to earn playing time on this team, the question is how much can he actually get?” Situations that kind of had nothing really to do with Stevens popped the door open to lots of playing time even though he was already an obvious rotation guy from Day 1. Once that door popped open, Stevens went flying through it and established himself as a cornerstone of Marquette basketball for the rest of his tenure in Milwaukee. It’s possible that we’re actually underrating Stevens as a performer this season because Nigel James is over there on the other side of the room saying “hey, check this freshman year out!” and that’s not really Stevens’ fault!

I think that because Stevens landed on “obvious starter caliber guy” by the time the season ended but not any further than that, I have to pin his grade at a 9. He’s not a superstar caliber player, or at least didn’t jump off the TV screen as that this season relative to what we thought he could be this season. He definitely shot past a reasonable expectation for him in 2025-26, so I think a 9 is fair.

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