Seton Hall Injury Note: Dylan Addae-Wusu has missed Seton Hall's last two games with a foot injury. Chaunce Jenkins led SHU in assists against Butler with four, while Garwey Dual's three helpers topped the charts in their loss to St. John's.
Marquette: #15
Seton Hall: #168
Game Projection: Marquette has an 87% chance of victory, with a predicted score of 73-61.
The Stakes: Marquette is looking to bounce back from their first Big East loss of the season. Seton Hall is looking to beat someone other than DePaul for the first time since December 4th.
This Season So Far: On April 4, 2024, Seton Hall beat Indiana State to win last season's NIT. They had to win five straight games against teams outside the Big East to make that happen, and they did it all in 16 days.
This year, it took Seton Hall nine games to rack up five wins against teams outside the Big East to start the season. They played those nine games across 31 days.
In short: Things have not been going great for the Pirates.
Even worse: Things weren't supposed to be going great for Seton Hall, and head coach Shaheen Holloway and his crew have found a trap door downwards in the bottom of the hole that they started in. Last year, the Pirates finished the season at #50 in the KenPom.com rankings. This year, the Pirates started the season at #91. A last second loss to Fordham in game #2 of the season dipped them out of the top 100, although they did briefly rally thanks to wins over Wagner and VCU back up to a season high of #86. Since then, it's been pretty much straight downhill, and they even lost a spot in the KP rankings after beating DePaul in overtime for their only Big East win of the season so far.
The Pirates come into Tuesday night on a three game losing streak. Very specifically, they lost by 28 in their most recent game, 79-51 to St. John's. That's of particular note because 1) it was at home, just like Tuesday night is for them, and 2) the Seton Hall faithful were particularly energized for that one when it started as they were looking forward to booing Kadary Richmond, who transferred to St. John's in the offseason.
The Red Storm started the game on a 17-3 run and were up 39-16 at the half. You get the idea.
Tempo Free Fun: We've got two things to work through here. The first is addressing the Pirates, the second is addressing the amount of CLANG noises coming from the Marquette offense.
We went into the season figuring that no matter what, Seton Hall was probably going to be able to defend. Shaheen Hollway had five straight top 100 finishes on KenPom.com in defensive efficiency, with three of those coming at Saint Peter's which comes with a certain amount of built in difficulty level to get into the top 100. His first two Seton Hall teams ended the year in the top 35 of defensive efficiency, so it stood to reason that no matter what else happens to them, they'll defend like crazy.
For the first month of the season, that looked like it was true. Seton Hall might have started out the year with a 5-4 record, but BartTorvik.com had them at #21 in the country on the defensive end of the floor. The Pirates couldn't hit water if they threw the ball out of a boat, but they knew how to defend.
And then they hosted Oklahoma State for the Big East/Big 12 Battle, officially kicking off the "nothing else but high major opponents" portion of the schedule. The Pirates have won just one time since then, outlasting DePaul in overtime. In that 1-8 stretch, BartTorvik.com has Seton Hall playing with the #.....
Teams are shooting 60.5% effective field goal percentage against Seton Hall in the last nine games, including nearly 60% on two-pointers and nearly 41% from behind the three-point arc. They're fouling like crazy, handing out a free throw rate of over 50% on defense.
According to KenPom.com, Seton Hall is the worst defense in the entire Big East when you look at only Big East games. They're allowing 118.8 points per 100 possessions even while forcing a turnover on nearly 19% of trips down the floor. They can't stop you from making shots, they can't block your shots, they let you shoot too many free throws, it's all bad, and there's not much about their offense to make you jump up and down, either.
All of this "Seton Hall's defense is having major problems" talk is going somewhere. Namely, it's going straight into the other thing we want to talk about.
Marquette is coming off their second worst three-point shooting night of the season. The Golden Eagles hit just 28% of their long range attempts against Xavier, and that definitely did not help them in their 59-57 loss. It was also MU's third worst two-point shooting night of the season, so there was a whole bunch of CLANG coming from the MU rim all night long against the Musketeers.
To drill down very specifically, Kam Jones and David Joplin did a lot of CLANG-ing against the Musketeers, combining to shoot 2-for-14 behind the three-point line. Joplin came into the season shooting 36% for his career, while Jones was at 38% after hitting more than 40% of his triples a year ago.
Through 18 games, Joplin's hitting just 31.5% of his three-pointers. Jones is even worse, connecting just 30.9% of the time.
Against Big East foes alone: Kam Jones is shooting 9-for-46 from deep..... and that's just 19.6%. In Marquette's last two games, Jones has hit just two of 16 three-point attempts.
The optimistic sort of person out there reads the last few paragraphs and thinks, "well, that just means that Kam Jones and David Joplin are due to have a big game." The astute and analytical mind realizes I just finished telling you that Seton Hall's defense has been atrocious for the last five weeks.
I'm not saying I can guarantee that the Golden Eagles are going to find their shooting touch on Tuesday night in New Jersey. I'm not going to be playing in the game, I can't guarantee anything.
But I can tell you that the table is set for a massive Get Right game for whatever you think ails the Golden Eagles right now. MU might be coming into this game struggling a bit on the offensive end of things, but that's "struggling relative to what they were doing earlier this year" or "struggling relative to what we thought this team was capable of doing." Seton Hall's defensive struggles are more along the lines of "are we sure this isn't the worst team in the country?" stuff.
Look. Win however you have to. But everything about this game says "as long as Marquette doesn't make their own problems, Seton Hall's not going to provide enough resistance to make this game hard for Marquette." If SHU is without Dylan Addae-Wusu and Yacine Toumi, both of whom missed the 79-51 loss to St. John's on Saturday? Then they're going to be trying to slow MU down while shorthanded, too.
Marquette Last 10 Games: 7-3, coming off having a six game winning streak snapped this past Saturday afternoon.
Seton Hall Last 10 Games: 2-8, with three straight losses as well as losses in eight of their last nine.
All-Time Series: Marquette leads, 24-14
Current Streak: The two teams split last season, with both sides winning at home. Marquette holds the edge with the second of the two games going their way, and the Golden Eagles have now won five of the last six contests against the Pirates.