With four regular season games left, Golden Eagles eager to fight to the finish
With just four regular-season games left, every little detail matters for the Marquette men's basketball team as it attempts to remove itself from the bubble conversation and return to the NCAA Tournament after missing March Madness — and the postseason entirely — for three consecutive seasons.
Heading into Tuesday's 7 p.m. contest against St. John's (12-15, 6-8 Big East) at the BMO Harris Bradley Center, each practice, film session and shootaround bears a heightened gravitas for the Golden Eagles (16-10, 7-7). With their postseason hopes hanging in the balance, all of the Golden Eagles' experience, talent and focus need to coalesce and produce a strong end to the regular season.
Following Marquette's bye week, which came after a stretch of four losses in five games, coach Steve Wojciechowski drew a line in the sand. He shifted three of his most consistent starters who had logged the most playing time — sophomore Haanif Cheatham and seniors Jajuan Johnson and Luke Fischer — out of the starting lineup Saturday against Xavier.
Cheatham ultimately played 26 minutes and scored 15 points, but Fischer got off the bench for just 12 minutes before fouling out and Wojciechowski decided to sit Johnson for the duration of the contest. The new starting lineup flourished, getting off to a hot start and sustaining the momentum.
With those moves, Wojciechowski added credence to his belief that skill, talent, potential, age, defensive matchups, conventional wisdom, etc. all take a back seat. As Marquette hits the stretch run, he's going to roll with the players who are going to fight the hardest.
"That's all I want," Wojciechowski said. "The score will take care of itself if you fight and if you're playing for your teammates, not just with them.”
Marquette's new-look rotation Saturday didn't just perform well early then merely maintain its lead. The starting unit of freshmen Markus Howard and Sam Hauser, sophomore Matt Heldt and redshirt juniors Duane Wilson and Andrew Rowsey displayed a level of urgency and passion that had been lacking during Marquette's recent skid.
They dived for loose balls, communicated defensively to succeed as a unit and fed emotionally off each other and the crowd, exchanging emphatic hugs and high fives as they dismantled the Musketeers.
"The group that started and guys that came off the bench, just great leadership from everybody," Howard said. "This was a must-win game, so we just came with the mindset that we were just going to have to fight and that's what we did."
That performance was totally opposite from what the Golden Eagles did at the beginning of the month in an 86-72 loss at St. John's. In that game, Marquette was sloppy, listless and defeated well before the final buzzer no matter what combination of players was on the court. The Red Storm's top three scorers — freshmen Shamorie Ponds and Marcus LoVett and junior Bashir Ahmed — were too quick, too doggedly aggressive and too effective, breaking the Golden Eagles' spirit steal by steal, shot by shot.
In a conference season that has featured multiple ups and downs, Marquette can't afford to let the pendulum swing backward. With four games remaining before the Big East tournament — two at home, two on the road — the Golden Eagles hold their destiny in their hands. As important as their execution and scheme will be over the final stretch, it's their intangible qualities — urgency, intensity, focus and effort — that may dictate which tournament they'll be playing in following selection Sunday.
"This is a great start for us, but we just have to continue," Howard said. "We have about four more games left in conference, so we have to treat each game like a war, like a fight."