With the 2023-24 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 turn our attention to the first returning player that was available for the whole campaign.......
Ben Gold
Sophom*ore - #12 - Forward - 6’11” - 245 lbs. - Wellington, New Zealand
Ben Gold Traditional Stats
| Games | Min | FGM | FGA | FG% | 3PTM | 3PA | 3P% | FTM | FTA | FT% | OReb | DReb | Reb | Ast | Stl | Blk | Fouls | Pts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Games | Min | FGM | FGA | FG% | 3PTM | 3PA | 3P% | FTM | FTA | FT% | OReb | DReb | Reb | Ast | Stl | Blk | Fouls | Pts |
| 37 | 16.8 | 1.8 | 4.1 | 44.7% | 1.1 | 3.2 | 35.9% | 0.2 | 0.5 | 52.9% | 0.7 | 2.2 | 3.0 | 0.6 | 0.4 | 0.4 | 1.9 | 5.0 |
Ben Gold Fancy Stats
| ORtg | %Poss | %Shots | eFG% | TS% | OR% | DR% | ARate | TORate | Blk% | Stl% | FC/40 | FD/40 | FTRate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ORtg | %Poss | %Shots | eFG% | TS% | OR% | DR% | ARate | TORate | Blk% | Stl% | FC/40 | FD/40 | FTRate |
| 116.5*** | 14.0% | 15.9% | 58.7% | 58.5% | 5.2% | 15.4% | 630.0% | 11.3%*** | 3.1%*** | 1.5% | 4.5 | 1.6 | 11.3% |
***— Notes a top 400 national ranking per KenPom.com
WHAT WE SAID:
Reasonable Expectations
The door is open for Ben Gold to do big things for Marquette this season.
Last year, in his review, we noted that head coach Shaka Smart deployed Gold as a backup to both Oso Ighodaro and Olivier-Maxence Prosper. As you may be aware, Prosper was a first round NBA Draft pick, and he’s on the roster for the Dallas Mavericks right now. As such, there’s a big spot for Gold to start vacuuming up minutes left behind in Prosper’s absence.
See AlsoEverything You Need to Know About Treating and Preventing Shin Splintsbuy back the secrets - sundiscus - BatmanThe San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, CaliforniaHow to Get a VA Rating for Spondylosis [2024 Definitive Guide]With that said, he’s not the guy who projects to take OMax’s starting spot. That pathway most likely belongs to David Joplin, but the fact of the matter is that Gold provides the Golden Eagles with a little bit more height and size than Joplin does. If getting a little bit bigger is something that MU needs, then that’s going to tip the scales towards Gold getting playing time.
However, we have to acknowledge the fact that the BartTorvik.com preseason algorithm says that Gold is projected for six minutes a night and 2.9 points and 0.5 rebounds to go with that. If he can play a little bit more like Big East Season Ben Gold than Season Average Ben Gold, I think he can easily beat those computer projection numbers, but it’s going to come down to whether or not he can get the chances to do it.
Why You Should Get Excited
Ben Gold’s per 40 minute numbers in Big East play: 16.5 points, 5.6 rebounds, 1.0 assists, 1.0 steals, 2.7 blocks.
Ben Gold’s per 100 possession numbers in Big East play: 23.6 points, 8.0 rebounds, 1.4 assists, 1.4 steals, 3.8 blocks.
Yes, he did not do much for Marquette last season. But Gold also had some really nice moments where he was doing an awful lot of really nice things. It’s just that he was limited in minutes because he was playing behind either A) one of the most uniquely talented players in the country or B) a guy who was ultimately headed towards a spot on an NBA roster this fall. No one’s faulting anyone on the coaching staff towards leaning towards Ighodaro and Prosper.
But in a world where Prosper’s not there any more... what if Gold’s capable of sustaining that kind of production with real minutes behind it?
Maybe it’s not going to be even 20 minutes a game. But if he’s starting to trend towards 10 or 15 minutes a game and can keep that offensive production up, and being dangerous on defense in the paint as well? Man, that sounds like an awful lot of fun to watch.
After all, Shaka Smart said over the summer that the coaching staff thinks that Gold is an awful lot better than Gold thinks he is. We can debate about exactly what the head coach means when he says that kind of a thing out loud in public, but if the basic concept is true, there’s a lot of untapped potential for the Kiwi.
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Well, we have to start this portion of the program out by discussing Gold’s shin splints that kept him from playing during the team’s trip to Italy in August. He’s a 6’11”, 245 pound guy, so anything that relates to his legs not holding up to their end of the bargain is, of course, slightly concerning.
With that said, according to pictures from Marquette, Gold wasn’t wearing his walking boot any more by the end of the month. That’s a good sign, but he has been wearing a compression sleeve on the same leg in preseason workouts. Keep an eye on that going forward.
The other thing that we have to worry about is Gold’s defense. Yes, I know, we mentioned his ability to block shots pretty well, but that’s not the full and sum total of defense, even at his size. Turning our attention to Hoop Explorer, Marquette was better on both ends of the court when Gold was off the floor last season. It was a less than six point per 100 possession difference on offense, but it was a nearly seven point shift on defense. More importantly, it was a shift amongst very nice offensive numbers but a shift from “this is good” on defense to “yeah, it’s below average, but I guess that’s fine if we’re scoring that much.”
Gold has to be better than that. Yes, there’s more going on to cause those numbers than just what he’s doing, sure. But if the coaching staff looks at whatever breakdowns they like to look at and see that they have better defensive options/better defensive production than what they’re getting from Gold, they’re going to go in a different direction. If that’s the case, we might end up seeing a lot more of 2022-23 Ben Gold Minutes in 2023-24.
We can not go so far as to say that Ben Gold made The Leap in 2023-24. You can’t more than double your minutes on average from freshman year and not double your scoring output on average and get people saying that you made The Leap. That’s just not how this works.
However.... maybe? Kinda? We can say Gold made a leap, lower case, indefinite article? The Hop, not to be confused with the Milwaukee streetcar?
He actually shot the ball less overall than he did as a freshman, going from 11.6 attempts per 40 minutes to just 9.7, but Gold’s success rate on three-pointers shot up from 30% even to just barely short of 36%. His rebounding went notably up, more than doubling his defensive rebounding rate and ending up #20 in the Big East during conference play. His turnovers went way down to the point where he had one of the 300 best rates in the country. Gold’s block rate decreased notably, by more than half, but 1) he was probably just being more responsible as a defender to stay on the court and chasing it less and 2) he was probably never going to be a top 70 block rate guy anyway..... but he did still end up top 400 and we’re not going to say no to that.
In short, notably better, if not noticeably better, if that makes sense.
It’s not to say that there weren’t ups and downs to his year. He had a run early in Big East play — not coincidentally when Marquette as a team struggled to throw the ball in Lake Michigan — where Gold missed 12 straight three-point attempts across a five game span. Early on in the year, it seemed like perhaps he was destined to be Inconsistent Minutes Guy, posting single digit appearances against Kansas, Wisconsin, and Providence, and only getting 10 minutes of run in the Maui championship game against Purdue and Zach Edey. It would be stupid to say that Marquette went 1-3 in those games because Ben Gold didn’t play enough........ but I think we could say that Marquette wasn’t operating at peak capacity because Gold wasn’t making enough of a positive contribution to stay on the floor. Four fouls against Purdue (although lots of people have trouble defending Zach Edey) and three in just six minutes against the Badgers does tend to agree with the idea of “Ben didn’t have it those nights.”
We highlighted Gold’s on/off numbers in the preview, so we should probably poke around in those here, right? Here’s some good news: Marquette was better on offense — or at least more efficient — when Ben Gold was on the floor. Adjusted for opponent level, Hoop Explorer says MU averaged 122.7 points per 100 possessions with Gold running around and 119.9 per 100 with him on the bench. It’s not much of an improvement, but it is showing that he was having a positive impact. Was that impact entirely “Gold shoots threes at a respectable clip and Oso Ighodaro doesn’t shoot them at all”? Might be!
The problem, however, is that there’s an argument to be made that Gold’s defense got worse. We noted in the preview that there was a nearly seven point per 100 possession swing on defense in a negative direction when Gold was on the floor as a freshman. As a sophom*ore? Adjusted for opponent level? More than nine points, 99.9 on the floor versus 90.8 while he was on the bench. That’s...... not good. Now, 99.9 is roughly speaking an average defense, so the fact that the offense got a touch better with him does help balance that problem out. If part of Gold’s role on the team was to provide a more offensive firepower look to the lineup when Ighodaro was on the floor, then this is a tradeoff that you can live with. After all, you’re going to win a lot of games scoring 122 and giving up 100 on average.
It’s just not what you want to see as a guy develops into a full fledged role player, nor what you want to see when you’re trying to judge how the guy’s year went on an individual level.
BEST GAME
We are maybe two Ben Gold made three-pointers away from being able to say the road trip to Creighton was his best game. With Tyler Kolek injured and Oso Ighodaro out sick, Marquette stayed within single digits for almost the entirety of the first 38 minutes of that game before taking a 14 point loss because Baylor Scheierman went nuclear hot to end it. Who’s to say what would have happened if Gold had canned an extra three here or there as he went 1-for-8 while starting in place of Ighodaro? He didn’t attempt one at all in the final seven minutes when the game was very much in doubt. I’m just saying: 13 points and six rebounds in an emergency 37 minute start as MU pulls a surprising upset win? Obvious best game.
But no: 1-for-8.
I think the answer is the road trip against Butler instead. Nine points, four rebounds and an assist in 16 minutes, and Gold’s first two free throws — not makes, attempts and he made them both — in Big East play helped push the Golden Eagles across the line to a 78-72 win in Indianapolis.
SEASON GRADE
Ben Gold definitely beat out what the T-Rank algorithm thought we were going to get from him in 2023-24. That’s great news, but I think we all thought he’d do more for the team than that in the first place. I don’t think we can bang on Gold for the defensive dropoff while he was on the floor all that much in this section of things because some of that is just “Oso Ighodaro is a very good basketball player and perhaps an underrated defender.” It’s not Gold’s fault he’s not that good right now, so we’ll give him credit for at least improving on things like rebounding from his freshman year.
It wasn’t a blowaway year, but it wasn’t a disappointment either, not by a long shot, and sometimes you have to grade on vibes. I liked what we saw from Ben Gold this past season, so I’ll give him an 8.
