2023-24 Marquette Men’s Basketball Player Review: #11 Tyler Kolek

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’ll discuss a guy who definitely deserves to be later in this order but that’s what injury luck does to you……..

Tyler Kolek

* — Notes a top 5 national ranking per KenPom.com

** — Notes a Top 10 national ranking per KenPom.com

*** — Notes a Top 400 national ranking per KenPom.com

WHAT WE SAID:

Reasonable Expectations

And yet, I am coming here today to tell you that we can not reasonably expect Tyler Kolek to be the 2024 Big East Player of the Year.

This is the logical section, the coldly calculating section. This is where we have to look at historical data and say, well, this is what has happened, so this is what’s likely to actually happen.

In the history of the Big East, going all the way back to the 1979-80 season, there are just seven men who have ever won Big East Player of the Year more than once.

St. John’s Chris Mullin (who won it three times), Georgetown’s Patrick Ewing, UConn’s Richard Hamilton, Notre Dame’s Troy Murphy, Boston College’s Troy Bell, Providence’s Kris Dunn, and Villanova’s Collin Gillespie.

No one, and The Rock means no one, has ever won Big East Player of the Year outright twice. Mullin and Ewing shared it twice in 1984 and 1985 after Mullin won it by himself as a sophomore, Hamilton had to share his second with Miami’s Tim James, Murphy shared his second with Bell’s first, Dunn shared his first with Villanova’s Ryan Arcidiacono, and Gillespie’s first trophy was the first three-way split in league history, and the coaches couldn’t even agree that Gillespie was the best VU player in 2020-21, aka The Weirdest College Basketball Season Ever. He shared that one, his first POY, with teammate Jeremiah Robinson-Earl and Seton Hall’s Sandro Mamukelashvili.

So. 44 seasons. Only seven repeat winners, several of them basketball royalty. None of them won it outright twice. I am setting the table here for you: Tyler Kolek might be great this season. Even if he is, he also might not be the best player in the league, and in fact history suggests that he won’t. Let’s be honest: Kolek will face stiff competition from his own teammates if Marquette has the kind of season that being preseason #5 in the Associated Press poll suggests that they’ll have.

By the way, BartTorvik.com suggests that Kolek will be arguably statistically better than he was last season. After finishing last year averaging 12.9 points, 4.1 rebounds, and 7.5 assists, the algorithm is projecting him at 14.6 points, 4.2 rebounds….. but only 5.7 assists per game. Like I said, arguably better. Which Tyler Kolek do you want: Big Time Scorer, or Big Time Passer? To a certain extent, you have to choose.

Why You Should Get Excited

Unless you don’t HAVE to choose. When Kolek kicked things into high gear last season, he averaged 16.8 points and 7.8 assists per game across an 18 game stretch while taking home 12 KenPom.com Game MVP awards. An 18 game sample size is an awfully big sample size to just ignore as something that can’t be replicated, even with opponents knowing it’s coming after seeing it last year. Heck, Marquette faced five of their Big East foes twice during that 18 game stretch and two of them three times thanks to the conference tournament, so five of them knew it was coming the second time around and that didn’t matter all that much.

What if Tyler Kolek is capable of doing that for 35-plus games? What if Marquette’s overall production allows him to do that? What if Stevie Mitchell shoots 35% on threes instead of 30%? What if Kam Jones shoots 38% on threes like he did in Big East play instead of 36% like he did for the whole season? What if Ben Gold shoots 40% on threes like he did in Big East play as opposed to his season long 30%? What if all of that extra shooting around Kolek makes him an even more dangerous scorer because the floor gets just a little bit more spaced open for him?

Again, even with this happening, it still might not mean that Kolek is the Player of the Year. But I’ll tell you one thing: Kolek finding a way to recreate that production for a full season is going to go a long way towards MU living up to that #5 ranking.

Oh, and one more thing?

Kolek missed breaking the single season assists record by five assists last year. I find it very important to point out to you that he only missed this because he had a total of nine assists in the NCAA tournament. If he did not suffer his hand injury early against Vermont and ended up with his season average of assists in those two contests — even if MU loses to Michigan State anyway and the season ends there — Kolek breaks Tony Miller’s nearly 30 year old record.

Does Tyler Kolek strike you as the kind of player and person who might be motivated by something like that?

Potential Pitfalls

The biggest problem for Kolek is that he’s probably more likely to have a regression — albeit a small one — than he is to take a massive step forward. That’s not saying anything about his development as a player, it’s just a combination of “it’s hard to get better than he was” and “Marquette’s system tends towards sharing the ball more than requiring any one player to show out on a regular basis.” If the Golden Eagles don’t need Kolek to play like he did down the stretch last season — and if we’re being honest, I suspect that deep down the coaches would like that to be the case just from a team play perspective — then it might feel like he’s having a “worse” season.

But “worse” for Kolek, relative to what he was doing down the stretch, would be 13 points, three rebounds, and seven assists a game while shooting 37% from behind the arc. Remember, before he found a whole new gear last season, Kolek was averaging 9.3 points, 4.0 rebounds, and 7.6 assists. This was a very good improvement on his sophomore year, and we were all very happy with what he was doing for the first two months of the season. I think we’re all okay with that happening if Marquette is still competing for a Big East title, a top 10 ranking, and a protected seed in the NCAA tournament.

Well, it certainly feels like that very last paragraph is a great part to start here. Tyler Kolek was definitely not worse than he was as a junior. 15.3 points, 4.9 rebounds, a best-in-the-country 7.7 assists per game, 38.8% from long range is the official stat line for the Rhode Island native, and yep, that’s better than a step back from his end of season run as a junior. It’s really about right in line with what he was doing down the stretch as Marquette won a Big East regular season and tournament title, and to keep that kind of production up as an average performance across another 31 games is incredible.

In fact, Kolek was pretty much the same guy, statistically speaking, and arguably better, before and after the abdominal muscle injury that cost him the final stretch of the regular season and the Big East tournament.

Before: 15.0 points, 4.7 rebounds, 7.6 assists, 1.6 steals, 40.0% from behind the arc

In the NCAA tournament: 18.7 points, 7.0 rebounds, 8.3 assists, 1.0 steals, but just 27% from three-point land

The 27% is misleading, by the way. 2-for-5 against Western Kentucky is great, 0-for-1 against Colorado is whatever, 1-for-5 against NC State was his downfall in terms of shooting percentage. But Marquette didn’t lose that game because Tyler Kolek missed a shot or two — 2-for-5 or 3-for-5 would have been outstanding — or for any other Kolek-related reason. 17 points and 10 rebounds from your point guard will go a long way…. But just three assists for the best passer in the country in 2023-24 tells you a lot about what happened there.

The other thing I really wanted to talk about here is my Reasonable Expectation that Tyler Kolek would probably not be Big East Player of the Year this past season.

Uh.

So.

Tyler Kolek probably could have been Big East Player of the Year.

In fact, there’s an argument that up through February 28th, Tyler Kolek was going to be Big East Player of the Year.

Here’s what we know happened:

Marquette was 13-4 in league play after beating the brakes off of Providence at Fiserv Forum. Kolek suffered his oblique injury late in that game after putting up 12 points, 2 rebounds, 6 assists, and a steal. Devin Carter, who would go on to become Big East Player of the Year, had 18 points, 5 rebounds, 5 assists, and two steals in that game……. But 13 of those points came after Marquette was up 25 with 10 minutes left to play, and MU never led by less than 20 the rest of the way.

Kolek missed the final three games of the regular season, including losses to Creighton and UConn which landed the Golden Eagles in a tie for second place in the Big East as opposed to vying for the league title in the final few games with the Huskies or finishing in front of the Bluejays. When the Big East announced the postseason all-conference teams, four men were unanimous picks for the First Team: Kolek, Carter, UConn’s Tristen Newton, and Creighton’s Baylor Scheierman.

My gut instinct was that all 11 coaches agreeing that those four were the best in the league this season meant we were going to get a shared Big East POY. Instead, what I suspect happened is that Kolek missing the last few games and Marquette slipping down the standings prompted some coaches to vote elsewhere. That’s how Carter ended up with the most votes, even though he wouldn’t have been my pick to share the trophy at all. Yes, he was great for the Friars, especially after Bryce Hopkins went out for the year…… but it defies logic that a guy on a 10-10 Big East team that didn’t make the NCAA tournament is the Player of the Year.

Not only do I believe that Kolek had a chance to be/should have been Player of the Year for a second straight season, or at least share it, I believe that his injury ended up costing UConn’s Tristen Newton at least a share of the trophy as well. I’m going to need to see a lot of charts and graphs to understand how a guy averaging 15/7/6 for a team that never dipped out of the Associated Press top five in an in-season poll isn’t Player of the Year straight up in the first place, so I am stuck with the belief that Kolek missing games right as the ballots needed to be turned in changed how a lot of people voted.

I say all of that to say this: Tyler Kolek was so good in 2023-24 that when he missed three games, it caused Big East coaches to temporarily lose their minds when voting for Player of the Year.

Oh, and by the way: That Marquette single season assists record? He ended up falling 36 assists short of breaking Tony Miller’s record.

Kolek missed six games. Six assists in each of the games he missed would have given him the record.

Tyler Kolek averaged 7.7 assists per game. He had it. It was in his hands, he was going to fly past the record. In the preview, I asked if Kolek seemed like the kind of player who would be motivated by falling five assists short of breaking the record mostly because he injured his hand in the first few minutes of the NCAA tournament. I think we can safely say that not only was the answer to that question, “Yes, he does seem like that kind of player,” but we can also say that Kolek was 100% motivated all season long by the prospect of sailing past Tony Miller’s 274 assists in one season.

BEST GAME

Without even looking at another game to consider it, I ask you if we should just say it’s the game at Illinois and move on. Remember, that was the game where we spent all weekend wondering if Kolek was going to be available at all because of an ankle injury suffered late against Rider. Not only did Kolek play, not only did Kolek start, but he put up 24 points, six rebounds, four assists, and two steals while shooting 10-for-18 from the field, most of which was him dancing his way to the rack for 9-for-16 shooting on two-point buckets. He was so good in that game, CBS Sports’ Gary Parrish and Matt Norlander openly questioned whether Kolek was actually injured at all in the first place on the Eye On College Basketball Podcast.

What else compares? 28/8/6 and three steals in a 21 point win against Texas, where he arguably was motivated to put the Longhorns in the dirt to make sure Shaka Smart beat his old program? That was the postgame “First of all, bullshit” quote from Kolek. 15/4/8 and three steals in a narrow home win over Creighton? 21/5/11 and two steals in that “I don’t really know how they did it but they did it” home win over Villanova? 32/6/9 and three steals in a narrow five point road win against the Wildcats?

Okay, that’s a pretty good one.

27/7/13 and two steals at home against St. John’s on National Marquette Day? 27/6/5 as MU gutted out a six point win at Butler? 21/5/11 and a steal against Colorado to put Marquette in the NCAA tournament Sweet 16 for the first time in over a decade? Played the full 40 minutes in that one, shot an absolutely absurd 10-for-13 on two-pointers.

Where do you want to put Kolek apparently starting off the home game against DePaul by saying “I’m breaking the single game assists record” and getting 18 helpers in just 26 minutes? He did almost nothing else in that game, by the way. 1-for-2 shooting, one rebound, two steals. “I’m here to do assists” like he suddenly turned into Larry Bird for a night, just deciding to treat a game like a 40 minute challenge for him.

SEASON GRADE

Yeah, I’m giving him a 10. I don’t care that he missed six games, that’s not causing a dent in what I think about how Kolek’s year went. I thought it was going to be hard for him to replicate what he did down the stretch as a junior, just as a natural function of “it’s hard to maintain the best run of your life,” and Kolek absolutely 100% did that all season long for Marquette. He was awesome and he is an sure fire all-time Marquette great, no question about it.