Marquette Golden Eagles star guard Kam Jones has been overlooked from the moment he stepped foot on campus.
As a freshman, Jones came off the bench and played with the second unit every day in practice. His coach, Shaka Smart, did everything he could to try to explain to his starters that year that Jones was a rising star, but it was easy to look past the guy who hadn’t even been a top-100 recruit.
“I was like, ‘Do you guys understand, this guy’s a better scorer than all you guys?’ ” Smart recalled Tuesday night.
The next two years, Jones led a Marquette team that was a fixture in the AP top 10 in scoring, but was still somehow overshadowed. Tyler Kolek and Oso Ighodaro, now in the NBA, were considered the faces of Marquette’s rise back to prominence. Jones averaged 17 points per game a year ago and somehow wasn’t even an honorable mention All-Big East player.
As a senior, it’s officially now Jones’s team. There’s no ignoring just how good the Memphis native is anymore, and his performance Tuesday night in a 76–58 win over the No. 6 Purdue Boilermakers should vault Jones into the early national player of the year conversation. The final line: 17 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists—Marquette’s first triple double since Dwyane Wade’s epic showing in the 2003 NCAA tournament against Kentucky. It showcased Jones’s growth from elite off-ball scorer to dominant lead guard, the unquestioned alpha of what looks like a serious Big East title contender.
“When he came here, he wasn’t that,” Purdue coach Matt Painter said. “He came here as a shooter, and now he’s a player.”
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Jones had scored 24 or more points in three of four games coming into Tuesday night, and Purdue swarmed him early to try to prevent him from taking over the game with his shot-making. But elite point guards are capable of dictating the game even on nights when the ball is taken out of their hands. Jones picked his spots, deferring to his teammates early and racking up assists before delivering the knockout blow late with his scoring ability. With under a minute to go, Jones found fellow senior Stevie Mitchell in the corner for a three, delivering Jones his triple double and Mitchell his first 20-point game of his college career.
Marquette’s ceiling in 2024–25 was going to be dictated as much as anything by Jones’s ability to slide into a true “lead guard” role after playing off Kolek a year ago. There were early signs it had potential: Jones played mostly point guard when Kolek missed six games last March and put up monster numbers, averaging nearly 21 points per game to go with 4.5 assists and a better than 2:1 assist-to-turnover ratio. But even the most optimistic Marquette fans might not have anticipated the transition being this smooth. Through five games, Jones has 30 assists to just seven turnovers, all while scoring at an even more efficient clip than he did a year ago.
“He’s always had better ability as a playmaker than people might think, but his role was a little bit different when we had Tyler and Oso because those guys were such good passers and distributors and we needed him to think ‘score, score, score,’ ” Smart said. “We still need him to score, but he also has the ball in his hands more and we need him to create opportunities for other guys.”
Smart was one of just two high-major coaches not to use the transfer portal at all this spring, and the only one to do it in consecutive years. He has consistently bet big on internal growth over one-year ringers to plug holes. Doing it this spring, with two NBA players headed out the door, was a risk, but early returns should vindicate Smart zigging while the rest of the sport zags.
It certainly helps when you’re bringing back a player of Jones’s caliber, who was seemingly hiding in plain sight in preseason All-American conversations. It’s early yet, but there aren’t five players in men’s college basketball playing better right now than Jones. For as long as he’s leading the charge, Marquette will have a puncher’s chance against just about anyone in the country.
“He’s special,” Smart said. “The guy’s a savant.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Kam Jones Steps Into Spotlight With Marquette’s First Triple Double Since Dwyane Wade.
