Late Sunday night, Marquette legend and current Indiana Pacers’ guard Kam Jones took to Twitter to call out a Marquette Wire Student reporter for a Tweet he sent during MU’s game at Connecticut.
On the one hand, I absolutely love to have alumni so connected to the team and wanting to stand up for a past teammate. These are millionaires with lives and jobs that couldn’t take them further from their college, and yet you have an NBA draft pick vocally protecting one of his own. It’s incredibly rare and speaks so highly both of Kam and the culture under Shaka Smart.
And yet this Tweet is outrageously wrong. Jack is a reporter and what he did was post facts in as mild a way as you can. No opinion. No hyperbole. Not even a negative connotation. The ill intent is entirely from the reader (in this case Kam) interpreting it as an attack because the stats were bad. There are probably 300 more malicious Tweets that could serve as fodder for Kam’s message, but this one actually does the opposite, in my opinion, making Kam out to be both out of touch and incredibly sensitive.
But this has nothing to do with a Tweet or Jack or Kam or a game. The Caedin Conundrum has been present since before the season began. How is a player that fails every eye test and grades out terribly on metrics, advanced and simple alike, given such a large role?
Expectation Setting
To get to the root of the issue we have to go back to the much happier time of October, when the questions were plentiful but the answers potentially positive.
Reporter Jon Rothstein will spend all summer and fall before the season starts talking to coaches on background, attending practices, and generally taking in lots of information to be able to share with his readers and followers.
I had this Tweet shared with me in a few chats and from multiple people. It was truly eye raising. It wasn’t just saying that he’d be a rotation piece, it was telling us he transformed and was starter quality on a potential NCAA team. That was a huge departure from what most expected.
To quantify those expectations, here is what 10 different Marquette followers projected for minutes, with the average coming out to 12 minutes a game for Caedin Hamilton in our projection. Doesn’t scream starter in the least.
And it just so happens that I had asked coach Nevada Smith specifically about Caedin, so I didn’t need secret moles, I had a source as close to the program as it gets on the record.
“Q: From a personnel perspective, I always like to ask you, because now you’ve seen it first-hand, but who’s the player that has surprised you the most this summer? Not maybe not the best, but just from the expectation that you might have had of him in April to what he is now in late October.
A: I mean, Caedin’s been terrific. I think that’s been pretty well documented too with all the awards and the dominoes. His growth has been fun to watch. His maturity level, his overall game, is at a level that can really help us win and complement the other guys on the floor.So I’m excited to see him out there against some other people in an environment where, he probably didn’t have the year he wanted to have last year. So I’m excited for him to be able to to show his growth on the floor and see what he can do. And it’s gonna be exciting to watch.”
He wasn’t promising Caedin would be all conference or something like that, but coming from a coach that I have the utmost respect for and had similar glowing comments about players he’d seen in the offseason pan out (like Justin Lewis), I definitely sat up a bit.
But we’d actually seen the Caedin hype before, from similar sourced moles, so I didn’t buy in completely.
And then the starting lineup came out before the Albany game with Caedin featured prominently. This wasn’t theoretical any more, it was time to see that growth in action.
It’s been 2 months and we are still waiting, but as an unfortunate circumstance, a good part of the ire at this season’s historic failure has been directed at Caedin personally. And while he has been very bad, he remains a constant in the starting lineup joining only Chase Ross in players who have started every game.
So while I will get into some of the stats in a minute, I want to try and emphasize that a lot of the hate going towards Caedin isn’t even basketball related. Shaka and the staff have done a very poor job of protecting him. They set unreasonable expectations early on and have unintentionally made him the face of the season by continuing to start him as the losses mount.
And because I know the media questions and social remarks are getting to Shaka, he’s coming up with demonstrably incoherent responses. I have searched every database I have ever come across and have yet to validate this remark that Caedin is Marquette’s best defensive player. I’d love to see those numbers.
But again, this isn’t even about stats or starts. I keep coming back to the Mugatu meme from Zoolander.
I know what I see and so does every opposing fan and coach.
Eye Test
I like to stay far, far away from what my eyes tell me, because I’m a terrible basketball player and rely on numbers to fill in a lot of gaps. But for Caedin, I think the eye test is crucial. It isn’t just that he’s missing a lot of shots, he has missed more point blank layups than I’ve ever seen a player miss in their career. I’m not saying contested or at the rim, I’m saying a near guaranteed 2 points. It got so bad I had to put together a 55 second mix of the worst ones from this season.
This may feel mean or gratuitous, but I think it’s incredibly important. You don’t have to browse nerdy stat sites to come up with an argument of why this player doesn’t have the quality to start at this level. All you have to do is watch.
Metrics Test
But then you get a chance to dive into the nerdy stat sites and the eye test is validated.
Using Evan Miya’s BPR metric, Caedin ranks 114th out of 116 Big East players that have played at least 100 possessions.
Using RAPM on Hoop Explorer, Caedin ranks 81st out of 90 eligible Big East players with a -0.6 RAPM score.
Using CBBAnalytic’s Win Shares, PER and WARP, Caedin falls below the 30th percentile and in the bottom 3 for MU players for all 3.
We don’t have to keep going but just know they all have a similar flavor, even while measuring slightly different things. The story they tell is of a player who is still low on the development curve.
What’s The Conundrum?
At this point you’ve probably reached the point of questioning the title of the article. Based on eye tests and in game metrics, Caedin doesn’t deserve the minutes he’s getting, and should be much lower on the rotation, right?
This is where I give a ton of leeway to the coaching staff. We see these players for 80 minutes a week, they see them for 4 to 5 hours a day. I can point at numbers all day, but samples are tiny even now and a few good games can make them look much different. Shaka and staff believe in the process. They believe Caedin has the tools and potential to be a Big East caliber player, he just hasn’t shown it in games yet.
I read this quote on Sunday and audibly chuckled.
It doesn’t mention Caedin at all, but as Clark is his direct competition, and Shaka has called out Caedin’s great practices and mentality, it isn’t a stretch to connect the dots.
And while I too have joined the chorus to see Clark in an extended stretch to see what a larger sample of data might give us, a funny thing happened. I filtered Marquette’s most used lineups in conference play and stumbled upon what the staff might be seeing. The lineup with the best raw +/- is currently Nigel, Stevens, Chase, Royce and Caedin.
Of course 31 possessions is a minuscule sample, but the reason Shaka is starting them in multiple games is to see how much of that is real, the same thing I’m asking for of Clark.
So now what?
What are we to do with all that data? No. 1 is be a decent human being.
I know these are players making 6 and 7 digits now. I know fans are paying more than ever in tickets, merch and NIL that directly goes to those players driving fancy cars and flashing expensive jewelry on Instagram. It is incredibly frustrating to juxtapose those 2 thing with one of the worst teams in modern Marquette history. But that isn’t an excuse for being jerks to Caedin or anyone else.
I’m not sure what prompted Sherrie (Sean Jones’ mom) to Tweet this, but it still is a message that should never need to be said, and it’s embarrassing that some push back against it.
I know this isn’t an MU thing at all and social media has allowed people’s indecency to become a prominent personality trait, but treating others as we’d like to be treated is still a core principle.
And yet, that also means parents, players and former players should listen to Shaka and block social media. As good as compliments feel and as much fun as it is to revel in big wins together, I do imagine a season like this takes a toll on everyone.
Which brings us back to the Kam Tweet. What I am specifically NOT saying is we shouldn’t criticize the players or program. Far from it.
I had some pushback last week for posting negative stats and while I understand the desire to go full ostrich and bury our heads in the sand to avoid it, I prefer to lean into it. Twitter is enjoyable for me because I can learn and celebrate (or commiserate) with a large group of people I may never have otherwise met. It has felt like gallows humor for a month or two, but it still beats suffering in silence. If you are overdrafted emotionally and prefer not to keep withdrawing then I understand not wanting to engage, but as long as it’s respectful and not directed at peeps, using that forum as an outlet seems ideal.
What about Caedin?
Oh yeah, Caedin. I will continue to root that he one day shoves my face in it for not having believed. But I still don’t believe a starter’s role suits him best, either mentally or on the court.
The staff hasn’t been able to unlock what they see in him (and from him) for two years now. The season may be shot, but there is still enough time to see some semblance of growth. Putting him in a lower stakes environment and relying on him less makes the most sense, in my opinion.
But this is where we’ll once more round out with a criticism of the team building approach for the season. We all thought we’d see Ben as the primary 5 for 28+ minutes, with Caedin, Clark and Royce filling in the other 12. The staff saw it differently, and has wanted to use Ben and Royce primarily at the 4, which left 30+ minutes each night for two projects in Clark and Caedin to fill in. It has gone worse than my worst nightmare.
If Ben/Royce weren’t suited at the 5 (which I do agree that they aren’t), rolling the dice on 2 projects there seems like a sub-opitmal process.
While trusting in growth and development worked wonders for Kolek and Kam and OMax, giving them an opportunity to flourish that may have been blocked by a transfer in, it has been an anchor for others. Caedin being a below replacement value player is problematic for his 3rd year in the program, but relying on contributions with no safety net is the root of the issue.
Quite the conundrum.
Make a one-time donation
Choose an amount
Or enter a custom amount
Your contribution is appreciated.
Donate
Paint Touches 
Excellent article and analysis.
Great work.
>