Night-Night: Marquette 78, Providence 56

There were a lot of factors to give all of us Marquette fans a bit of nerves going into Wednesday night’s game at Providence. There’s the fact that Marquette had no business beating Providence in Milwaukee earlier this season before succeeding in overtime, there’s the fact that Marquette looked absolutely horrible on Sunday against DePaul, and then there’s the fact that this is Marquette/Providence, where something out of sorts is bound to happen when these two teams collide.

And then Marquette started off the game 8-0

and 14-5

and a 14-1 run had the Golden Eagles up 28-10.

Wait, is Marquette beating the hell out of Providence here?

Reality asserted itself for a moment, and the Friars threw a 9-2 burst at Marquette. With 3:45 to go before intermission, Providence had cut the margin down to just 11 points. Maybe there’s a game developing here?

Nope, 7-2 Marquette pushed it back towards the Golden Eagles late in the frame before a bucket from Oswin Erhunmwunse made it 37-23 MU at the break. Was that a dominant Marquette performance for 20 minutes? No, not really, not at just 55% effective field goal percentage in the first half, not with just 1.09 points per possession scored. Now on the defensive end? MU was doing a lot of things right over there, like holding the Friars without a field goal for just one second short of 10 straight minutes. Providence also committed 13 turnovers in the first half, which works out to 38% of their possessions. A lot of those weren’t even Marquette being particularly great on defense, more just Providence going “OOOOOOPS, WHERE DID THE BALL GO?”

There wasn’t a big push from Marquette to decimate the Friars in the second half, just merely refusing to let them score consecutive baskets and then scoring two in a row of their own. Adrien Stevens opened up the second half scoring with a three-pointer to get the lead to 17, then it was 19, 20, 23, and a 6-0 burst across nearly three minutes of game time had MU up 27 and coasting with 10:30 to play.

Here’s how over this was: Providence went on a 18-7 run capped by 10 in a row…. and that dropped the margin to only 16 with 4:31 to play.

This goes in the books as Marquette’s third best defensive performance of the season in terms of points per possession allowed, and it’s their best 1) against a high major opponent and 2) best since allowing 0.73 points per trip to Little Rock on November 12th. This gets an extra level of degree of difficulty for the Golden Eagles, as Providence came into the game at #25 in offensive efficiency according to KenPom.com and #2 in the Big East in league contests. And yes: This was Providence’s worst offensive night of the entire season.

Marquette’s freshmen carried the day here, as Adrien Stevens had a career high 21 points along with four rebounds and four steals. Could have had 23, but one of his three turnovers on the night came on a freak chance bounce on a breakaway that hit his calf and went out of bounds. Nigel James had 20 and added seven rebounds, two assists, and two steals. They were Marquette’s only two double digit scorers in the contest, although Royce Parham and Tre Norman got to nine each. Yes, Tre Norman had nine. He played 16 minutes here because Stevens and Parham were the only starters to break 30 minutes at 31 and 30 each.

Highlights, courtesy of GoMarquette.com and NBC Sports/Peacock:

Up Next: One last regular season game to go. On Saturday, Marquette will wrap up the regular season with one more home game, and they will play host to #4 UConn. Tipoff at Fiserv Forum is set for 11:30am Central time, and Fox will have the broadcast. Yes, big fancy broadcast Fox. The Huskies will have had a week’s worth of rest coming in as their last game was a 71-67 home win over Seton Hall last Saturday. They will be playing for a share of the Big East regular season title as they are tied with St. John’s at 17-2 with one game left for both squads.

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