A while back, we looked at where various Marquette players were on a historical level. At this point in the season, I think it's safe to say that Marquette is a post season team, so that leaves us a guaranteed 7 games on the schedule: 5 regular season, 1 Big East Tournament and 1 post season game. With that in mind, and a tip of the hat to the MU Scoop Wiki, let's check back in and see where the Golden Eagles stand now.
We'll start where we started last time. Since mid-December, both Darius Johnson-Odom and Jae Crowder have tailed off a bit when it comes to scoring. DJO's dip of just 0.4 points per game has him at 1,486 points in his career, just 14 points shy of becoming the 16th player in Marquette history with 1,500 points in his career. His season average of 18.4 puts him on pace for another 128 points in the 7 guaranteed games left for a total of 1,614 which would move him into 13th place all time between Dean "The Dream" Meminger's 1,637 points and Trevor Powell's 1,571 points.
As for the Absolut Weapon, he has fallen from 17.4 points/game down to 16.2 per contest. That puts him on track to record another 113 points in the games remaining this season. Add that to his current point total of 857, and Crowder is on track to end up with 970 points. It's going to take either a few more outbursts like his 23 point showing against Cincinnati or a couple of deep tournament runs to get Crowder to become the 44th player in Marquette history with 1,000 points.
Just like last time, we'll head to the jump to talk about the single season marks that the Golden Eagles are heading towards, including one change from last time.
DJO is still on pace to enter the top 10 list for single season scoring, and given the way that the current top 10 list is composed, he's still on pace to end up in the same spot. Combining his current 460 points this season with his projected 128 points gets him to 588 points on the season, which would push him 2 points past George Thompson's 586 points in 1968-69 and into 9th place all time.
With both of his top scorers slowing their pace, it's not surprising that Junior Cadougan's assist rate has slowed as well. The junior point guard's assist average is down from 6.25 in mid-December to a still excellent 5.6 per game. That puts Cadougan on target for 178 assists on the season and the 9th best season in Marquette history. He would pass Sam Worthen's 1979-80 total of 175 assists and sit behind the 183 assists that Lloyd Walton recorded in 1975-76.
As I said, there's one change in the players that we're looking at now. The change comes in the category of steals in a season. Vander Blue started out the season white hot, but has dramatically slowed down since then. My thought is that this has less to do with Blue not getting steals and more to do with his responsibility to get rebounds with Chris Otule out. Since Vander's increased his rebounding rate from 3.8/game when we checked in last time to a robust 4.4/game now, I'd say that's a safe bet. The upside to this is that Jae Crowder has gone completely haywire on the steals front, currently averaging more steals now (2.3) than Blue did in mid-December (2.2). Maintaining his season long average over the last 7 games would move Crowder into a three-way tie for 5th place with the 76 steals that Jerel McNeal grabbed in both 2006-07 and 2007-08. If Crowder can maintain his pace in conference games (2.9), he'll end up with the 3rd best steals season in Marquette history at 80 steals this season.