2026-27 Marquette Men’s Basketball Player Preview: #9 Damarius Owens
· Yahoo Sports
The 2026-27 college basketball season is right around the corner, so let’s dive into the Marquette men’s basketball roster and take a look at what to expect from each player this season. Going forward in these Player Previews, we’ll be going in this order: The two freshmen going in alphabetical order by last name then doing the same for the three transfers, then moving on to the redshirt freshmen. After that, it’s the seven players returning from last year’s roster going in order of average minutes played per game last season.
We’re going to organize our thoughts about the upcoming season as it relates to each player into categories, as we always do:
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- Reasonable Expectations
- Why You Should Get Excited
- Potential Pitfalls
With that out of the way, we move along to a guy who appears to have moved all the way forward into the starting lineup during the offseason….
Damarius Owens
Junior — #9 — Forward — 6’7” — 205 lbs. — Rochester, New York
We left the end of the 2025-26 season on a positive note for the direction of Damarius Owens’ Marquette career. Over the final 21 games of the season, which included his first career start, Owens averaged 5.7 points and 3.1 rebounds in nearly 19 minutes a game. He made Marquette’s defense better while he was on the floor, but unfortunately, probably because he was shooting 26% on threes against Big East opponents, the offense was slightly worse when he was out there as opposed to when he was on the bench. Ultimately, both the offense and defense got better/worse at pretty much the same rate when Owens left the floor, so it’s hard to say that he was a drain on the offense when his benefit on defense matched things pretty evenly there.
The point of the story is that Owens was a useful player for those final 21 games of the year. That’s a great development for him and for Marquette, because it was hard to say that was the case for the first 39 games of his career. Part of that may have just been ongoing injury issues during his freshman season and a general roster bottleneck to start his sophomore year, but once Zaide Lowery left town and opened up space for Owens, he was doing alright for himself. Perhaps even better than that, he was doing alright for himself while Marquette was looking better and better as the season went along.
Moving on to the start of his junior year, we’re approaching it with a positive mindset for him, and maybe he has adopted that idea as well, springboarding forward from how last year wrapped up. After all, Owens went from coming off the bench for the first two games on the Canada trip (he started in place of a sick Adrien Stevens in the third) to starting the exhibition game against Green Bay. Whatever head coach Shaka Smart has been seeing from Owens since the start of August and as preseason practice has been going on has convinced the coaching staff that Owens is the guy that needs to be starting, not Nolan Minessale.
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Reasonable Expectations
If the staff thinks Owens should be starting and more importantly, if they’ve made that change over the past 11 weeks, then we have to set expectations for Owens along similar lines. It seems clear that the coaching staff has a bigger role in mind for Owens than the one that the BartTorvik.com algorithm is spitting out: 5 points, 3.1 rebounds, less than an assist per game in under 15 minutes a night. In fairness to the computers, that’s about what Owens was averaging for all of last season. It’s also a step back from what he was doing off the bench in Big East play last year, which is another reason why we should probably be expecting more from Owens, even while we’re being reasonable about this.
We’re not expecting a lot from him, either. After all, we can safely guess that Nigel James is going to lead this team in scoring, and Royce Parham is probably going to be second. Sananda Fru is going to be in charge of doing a lot of the rebounding on this roster, and Shaka Smart has said that he actually wants to see Fru push the issue on his scoring a bit more as well.
That makes Owens more of a glue guy in terms of what kinds of stats he’s putting on the board. If he’s going to be starting, then we should probably expect over 20 minutes a game from him. If we’re bumping up his minutes just slightly, then a mild expansion and growth of his game to, let’s call it 7 points and 4 rebounds per game? Of course, we’re going to need to see him be an impact player on the defensive end of the floor as well, but it would appear that Shaka Smart has challenged Owens to be a cornerstone of MU’s defensive efforts this year. It seems like that’s going well, as Loyal Reader (and MU season ticket holder) Fluffy Bunny reports that Owens is declaring himself to be The Fun Stopper.
Why You Should Get Excited
I left one thing out of the expectations for Owens there because I don’t want to end up knocking him in May if he doesn’t quite hit the baseline I’m putting out there.
We’re gonna need to see him hit some three-pointers.
Owens was great inside the arc over the final 21 games of the season last year, getting 57% of his shots to fall, which was good enough to rank 12th in the entire Big East during league play. That’s better than Marquette’s team average for the whole season and for conference play as well. Fantastic news, love to see it, etc.
But he only cashed out 27.1% of his three-point attempts for the whole season, and that was down to just 26.1% in MU’s 20 Big East games. If we want to give him a little bit of credit, Owens was shooting 30.7% from distance going into the final three games of Big East play, and then he missed his final seven attempts. Under 31% is still not good anyway, so we’re still gonna need him to do better than that.
I’m filing all of this under Why You Should Get Excited because imagine what Owens shooting 34% like he did as a freshman is going to unlock for Marquette’s offense. The Golden Eagles only shot 31.8% from behind the arc last season, and that only went up to 32.7% during Big East play. That’s not good enough for a team percentage, and Owens’ 26% was not helping that situation. As a team, Marquette needs to be better about this in 2026-27, and if Owens is going to play 20+ minute a night, a lot of being better about that will merely be accomplished by him going from 26% to anything north of 33%. That’s a pretty big jump up for one guy, sure, but if you’re going to be a core component of what’s going on, you have to pull your weight.
If Owens doesn’t get there, if he turns into a guy that defenses know they can leave alone, that’s going to make a lot of things a lot harder for MU’s offense. If Owens gets there, and Nigel James keeps shooting towards 35%, and Royce Parham is above 33% again, and Adrien Stevens is approaching 38%…. then you see the vision here, right?
Potential Pitfalls
I keep thinking about 21 good games and 39 maybe not so hot games. We’ve really only seen Damarius Owens look like a useful rotation player for Marquette for about two and a half months of a season. We’ve seen a variety of injuries sap playing time from him. We’ve seen Shaka Smart say that Owens had to make some crucial off the court decisions about “who he was going to align himself with.” We’ve seen Owens get buried on the bench behind Zaide Lowery who, as it turns out, was not particularly invested in the success of this program at this time last year. We’ve seen Owens miss the open scrimmage at the start of October with a back issue. We’ve seen Owens score just two points — including missing his only three-point attempt — and gather just one rebound in 18 minutes against Green Bay, and it’s important to remember that Owens was on the floor the whole time while Marquette trailed 10-9 in the first four-ish minutes… and then the lead went from 6 to as high as 15 and then back down to 8 when he subbed back in and out later in the first half.
All of this paints a picture that’s not the ideal scenario for an entire season’s worth of action for Owens, much less for Marquette. We can not be sure we’re going to see from Damarius Owens for an entire season right now because we’ve yet to see him do anything consistently for an entire season for Marquette so far. There’s a chance that this might not shake out the way that Shaka Smart and the coaching staff wants it to go. A point in their favor on the issue is that they’ve got a number of options to turn to if Owens doesn’t pan out, starting with Nolan Minessale, who was their gut instinct option for the starting lineup at the position in question. All of those options is a looming problem for Owens if it’s not going his way, because there’s more than a few guys who will happily take advantage of his shortcomings and play their way into the rotation.
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