2025-26 Marquette Men’s Basketball Player Review: #8 Josh Clark

This is from the Little Rock game. Josh Clark played 14 minutes in this game. | Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images

With the 2025-26 season long since in the books, let’s take a few moments to look back at the performance of each member of YOUR Marquette Golden Eagles this year. While we’re at it, we’ll also take a look back at our player previews and see how our preseason prognostications stack up with how things actually played out. We’ll run through the roster in order of total minutes played going from lowest to highest, and today we’ll start off our run of reviews with the tallest guy on the roster this past season…….

Josh Clark

Redshirt Freshman — #8 — Forward — 7’1” — 225 lbs. — Virginia Beach, Virginia

WHAT WE SAID:

Reasonable Expectations

Six minutes a game, 1.5 points, 1.2 rebounds.

Yes, that is hyper-specific, thank you for asking. Why? Because those numbers are exactly what Caedin Hamilton did last year for Marquette. There’s not much different between Hamilton and Clark, with both men as “project big men coming off a redshirt season to help them get ready to contribute.” Sure, Clark has four inches on Hamilton, which does naturally help him out in terms of immediate impact, but expecting more than the last guy who was a project big for Shaka Smart probably isn’t the best idea we’ve ever had, y’know?

To continue the point: The BartTorvik.com algorithm doesn’t have Clark listed as one of the top 10 contributors on this year’s team. We’ll get into why I don’t 100% buy that in a second, but we’re talking about reasonable expectations here. After what we saw from Hamilton last year — and Keeyan Itejere back in 2022-23, if we’re being honest — I don’t think that we can expect a whole bunch from Clark this year. The year in Milwaukee is going to be beneficial for him, but probably not “starting big man” beneficial.

Why You Should Get Excited

Someone has to start at center for Marquette.

I landed on “He was fine at worst” relative to Ben Gold’s adventures as Marquette’s starting center last season. That doesn’t stop me from thinking that he may be deployed best as the primary/starting 4-man in the starting lineup and occasionally landing as the big man on the floor depending on fouls and lineup rotations.

If that’s the case, then Marquette’s attention for a starting center turns to either Caedin Hamilton or Joshua Clark. This is the part where I don’t agree with BartTorvik.com leaving both of them out of the top 10 contributors. If Shaka Smart and his staff move Gold over to the 4 and tell Hamilton and Clark that “hey, you guys gotta figure out how to cover at least 30 of these minutes, have at it,” then at least one of them is pretty much automatically a top 10 contributor.

And why not Clark? He’s the taller one which helps on both offense and defense, he’s the one that lit up the McGuire Center with quickie dunks in last year’s open practice. I’m not talking about a massive overshooting of expectations here. Starting, playing 15 minutes, averaging five points and four rebounds, being a net positive defender? If Marquette can get that from Clark, I think that changes the trajectory of the season and bodes well for his development over the next several seasons, too.

5.5 minutes per game, 1.3 points per game, 1.9 rebounds per game.

I don’t want to start off our Player Review series here with a NAILED IT~!, but I think it’s safe to say that if you were truly, madly, deeply believing in your heart of hearts that you were going to see more from Josh Clark than what we did see from Josh Clark in 2025-26, then you were just setting yourself up for disappointment back in October. Josh Clark was a redshirt freshman project big man, and he played like one. Sparing minutes, little to no impact when he did play. Heck, at one point this season, he actually got head coach Shaka Smart to say “Josh is better in the games than in practice,” indicating that it’s hard for the coaching staff to figure out how to work Clark into the lineup on the floor because his performance in practice didn’t justify getting him more minutes than what we saw from him.

And that means it’s time to swing around to exactly how many minutes we’re talking about. Glance back up at that Pitfalls section for a second and come on back here. Okay, all set? Josh Clark played just 126 minutes this season, and just 63 after the start of Big East play…. and that’s if I give him credit for a full minute played for his one-ish second played as Royce Parham was intentionally missing a free throw right at the end of the Big East tournament first round game.

I’ll go even one further: If you count the overtime home win against Providence as the point where Marquette swung their season out of a tailspin — they went 6-7 from that win onwards — then we have to note that Josh Clark played just 19 of his 126 minutes as Shaka Smart and the Golden Eagles figured out how to be not crazy terrible down the stretch. That’s 19 of 63 minutes in 21 Big East games, and yes, that counts the one second against Xavier as a full minute. It’s not an overwhelming sign of confidence in the 7-footer’s ability contribute, that’s for sure.

Whatever else you want to say about Caedin Hamilton’s redshirt freshman season, Josh Clark didn’t even measure up to that standard. He did in terms of stats, but not really even close in terms of actual minutes on the floor. It is what it is, and that reinforces the point of “if you were expecting something much, much more impactful than that, you were just telling yourself lies all along.”

I feel like I’m being dismissive here. Should we throw in one nice thing? Okay, how about this: In limited minutes, Josh Clark actually had some really interesting rebounding rates according to KenPom.com. If he had played 40% of Marquette’s minutes instead of 9.8%, his offensive rebounding rate would have ranked #92 in the country. His defensive rebounding rate would have been #20 in the country. This is all very good, and so ask yourself this: What was it about Josh Clark’s game that kept him on the bench while Shaka Smart was coaching a team that was very bad at rebounding?

BEST GAME

I mean, it has to be the one that made Shaka Smart say he’s better in games than practice, right? Six points on 3-for-3 shooting, six rebounds, and two steals in 13 minutes against #4 Connecticut is pretty good stuff. Now, he didn’t contribute any of that until Marquette was down 12 with less than four minutes to go in the first half in what eventually turned into a 73-57 loss, but a lot of it did help MU go into the locker room only down eight. That’s something, right?

SEASON GRADE

On one hand, he hit the Reasonable Expectation for his per game averages.

On the other hand, if you take out the UConn game and the three points and four rebounds he had in the absolute nadir of the season on the road against Creighton…. then Clark averaged 1.0 points and 1.6 rebounds in just 4.8 minutes per game. Quite honestly, the only thing stopping me from handing out an Incomplete here is the fact that Clark remained available all season long. Other than that, I can’t do better than a 5.

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