Markus Howard is ready to be a March Madness hero

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Marquette’s star point guard has topped 40 points three times this year.

There is not a major conference team in the NCAA Tournament whose potential success hinges more on one player than Marquette. That’s what happens when you have the leading scorer in the tournament on your team.

Markus Howard is the guy. If he is locked in, the Golden Eagles can beat up on weaker opponents and shock a higher seed. If not, then the team is left with a couple of solid players named Hauser and not much else.

Fortunately for Marquette, Howard can go off like no other player in the field. The 5’11 junior spent the 2018-19 season smashing school and Big East scoring records. His 53 points against Creighton were the best for a single player in conference history and his 774 points for the season were the most ever by a Golden Eagle. The result was Marquette’s second NCAA Tournament appearance in the last six seasons and their highest seed since 2013.

Yet by talking to Howard, it seems like he’s unaware of his own heroics, often passing off credit to his teammates. It could even get a little annoying sometimes, hearing him talk up guys who played much more minor roles in a win while you’re trying to find out what makes one of the best scorers in the country tick.

Speaking in the locker room after Marquette’s Big East quarterfinal win over St. John’s last week at Madison Square Garden, he reflected on his 30-point performance by talking about how he got other players involved.

“When I get in a rhythm I want to be sure that I’m not handling the ball all of the time. I want to make sure my teammates are feeling like they need to attack as well,” he said. “My teammate did a really good job of being able to knock down shots and make plays tonight.”

Howard tried to continue his thought, but freshman Joey Hauser overheard and interrupted.

“No,” Hauser said. “When he’s in a rhythm, we tell him to shoot.”

Marquette received a No. 5 seed and will face Murray State in the First Round on Thursday. There, Howard will have a chance to go up against another bonafide bucket-getter in Ja Morant.

Howard was named all-Big East First Team in the preseason and scored 52 in a game last year against Providence, so he wasn’t exactly a hidden talent coming into the year. But he wasn’t the preseason player of the year and only received six votes to the AP All-American team.

The first sign of his rise came in Marquette’s second game, when he went 7-10 from three, shot 10-11 from the line, and scored 37 points in just 28 minutes against Bethune-Cookman. That was against a MEAC school that finished with a losing record and was ranked 306th in KenPom. A few weeks later, he dropped 45 on a Kansas State team that went on to win the Big 12.

His greatest moment was 20 days after that Kansas State game, when he had his second 45-point performance of the season. Against then-undefeated Buffalo, Howard took a four-point game at the break and made it a laugher by hitting nine total threes and scoring 40 points in the second half. At one point, he scored 24 straight for Marquette. That game gave Howard the top three individual single-game scoring performances in program history. It also tied his mark for the second-most threes in a game.

“He can take a game over whenever,” his backcourt mate Sacar Amin said. “When he’s doing that, we let him do his thing. We’re there for offensive rebounds.”

Once Howard gets going, he’s nearly impossible to stop. He knows it and takes pride in it.

The team knows that its best offense is to just get Howard the ball and let him score. They work on it and know that often it is their best chance to win.

That’s when practice or the opposing scouting report takes a backseat to Howard’s instincts.

“When you’re feeling like that, you definitely go off of your instincts,” he said. “So whatever the game presents itself, you want to keep on doing that.”

But Howard is not just a scorer. He averaged four assists per game this year and ranked fifth in the Big East in assist rate, meaning that when he was in the game, more than a quarter of Marquette’s field goals came off one of his passes.

“Markus is Big East Player of the Year for a reason, and it’s not just because he can score,” Wojciechowski said. “You’re talking about a complete player who every team’s game plan is geared to stop him. What he’s been able to do this year is fantastic. It’s hard when you command that much attention from a defense to make a great decision every time.”

One such example was in the second half of the St. John’s game. With Marquette already up 18, Howard had the ball at the top of the key. After a night of aggressive drives and crossovers that turned to step-back jumpers, Howard instead got his defender in the air then threw the ball behind his man’s back to thread a narrow passing lane to teammate Ed Morrow for an easy layup.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

In an ideal scenario, the Golden Eagles would enter the tournament knowing that they are one Howard hot streak away from being able to make a deep run.

Yet there is some concern. In their Big East semifinal loss to Seton Hall, Howard left the game late in the first half with a wrist injury. Though he did return and Wojciechowski later insisted he was fine, Marquette’s star was clearly off. He was a 90 percent free throw shooter in the regular season but missed five in the second half. Howard was not made available to the media after the game.

“He’s well enough to play,” Wojciechowski said. “We’re going to just have to get him through with all the bumps and bruises he’s endured, especially over the last few weeks.”

Howard will have almost a week for the wrist to heal, and it’ll need to. Murray State knocked off an at-large Belmont team in the Ohio Valley title game behind 36 points from Morant, who projects as a top-five pick in the NBA Draft. It’ll be on Howard to do just a little bit more on Thursday.

One thing we know: his teammate will clear the way for him.