2025-26 Marquette Men’s Basketball Player Review: #13 Royce Parham

· Yahoo Sports

Once Royce Parham got going, he REALLY got going this season. | Credit: Kamil Krzaczynski-Imagn 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 talk about exactly how a sophomore breakout broke down…..

Royce Parham

Sophomore — #13 — Forward — 6’8” — 235 lbs. — Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

GamesMinFGMFGAFG%3PTM3PA3P%FTMFTAFT%ORebDRebRebAstStl BlkFoulsPts3128.84.68.852.2%1.13.333.3%2.23.365.0%1.93.04.90.90.70.82.012.5ORtg%Poss%ShotseFG%TS%OR%DR%ARateTORateBlk%Stl%FC/40FD/40FTRate114.019.4%20.2%58.4%***59.9%**7.0%12.0%6.4%13.8%3.1%*1.4%2.73.737.6%*

* — Notes a top 500 national ranking per KenPom.com
** — Notes a top 300 national ranking per KenPom.com
*** — Notes a top 200 national ranking per KenPom.com

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WHAT WE SAID:

Reasonable Expectations

The obvious question for 2025-26 when it comes to what to reasonably expect from Royce Parham is “how much growth and development is still in there?” I think everyone would like that answer to be “a lot,” and we can start with the BartTorvik.com algorithm in terms of thinking that might happen. Can I interest you in 11.1 points, 4.6 rebounds, and 1.2 assists in nearly 28 minutes a game?

Before you get over the top with “woah, that’s a big jump from 5.1/2.2/0.4,” remember that we’re talking about nearly doubling his minutes, too. If you project that out to per-40 minute expectations, that’s going from 13.8 points last year to 16.1 points. 6.0 rebounds last year to 6.7. 1.0 assists to 1.7. It’s not that much more than he was doing, just being a little bit better — the best thing about freshmen is that they become sophomores, right? — and getting a lot more minutes. If Parham has had the kind of offseason development in the weight room and in the gym that goes along with that kind of on-court/in-season development, then I think that’s not really that big of a jump for him.

Why You Should Get Excited

Perhaps the bigger question about Royce Parham isn’t so much how much has he developed himself as a player since March, but more about exactly what his role on this team is. Last year, he was a backup big, spelling Ben Gold at center an awful lot.

What if his role this season is David Joplin’s replacement in the starting lineup? What if Parham gets to play a little more inside/outside, what if he can turn into something of a matchup nightmare: Capable of moving on the perimeter to bother the hell out of you on offense, but ready to body your big man in the paint if need be? Creating second chances in the paint with that nearly 10% offensive rebounding rate that we saw in Big East play last year, but using his size and wingspan to cut off attacking and passing lanes from the three-point line?

Expecting him to be what Joplin was last season would be wrongheaded. But do you know what David Joplin did in his first season as a starter for Marquette? 10.8 points, 3.9 rebounds, 0.6 assists in just under 28 minutes a night. Uh, isn’t that what the algorithm projected for Parham, pretty much?

And, uh, the thing to remember? Jop did that on a team playing with three NBA draft picks. That’s what he did as a #4 option. I’m pretty sure this team needs Royce Parham to contribute, not just be useful in the background. What if, because the opportunity is there, Parham steps up and becomes a big ol’ star for the Golden Eagles? Someone has to be the leading scorer, right? Why not Royce?

Potential Pitfalls

“Royce Parham grabs a spot in the starting lineup” seems like a pretty likely outcome for where this season is going. However, when outlining the positive possibilities for guys like Caedin Hamilton and Joshua Clark to get on the floor, my mind turned to “what if those guys can take most of the minutes at center, freeing up Ben Gold to play a perhaps more natural position for him at the 4?”

If that potential possibilities comes through, then Parham’s not a starter on this team. I don’t think he can slide up to the 3 and play a lot on the wing, even though Marquette going 6’8”/6’11”/7’1” with Parham/Gold/Clark at times would be an imposing look. Give you 10 seconds of a possession to cause havoc on the wing? Yes. Chase around a third guard in an opposing lineup for 25 minutes a night? Feels unlikely, right?

So, if Hamilton and Clark give you 30 combined minutes at the 5, and Ben Gold gives you 25-30 between starting at the 4 and covering some of the remaining 10 minutes at the 5…. where does Royce Parham fit into this rotation? Maybe it’s a situation where head coach Shaka Smart and his staff elect to cover the 80 combined minutes from those two positions with these four guys somehow, and that’s how Parham fits? If that’s what it is, I don’t know if he’s going to get to 11/5/1 in 28 minutes, and then how we view his season comes down to exactly how successful the team mixture was in the win/loss columns.

For about the first 11 games of the 2025-26 season, things were veering pretty heavily over into the Potential Pitfalls situation I described back in the fall. It wasn’t that bad in terms of minutes, as through all of non-conference play, Royce Parham was averaging just short of 22 minutes a night, all off the bench. As it turns out, the plan was very much not to get Josh Clark to absorb a lot of minutes last season, so that left more than enough time for Parham to get on the court in that mixture along with Caedin Hamilton and Ben Gold.

The problem was that it wasn’t a particularly productive time for Parham. Okay, maybe that’s a little unfair, because 9.1 points and 4.8 rebounds in barely over half the game is still pretty good. It’s 16.6 points and 8.8 rebounds per 40 minutes of action, and that’s clearly way better than he was doing freshman year. However, Parham was going about the scoring end of things in the worst manner possible. 40 of his 89 shot attempts in the first 11 games — 45% of them! — came from behind the three-point line, and he only hit 25% of the shots. That’s real bad, y’all. I’m not going to pin all of Marquette’s offensive woes on Parham’s shot selection here, but a guy coming off your bench shooting such a healthy dose of his shots with such unhealthy results, it’s dragging things down no matter what else is going on.

And then, in Game #12, we got Royce Parham’s first career start. It came at the expense of Ben Gold, which was definitely not the change that anyone outside of the locker room was asking for at that juncture of the season, but it did seem to unlock Parham’s play. He opened up Big East play with a 12 point, 4 rebound performance against Georgetown, including going 2-for-3 from behind the arc, and then it was off to the races for Parham from there.

Across the rest of the season — 19 Big East games because he missed the trip to Georgetown with late developing back spasms and MU’s one conference tournament game — Parham averaged 14.4 points and 5.0 rebounds in nearly 33 minutes a night, and he was just over an assist and just under a block per game as well. More importantly, it would seem that he got a massive confidence boost from the starting assignment. Parham shot 38.7% from three-point land the rest of the way and a very scary 66.7% on two-pointers as well. For Big East regular season games, Parham finished the season with the third best two-point shooting percentage and effective field goal percentage. Even with a not-so-hot 65% on free throws, Parham was still #2 in the entire Big East in true shooting percentage. Perhaps most importantly to the entire thing: Parham was taking about twice as many twos as threes in his last 20 games of the year. 62 triples, 123 attempts inside the arc. That’s a much more profitable situation for both Parham and the Golden Eagles.

Nowhere was the evolution of Royce Parham as a Golden Eagle more evident than the home game against #4 Connecticut. As the game moved along to the second half, it was starting to become clear that the Golden Eagles were going to be able to hang with the Huskies. As the game hit 15 minutes to go, UConn pushed their advantage to 45-41. Cue Royce Parham’s Music.

A simple flip back from Chase Ross for an open three, MU down one. After an offensive foul against Alex Karaban, UConn’s defense collapses on Nigel James as he moves into the middle, Parham rotates to where no one can recover to him, cash money, Marquette up two. Parham pulls in a rebound off a Braylon Mullins miss, and then off a James drive, once again the defense follows, so he kicks to Parham. Eric Reibe sees it, and Parham recognizes that 1) he shouldn’t shoot over the 7-footer and 2) the 7-footer will not stop in time to contain a drive. So that’s what he does AND he recognizes that Silas Demary is building a lean-to in the lane with all the time he has to get stationary, so Parham feathers in a floater over the top.

8-0 run, all by the big man from Pittsburgh on his way to 13 in the game, plus one of his five rebounds of the day, Marquette’s up four. It’s the beginning of a 14-2 run as MU builds a lead that they will never relinquish.

First 11 games Royce Parham doesn’t hit those threes. First 11 games Royce Parham probably tries to fire off that three-pointer with Reibe closing on him. I don’t know if I can accurately or adequately project whether or not First 11 games Royce would have gone hard to the rack at Demary or not, but the entire sequence of choices is that of a confident and high basketball IQ player, and I really can’t say for certain that we saw that kind of combination from Parham back before conference play started.

This all raises an incredibly important point about Parham’s season. How much of the shift in his performance — both the improvements and shot selection — are purely because he was in the starting lineup and how much is because of tactical change by the coaching staff? Did they start asking him to do something or some things differently since he was playing nearly 33 minutes a night? Since the “Marquette doesn’t look like goofs any more” portion of the season is held inside a lot of Parham’s improvement, how much did general team flow benefit Parham and how much did Parham’s improved play fix the general team flow? There’s some chicken and the egg questions to be asked here to be sure, but if there’s an element of “we’re going to use Royce differently” at work here, then that begs the question: Why wasn’t that the decision to start the season? It certainly seems like Parham’s role was changed, as his per-40 minute rebounding numbers dropped kind of notably. I’m not saying that anything happening in non-conference play was the wrong choice based on information at the time…. but based on the information we can see here in May, it really looks like the wrong choice was made to start the year.

BEST GAME

As seemingly obvious the UConn regular season finale is for this spot, I think we can just as easily skip it. After all, Royce Parham had back-to-back double-doubles that have kind of just been lost to the ether because they both came in losses. One of them is very fair that we’ve just completely deleted it from memory, as it was the “over nearly immediately” loss at Xavier, but Parham did have 24 points, 10 rebounds, two assists, and two blocks while shooting 9-for-14 from the field and a perfect 4-for-4 from the charity stripe. However, one game earlier, Parham picked up his first ever KenPom.com game MVP award, yes, even in a loss on the road against Villanova. A career high 26 points, a career high 11 rebounds, two blocks and a steal, 8-for-9 from the field, 9-for-10 from the line….. but Marquette couldn’t hold their 72-66 lead with three minutes to go. Parham had nine points in a 15-3 run in the second half to drive the Golden Eagles out in front and nearly go up double digits at the Finn. Whatever else happened in that game — Chase Ross attempted just two shots in 29 minutes! — Marquette didn’t lose because of Royce Parham, that’s for sure.

SEASON GRADE

I think, all told, that Royce Parham’s grade lands at an 8. Even when he wasn’t shooting it well to start the year, he was still contributing in a manner that was a huge jump forward from where he was as a freshman. Once he got into the starting lineup, he leapt forward again and actually ended up as Marquette’s #2 scorer in Big East games. Whatever optimism you have for the 2026-27 season, part of it sits nestled in the knowledge of what you saw from Parham in that stretch of the year. Even with the shooting troubles early, he shot it so well in conference games that he still ended up with one of the 200 best effective field goal percentages in the country for the whole year! That’s really great and we should reward him for that! I’m not going to knock him for getting assigned the job of coming off the bench to start the year, because that’s mismanagement from the coaching staff, not poor performance from Parham. While the wins and the losses didn’t really work out in MU’s favor, Parham’s growth as a player can’t be denied. It just wasn’t a perfect season for him, so that’s why it’s an 8 from me.

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