2026-27 Marquette Men’s Basketball Player Preview: Joshua Clark

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:

• Reasonable Expectations
• Why You Should Get Excited
• Potential Pitfalls

With that out of the way, we address a guy who suddenly became very important at work without really doing anything himself…..

The thing to remember about Joshua Clark is that he arrived at Marquette as an unrated and unranked recruiting prospect and was listed at 225 pounds by the Golden Eagles after 247 Sports said that the 7-footer was just 215 pounds in high school.

And so, when he played just 126 minutes spread across 23 games as a redshirt freshman last season, we can’t take that as an indictment of Clark’s overall development pathway. It was merely a massive problem for head coach Shaka Smart that Caedin Hamilton was clearly not working out in the role that was given to him and that Clark wasn’t ready to shoulder the burden of taking up that space instead. Clark wasn’t supposed to do that, that’s not what the plan was last year, the plan was for him to get his feet wet, and when the season went sideways by Christmas, Smart had to go in a new direction.

That’s why Clark played just 33 total minutes in the final 17 games of the season while only appearing in 11 of them. Marquette needed to win and Clark’s trajectory became secondary to that venture. It made things look really troubling, but again: Were you really expecting the unrated and unranked prospect coming off a physical development redshirt season to give you a lot in his first year of college basketball action? Remove it from the context of what was going on last year, and the answer is always going to be No on that question.

You don’t have to be excited about Joshua Clark’s future as a player because of what you did — or did not! — see from him last season, but you also can’t be completely dismissive of him. Small Sample Size Theater, of course, but: Double digit rebounding rates on both ends of the floor according to KenPom.com, and a 7% block rate. If he could have replicated his production with enough minutes to qualify, Clark would have been one of the top 80 shot blockers in the country last season. He would have been top 25 in the country in defensive rebounding rate and top 100 on the offensive glass. There’s kernels of things to believe in for Clark in there.

The question is whether or not we see them fully grown.

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Sometimes the writing process is all about timing. Had I written this Player Preview back in September and then just locked it and scheduled it for publication on October 18th, you would have gotten a Reasonable Expectations section that was kind of “well, let’s see, if Clark understands why he didn’t play in the second half of last year and put in the work to stop that from happening again, maybe we’ve got something here” and so on.

Instead, I’m writing this after the open scrimmage at the beginning of October where we all learned that redshirt junior big man Caedin Hamilton has a torn calf muscle and will be out until at least Thanksgiving and maybe til Christmas.

Before we got into October, we could have said that the reasonable expectation for Clark is that he’ll be in a competition with Hamilton for minutes behind Sananda Fru at center. However, with Hamilton sidelined for at least MU’s first eight games and maybe as many as the first 14 games of the season — which is nearly half! — there’s not going to be a competition for minutes behind Fru. The Louisville transfer was always going to get to play as much as he wanted/as much as he could, and everything else would go from there.

The “everything else” is now Joshua Clark’s exclusive domain. The reasonable expectation for him has gone from “compete for minutes” to “be the guy that lets Fru take a break and catch his breath.” This may turn out to be as simple as “play two minutes at a time twice in each half,” but when we last saw Joshua Clark in action, Shaka Smart didn’t trust him to do that in a game. Now that has has to be his job at the very least.

You guys want to trust Nash Walker? Not as a contributor on the court this season, but as a guy who had to spend a lot of the offseason sitting on the sideline watching things because of his shoulder surgery?

He talked to the media after the open scrimmage, and he was asked about Joshua Clark, if for no other reason than that was when everyone realized that Clark was going to be The Guy called on to back up Sananda Fru:

“Josh has taken great strides. He’s a presence on the floor. He can read the floor well. The sky is the limit for Josh.”

I’m not asking you to trust Nash Walker here. I am, however, pointing out that the team’s social media managers decided to put that out there into the universe and make sure that everyone saw it. You can click through and see video of Walker’s full quote there, as there’s a little bit more to what he said, but the statements on the Instagram post are in context to what he actually meant.

Marquette does not need Joshua Clark to be a dominant force in the Big East this season. They need Clark to be a useful contributor. If the team is willing to put Walker’s quotes out there, effectively promising fans that Clark is ready for his role, then that has to be encouraging. Every minute Clark can absorb and allow Fru to gather himself on the bench, that’s one minute in February and March that Fru’s going to be more efficient and better rested and ready to contribute.

Long term, even better: Every minute Clark is able to hold his own on the floor this year is one more minute towards believing that Marquette has a legitimate starting center option for 2027-28 on the roster already.

I actually started writing bits of this up in the Reasonable Expectations section because it was a natural evolution of where that was going. It belongs down here though.

It’s really quite simple: Either Joshua Clark proves he can absorb the 10-ish minutes a game where Sananda Fru is not on the floor by the end of Marquette’s fourth game of the season, or he needs to spend the rest of the season on the bench. Game is at Michigan, Game is against Missouri in Chicago at the United Center. There’s probably a bit of leeway of “hey, he’s figuring it out, it’ll be fine” that the Golden Eagles can deal with as the season goes along if they go 2-0 in those contests. Maybe even 1-1, which is how KenPom.com projects it to go with the Mizzou game expected to be a two point contest with the Golden Eagles coming out on top.

But if MU comes out of Game of the year at 2-2 with two high major losses and four more high major non-conference games left to go, and it was very clear that part of the reason why Marquette lost both is because Joshua Clark was a liability during his minutes…. that’s the ball game for him. Shaka Smart is under at least a little bit of pressure, depending on how you want to think about last year and how he’s reset the roster since, to make sure that 2026-27 is a successful season for Marquette. If two of the six chances to earn a notable non-conference win go by without succeeding, then Smart has to do whatever lineup adjusting he needs to do to make sure the Golden Eagles get to Big East play with at least one and preferably several of the other four going in their favor.

If Clark’s minutes are a reason why MU gets off to a rough start, then merely eliminating his playing time is the clear solution, even if that means putting other players — hi, Royce Parham! — in situations that are not the best possible option for them. This team can not stand around and wait for Joshua Clark to figure it out this year, at least not during minutes in a game that counts.

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