​I’m going to pretend that this facial expression is Adrien Stevens being surprised that Braylon Mullins thinks he can guard him. | Credit: Jeff Hanisch-Imagn Images 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 ExpectationsWhy You Should Get ExcitedPotential PitfallsWith that out of the way, we swing the camera around to the sophomore who suddenly found himself in the starting lineup after nine games of his freshman year…..Adrien StevensSophomore — #10 — Guard — 6’4” — 215 lbs. — Potomac, MarylandThe 2025-26 season for Adrien Stevens can kind of be summed up this way: “Hey, freshman, can you do this for us? How about this? Can we add this? What about this? Okay, hotshot, how about this? You handled all of that, huh?”He started out the year playing real rotation minutes right out of the gate, never dipping into single digit minutes. He found his way into the starting lineup when the coaching staff needed a new face to take charge of one of the backcourt/wing positions. He got comfortable as a pillar of strength in the lineup, and by the end of the season, Stevens had kind of quietly turned into one of the more reliable backcourt presences in the entire Big East.If you just take his season long stats — 7.9 points, 2.6 rebounds, 1.6 assists, 1.4 steals, 37.5% three-point shooting, 57.4% two-point shooting — you say “hey, that’s a heck of a freshman season for anyone, to be honest.” But if you take his stats from just Marquette’s final 13 games of the season, when the team looked like they were a competent and competitive Big East club, you get this: 10.8 points, 3.3 rebounds, 2.1 assists, 2.2 steals, 37.7% from deep, 55.6% inside the arc. That’s a good season for any guard playing in a conference on the level of the Big East. If you want to quibble with my evaluation there, that’s fine, but it’s hard to argue about these numbers from just conference play, according to KenPom.com: #7 in the league in effective field goal percentage, #9 in true shooting percentage, #10 in steal rate, and #5 in three-point shooting percentage.The fact of the matter is that by the end of the 2025-26 season, Adrien Stevens proved he belonged on the court for whatever playing time the coaching staff threw at him. It felt like they kept stacking responsibilities on him, and he just kept shouldering tha