K-State guard Markquis Nowell taking Big 12 by storm ... one 30-point game at a time
Markquis Nowell is doing things on the hardwood that no other player in the history of Kansas State basketball has done before.
The senior point guard wrote his name into the K-State record books by scoring 32 points and sending out 14 assists during a thrilling 97-95 overtime victory against the No. 19 Baylor Bears on Saturday at Ferrell Center.
They have been playing basketball in the Little Apple since 1902, and yet Nowell is the first K-State hooper in all those years to deliver the combination of 30 points and 10 assists in a single game.
Perhaps even more impressive, that performance followed another sensational outing that featured 36 points and nine assists during a 116-103 victory over Texas earlier this week in Austin. No K-State player had topped 30 points in consecutive games since Michael Beasley in 2008.
Add up his past two games, and Nowell is in even better company. According to ESPN research, the last two college basketball players with at least 65 points and 20 assists over a two-game span were Ja Morant and Trae Young.
Call him the early front-runner for Big 12 Player of the Year, if not a national award.
“Nowell is an unbelievable player,” Baylor coach Scott Drew said. “There aren’t many people out there averaging 30 and 10.”
It feels almost surreal for everyone involved to see Nowell putting up these numbers. He was a solid player during his first four years of college basketball at Arkansas-Little Rock and then K-State playing under former coach Bruce Weber. But he never played with this kind of ceiling or consistency until Jerome Tang was hired by the Wildcats last March.
Nowell’s scoring is up (from 12.4 points per game to 16.9). And so are his assists (from 5.1 per game to 8.9), and his turnovers are down. Coming into Saturday, Nowell ranked ninth in the Big 12 in scoring, and first in assists.
Without a doubt, he is the most improved player in the conference.
“He worked his butt off this summer,” Baylor guard Adam Flagler said. “He has a coaching staff that believes in him highly. They let him be the engine to his team, and he goes out there and he leads by example. Kudos to him. He did a really good job today.”
Why is Nowell suddenly such an electric player for Tang?
For starters, he is playing with much more confidence than he did in the past. But he is also doing a much better job of playing within himself and within the K-State system than he has in the past. Nowell will tell you he is taking better shots this season and that showed on Saturday.
Nowell went 4 of 7 from three-point range, but he also drove toward the basket and made things happen on his way to four two-pointers and 13 trips to the free-throw line. He seldom misses from there and made 12 against the Bears.
The wild and off-balance shots he often attempted last season have disappeared from his game.
“I’m taking good shots,” Nowell said. “When I do that I am more efficient. So I have just tried to focus on that more and know just try to take them.”
Tang likes to compare Nowell to a locomotive.
“A train is a very powerful piece of machinery,” Tang said. “But if you put it on sand, it can’t go. All we’ve done as a staff is just put some tracks under him so that he can go wherever he wants to within the boundaries of the tracks.”
“For him to embrace that and say, ‘OK, coach,’ was important. Some people see those as limitations, but it’s not. It allows you to propel your game further by taking some things away and then adding some things ... I’m just so proud of him because it’s hard work. He really worked hard in the offseason.”
Nowell is trying to stay humble during his hot stretch of games. On Saturday, he said he credited his teammates for much of his success and pointed out that there is no way the Wildcats could have defeated the Bears without their help.
But he was the one making all the highlight plays and finishing with an eye-popping stat line. At one point, with the shot clock winding down in the first half, he was forced to attempt a three-pointer from the Baylor logo at midcourt.
It was the low-percentage shot that he is trying to eliminate from his arsenal, but it still went in.
That once again put him in impressive company.
“Damian Lillard,” Drew said, “doesn’t even shoot from that far out.”
This story was originally published January 7, 2023 at 9:47 PM with the headline "K-State guard Markquis Nowell taking Big 12 by storm ... one 30-point game at a time."