when you grow up in the everyone gets a trophy generation
- Thread starter newell138
- Start date
People who use the more games less game argument are really distorting the picture here.
Pete took nearly 40 shot attempts a game. Someone mentioned Davis shooting 41% and more shots than the next 3 players. Pete shot 44% and took as many shots as the rest of his entire team!
People are alluding to Davis being selfish meanwhile he took less shots than Maravich even though he played 56 more games.
Not a referendum on anything here but some perspective is needed.
There are a lot of players that if given the green light to take 40 shots a game would shatter this record.
Pistol Pete never was guarded by Caleb.
He didn’t have the distractions of social media
Didn’t have to grow up watching Dora the Explorer
He didn’t have the distractions of social media
Didn’t have to grow up watching Dora the Explorer
It gets tricky assessing Pistol’s shooting numbers. He shot only 44%, which was low for his era, but he was on bad teams and was often double-teamed. He was a wizard at handling the ball had to create his own shots. If he was more selective his percentage would have been higher, and his scoring lower, but the team probably would have done worse. LSU was 3-23 the year before he played. Then went 14-12, 13-13, and 22-10. They dropped back to 14-12 and 10-16 after he left.
IMO he was just doing what he had to do to make LSU a winner.
Valid points.. But I wasn't saying or implying that Davis was selfish, I was just pointing out that he took a very high amount of shots relative to the rest of his team, which obviously affected the high amount of points he scored. I never meant to suggest that the same thing didn't apply to Maravich.
So I realize this if kind of off topic, but whose unusually high shooting volume helped his team more? No way to tell for sure, but just as a short and admittedly incomplete comparison, while Davis took most of his team's shots this year and led his team to a 14-19 record and averaged 3.6 assists per game, Maravich took most of his team's shots HIS senior year and led the team to a 22-10 record, shot a higher percentage from the field, and averaged 6.2 assists per game.
Davis averaged 22.2 shots per game this season, far more than any of the other scoring leaders. Of the next 49 NCAA leading scorers this season, the kid from Marshall averaged 19 shots per game, and the other 48 averaged somewhere between 12.6 and 17.5 attempts per game. And Davis also had the lowest shooting percentage of any of them.
In the three seasons immediately before Maravich played his 3 seasons at LSU, LSU had a combined record of 15-63. In the three seasons that Maravich played, LSU had a combined record of 49-35.
In the five seasons immediately before Davis played, Detroit Mercy had a combined record of 60-99. In the five seasons that Davis played, Detroit Mercy had a combined record of 59-88...
Maravich didn't have a single losing season at LSU. Davis had a losing season every year with the exception of the shortened Covid year when Detroit Mercy finished 12-10. So it seems possible that Maravich taking most of his team's shots benefitted his team more than Davis taking most of HIS team's shots did. (And I realize that we're talking about scoring, but Maravich also averaged twice as many rebounds for his career as Davis, 6.4 per game vs 3.2 per game.).
Maravich was the 3rd player taken in the 1970 NBA draft. It'll be interesting to see where Antoine Davis is drafted. If he's not a lottery pick, hopefully he won't be shocked and think he was cheated.... 😉
Last edited:
The modern day trophy era stuff is much more applicable to school philosophy rather than sport.
Back in my day, all tests were sent home with a grade on them. School classes were split based on ability so that teachers would have a group of kids all learning at around the same speed in their classes. Now a days, this philosophy has been scrapped. My 3rd graders rarely bring home papers with actual grades on them. And classrooms are deliberately split randomly with learners at all levels in each class so nobody feels bad.
If anything sport has gone entirely in the other direction in NJ. Travel sports are extremely competitive. More kids do not make the town teams than make it. And there’s no guarantee year over year that your kid will have a slot on the team next year either. Highly competitive starting at age 7. Parents paying through the nose for private lessons and year long AAU clubs to keep up with the pack.
And yet there were people in this same group that wanted a banner for the 2020 season as credit for a likely NCAA bid, or a banner for the 2021 season that would have been more than the norm.
I wasn't one of them. I find it rather annoying when people say we made the tournament in 2020.
What school district? My kids District has a parent portal. All grades are posted after each assignment so we see the grades probably faster than my parents saw my grades many years ago. Also kids are split up by AP, Honors, Level 1 and Level 2. Similar to how we did it as kids.
