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.
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....
