Blue is Me

Tag: pete maravich

  • Has there been an NBA player whose overall legacy or ranking you’ve significantly re-evaluated, and what specifically changed your mind?

    I have mixed feelings about Pete Maravich

    Like.. the guy was a legend. He averaged like 44 PPG in college. He was a prolific scorer in the NBA and was flashy with both scoring and passing. He was considered one of the greatest ball handlers ever. He died young. All these make up for a man who’s more myth than fact.

    But you dig into his career, and here’s what you get:

    -He only played 10 seasons, only 7 of which was sorta healthy seasons where he played over 60 games

    -He was a prolific shot chucker; he averaged more FGAs per game than Lebron or Kobe or West or even Rick Barry and roughly the same amount as Iverson. He was basically the Iverson of the 1970s.

    -It’s difficult to judge his 3P% although apparently he was a sniper back then, but his regular FG% of 44% sure aint nothing special

    -Turnovers per game weren’t tracked until later in his career, but he averaged almost as many TOV as AST.. that’s not good

    -He reached the playoffs 4 times; 3 of which he was sharing scoring duties with Lou Hudson on the Atlanta Hawks and 1 time when he was a bench player with the Larry Bird Celtics. He never reached the playoffs as the main star for the New Orleans Jazz.

    -He looks pretty lackluster in advanced analytics.. TS% of 50%, and WS/48 of only 0.09? that’s not great for an all time player like him

    -He couldn’t really play defense to save his life

    I don’t know.. Pete Maravich was on the NBA 50 and NBA 75 teams but he doesn’t seem like even a top 100 player to me. More like top 150. I don’t want to seem like a hater but I have a spreadsheet where I calculate every NBA star’s ranking in awards, stats, totals, analytics etc combined… and Pistol Pete is somewhere in the top 150 for me. That’s all I gotta say, once upon a time I too was enamored by his flashy scoring and passing, but the dude is overrated. He’s literally the Iverson of the 1970s but unlike Iverson couldn’t even reach the Finals OR conference finals as the main guy.

  • Was Pete Maravich the best college player ever?

    No. Pete Maravich IMO is one of the most overrated players.

    Pistol Pete was a prolific shot chucker who averaged about 40 FGAs a game because his dad was the coach for LSU and let him stat pad as much as he wanted. Yes he scored 44 PPG without a 3 point line. It doesn’t matter, because this style of play does not lead to winning. Low efficiency high volume scorers – Elgin Baylor, Pistol Pete, Tmac, Iverson, Westbrook etc have historically not done well when it came to winning because it goes against how the game is supposed to be played – as a team. Wilt actually learned this throughout his career when he was a very high volume scorer but didn’t win much until Alex Hannum became his coach and asked him to focus more on defense and rebounding – and that’s when he started winning.

    MJ, Kobe and Rick Barry were the three exceptions to this. All were high volume shooters – but the difference is MJ was actually a very efficient scorer, Kobe needed both Phil Jackson’s triangle offense as well as 3 rebounders surrounding him in order to offset his bad shots, and Rick Barry’s passing abilities was at its peak and the league at its weakest the year he won the championship.

    I always enjoy listening to this Dan Issel story (Issel and Pistol both came out in the 1970 draft): Issel said Kentucky Wildcats HoF coach Adolph Rupp told him when they faced LSU to let Pete score as much as he could. So they let him do that. Pete averaged 55 PPG. And Issel’s Wildcats won.

    This just drives home the point that basketball is a team game. Pistol Pete, for all of his flashy passing skills, was not a great team player, and that’s why he never won anything in college or the NBA. He played with (newly minted HoFer) Lou Hudson, HoFer Walt Bellamy, Gail Goodrich, Truck Robinson, etc and never made it past the first round.

    The best college player ever was Lew Alcindor / Kareem Abdul Jabbar

    The GOAT college player and debatably the GOAT pro player too. Kareem did it all on both sides of the court and John Wooden taught him correctly, to play the game of basketball as a team.