As the summer broils on, we have reached the end of July in complete UConn sports withdrawal. Football season is a month away. Even basketball recruiting has slowed as many top recruits look to the fall for their college announcements (save us, Steve Enoch). The product of this mind-numbing insipidness here at A Dime Back is this completely stupid hypothetical post.
Here’s the concept: if no UConn player had left college early, how would the all-time scoring list be reshaped?
There’s probably some really cool scientific way to calculate this based on the average year-over-year improvements of the average player or something, but math is more Peter’s thing and he didn’t want to waste time figuring it out. So our method here is a lot more rudimentary. We’ve simply filled in the blank seasons with the point total from the last year on campus. For example, how many points would Donyell Marshall have scored had he returned to UConn for his senior year? No idea. So let’s just assume he’ll score the exact same amount of points as he did the year prior during his junior season.
Ready for the paragraph that serves as one giant asterisk to this process? Here it is.
The calculation method is stupid. For one, you’d assume that the best players would improve from their junior year to their senior year. The last big time 4-year player at UConn who scored less points as a senior than he did as a junior was Kevin Freeman. Most saw notable increases. Our stupid answer to this problem: by adding extra years to the early-departed, the playing time and scoring opportunities for others would shift. Using Marshall as our example again, had he returned for his senior season, he would have taken scoring opportunities away from sophomore Ray Allen — so maybe over four years it evens out.
The other significant issue comes into play with guys who left more than one season early. Quadrupling Andre Drummond’s freshman year point total lands him at 1,360 total points. That’s light as shit. Especially considering he scored 13.5 points per game as a 20 year old in the NBA this season. The same can be said about Rudy Gay, who scored more points as a sophomore than guys like Kemba Walker, Khalid El-Amin, Shabazz Napier and Marshall. In our new calculations, Gay doesn’t crack the top 10, but it’s certainly likely that he would have increased his scoring enough during his last two years on campus to change that.
But whatever. Let’s look at the new list!
1. Richard Hamilton: 2,768 points
2. Kemba Walker: 2,748
3. Ray Allen: 2,740
4. (tie) Caron Butler: 2,518
4. Ben Gordon: 2,518
6. Donyell Marshall: 2,503
7. Jeremy Lamb: 2,266
8. Khalid El-Amin: 2,210
9. Chris Smith: 2,145
10. Emeka Okafor: 2,067
Is this interesting? Maybe a little. Unlike UConn’s actual all-time scoring list, which is topped by Smith, this list looks a little more like the common sense list of UConn’s all-time best players. Jeremy Lamb at number seven was a bit of a surprise but he scored 457 points as a freshman (4th best in UConn history) and 603 as a sophomore (6th best), so his ranking isn’t infeasible.
The gold standard for college basketball is the 3,000 point club, a group that no one on the list would join in this hypothetical. For some perspective, to achieve 3,000 points means a four-year average of 750 points per season. There have only been four 750+ point seasons in the entirety of UConn history (Marshall ’94, Allen ’96, Hamilton ’98, Walker ’11). So we might be waiting a while for that one.
Whataya think? Was this a horrible waste of time? Got a better method for calculating point totals? Are you not even reading this because you have better ways of spending your summer? Let us know in the comments.
Is this interesting? Maybe a little.
Actually, Ty, it was kind of interesting. Thanks.