Alright, let’s talk about something I was messing around with recently. I got thinking about Pistol Pete Maravich and those absolutely wild college numbers he put up at LSU.
So, I started by just pulling up his official stats. You know, the ones everybody knows. Played 83 games from ’67 to ’70. Scored a ridiculous 3,667 points. That’s an average of 44.2 points per game. Just nuts. Nobody’s touched that since.
But then the thought hit me – they didn’t have a 3-point line back then. Every single basket was just two points, unless it was a free throw. And if you’ve ever seen footage of Pete, you know the guy wasn’t just living in the paint. He was launching shots from everywhere, way out there.
Digging into the ‘What If’
This got me curious. How could I even try to figure out what his stats might look like with a modern 3-point line? It’s not like I can just magically add points. I needed some kind of basis.
I remembered reading somewhere that people had tried to figure this out before. So, my next step was just searching around, trying to find those analyses. Didn’t want to reinvent the wheel, you know?
Found some articles and mentions that his own coach at LSU, Dale Brown, apparently went back years later with his staff. They actually sat down with game film, charting where Pete took his shots from. That’s some serious dedication.
The Estimation Game
Based on that work Coach Brown did, the estimates started popping up. They figured out roughly how many of his shots would have been behind today’s college 3-point line.
Here’s the breakdown I pieced together from what I found:
- Coach Brown estimated Pete took about 13 shots per game that would count as threes today.
- Now, the tricky part: how many did he make? We don’t know his percentage from back then for just those long shots.
- But the commonly cited estimate, stemming from Brown’s research, suggests that if those made long-range shots counted for three points instead of two, his average would jump significantly.
I saw different numbers, but the one that seemed most grounded in that film study was that adding that extra point for a good chunk of his long bombs would push his average way up.
So, I did the rough math based on the popular estimate derived from Coach Brown’s work. If a certain number of his made field goals per game became 3-pointers, what would that look like?
The figure people usually land on, after all that film review and calculation, is that Pete Maravich would have likely averaged somewhere around 57 points per game. Yeah, fifty-seven.
Think about that. An extra 13 points per game, just by adding the three-point line. His total points over those 83 games would shoot up from 3,667 to over 4,700.
Final Thoughts
Look, it’s obviously speculation. We can’t go back in time. We don’t know exactly how defenses would have played him differently, or if his shot selection would change with an actual line on the floor. But based on the work done by people who actually watched the films and charted the shots, especially his own coach… it’s pretty staggering.
It just confirmed what I always thought watching his highlights. The guy was playing a different game back then. He truly was ahead of his time. Spending an afternoon digging into this and trying to visualize it was pretty cool.
