Pete Maravich - What Might Have Been

Did you copy/paste that from an article from 2002?

Because this question has been asked at least once a year for the last 30 years.

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What Might Have Been

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You mean if LSU would had broken the color barrier long before Collis Temple and recruited Elvin Hayes to school.

With Pete and Elvin, that would have been two First Team All-Americans at least for a year that would have kept The Wizard of Westwood awake at night.

Hell, maybe they could have gotten Don Chaney from McKinley HS here as well.

The dunk meant nothing to Pete. It was never a part of his game. The three point line, shot clock and hand checking would have meant a great deal. Hell, in his 68 point game with a three point line and the referees calling two ridiculous charges on him he would have had 76 or above.

The GOAT at LSU. Never really cared about LSU basketball until I saw him in the first freshman game at LSU. Told my brother, we gettin season tickets. He was in a league of his own.

We're all just guessing, of course, about how many more points Pete would have scored with the 3-point shot allowed.
But those of us who were lucky enough to see him play at LSU know that if they had painted a 3-point arc on the basketball courts, Maravich would have viewed it as a challenge and probably taken MOST of his shots beyond the 3-point line. That's just what kind of player he was.

Do the math, though. If half of Pete's 1,387 career baskets at LSU had been 3-pointers -- which I don't think is an unreasonable assumption -- that would have boosted his average per game to.... 52.5 points a game.

FWIW, Tennessee never played the Four Corners against LSU. That was a Dean Smith/North Carolina thing that didn't become popular until the early 1980s.
What coach Ray Mears did at Tennessee was simply run a slow and deliberate offense. They were in no hurry to do anything.
To stop Maravich, Mears had a smaller, quicker guard named Billy Hann guard Pete one-on-one wherever he went, and then the Vols trapped Pete with one of their wing defenders whenever he would go to either side -- creating a constant double-team.
Mears gambled that LSU's other four players couldn't make up the slack, and he was right.
The Tennessee games always left a bitter taste in the mouths of LSU people in those days. The Volunteers were roundly despised by the rest of the SEC. Kentucky was envied and respected; Tennessee was just an orange pain in the arse. They had a pregame routine like the Globetrotters, and they wore these stupid orange-striped clown warmup pants. But when the game would start, Mears would have them dribbling and passing the ball six, seven times before shooting. We hated them.

I know Maravich went on to be a fairly successful NBA player. But in my mind, Pistol Pete is forever young, wearing his floppy socks and an LSU uniform, scoring 44 points a game at the dusty old Parker Ag Center.

If today’s rules were applied he probably plays a year then goes pro.

He'd be riding with Team Gordon

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Maybe I’m biased because I love LSU, but as great as Pete was, the fact that he never played on a championship team, college or pro, that causes him to be overlooked as a true great of the game after 50 years.

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and sadly his body quit one season short of that goal, the Celtics won it the year he hung it up

I had class with Pete. When he returned from road to Tenn, he looked like someone had tried to "filet" him.. eyes sunk back in head, arms/face scratched. he said they took some goons from football, had them let their fingernails grow, and purposely fouled out to contain him to a mere 20 pts per game. But without a doubt, I've never seen another athlete, in any sport, who possessed the physical skills he had....try watching replays in real time...then slo-mo and keep your mouth closed

Basketball is a team game and Maravich never played on a team capable of winning anything until end of his career. LSU winning a BB championship in SEC in the 60s is equivalent to Ole Miss winning a FB championship today.