beast of the east
Active member
BUT - his overall shooting percentage is way too low for someone scoring so many points, costing his team in very close games. Some of it is focus, and some of it is shot selection. But you can't tell me we wouldn't be winning more if his shooting % was closer to 50%. Basketball is just math. All things being equal - rebounds, fouls, turnovers, blocks - the team that shoots better wins. When your best scorer has one of the lowest shooting % among the top scorers in D1, unless the rest of the team is picking up the slack, your record isn't going to be very good.
I think that stroke is a little too broad. No doubt, we'd be a better/more efficient team if he shot a better %. You could say that about any player, especially the one's who shoot the most.
But we'd also be a lesser team if Harrison wasn't giving us the actual scoring production he's giving us. I'd rather have a guy capable of getting you 18 a game at 40% than a capable of shooting 52% but can't get his shot consistently.
While higher %s from volume scorers is preferred, it's not a requirement. Harrison is getting 18.1 on 39.6/36.4/85.2. Last year Russ Smith got 18.7 on 41.4/32.8/80.4 and they won a National Championship. This year Bryce Cotton is getting 20.8 on 41.0/32.8/83.5 and is getting national attention for what he and his team are doing.
The amount of true #1 type players who can score at a high level while also doing so with efficient percentages is limited. There are only so many of them out there. Every other player has varying degrees of warts, and while this is one of Harrison's most prominent, it's relatively minor, especially in the context of some of the deficiencies this team has. They aren't ideal percentages, but they aren't holding us back in any significant way either.
Russ Smith is an anomaly I believe, and I'm not sure you needed the ball in his hands with the game on the line. You make a good argument though, but the main difference between Smith's team and Harrison's that if Smith is the best player that HIS TEAM WINS, and if Harrison is ours, we could see 4 years from him without a sniff of the NCAAs. That speaks volumes.
A really great baseball book to read is Joe DiMaggio - a Hero's Life. I had always been dismissive of DiMaggio to the extend that you can of an all time great player because his Yankee teams were so stacked. however, what the book makes clear is that DiMaggio took it as his PERSONAL responsibility to deliver a World championships, and some of his heroics in the World Series were the kind that won't show up in a boxscore, or in the Series summary, but nearly always included coming up big when it mattered. there is a great phot in the book for example of how the graceful and smooth DiMaggio was headed towards the plate when the ball was going to arrive a moment sooner. He DOVE OVER the catcher's shoulder who was bracing for a collision, and in an acrobatic move never seen in that era (or rarely in any), landed and swiped the plate with an outstretched arm.
The point is, great players find a way for delivering wins for their team, not in the body of a line score, but also coming up big when it matters. You can argue that being one of the three worst shooter in the top 50 NCAA scorers is good enough. I would counter that looking at our record, it clearly is not.
TO BE CLEAR though, I'd want Harrison on my team getting minutes on any SJU squad I've ever seen.
No argument there. As I said in response to Alum, I didn't mean to compare Harrison to Smith to Cotton overall, I just used them to show that great shooting percentages, while preferred, can be overstated. A volume scorer at 33% is hurting his team. A volume scorer at 40% vs. 45%, while different, is not really that statistically significant when observed in a vacuum. As we are both pointing out I think, you have to look at it in context. Clearly, as you mention, there is a difference in Harrison v. Smith, and that difference is finer than their overall numbers/percentages (which are similar if comparing Smith last year to Harrison this year).
I guess what I'm saying is that horrific %s are a bad thing, great %s are a good thing, and middling %s (like Harrison's this year, and Smith last) are not an automatic demerit, they have to be looked at in the context of what that player brings to the team.
You can say that about every team So if Doug Mc Dermott was not playing how many wins would they have ,not many
They'd have a lot of wins, I think. They have Wragge--who almost singlehandedly destroyed Villnova.
Come on, Wragge gets his open jumpers because of McDermott. They are a decent team w/o McDermott at best.
Wragge's shooting %'s are as good as McDermott's and he logs almost 30 mins a game. And that's the point--they have 2 legitimate shooters. Double team one of them, leave the other open and you lose.
There is not a reason in the world you need to double team Wragge - while he is a VERY good shooter he cannot create a shot. He killed Nova because they double teamed McDermott; he did nothing against us because we didn't. Frankly, to compare the two as players because their shooting %'s are similar just doesn't make sense. McDermott is an AA, Wragge a good role player, albeit a very valuable role.
So, you are saying that Lavin out strategized Jay Wright in the two team's games vs. Creighton and McDermott. Interesting.
