Pistol Pete Maravich played his NCAA basketball at Louisiana State University (LSU) before being selected with the number three overall pick in the 1970 NBA Draft. Pistol Pete Maravich in his prime is often considered the greatest shooter in college basketball history.
There have been a multitude of exceptional basketball players in the game’s relatively short history, and international involvement, as well as the general rise in popularity, has spurred more great talent in the past twenty years than all the great basketball players combined. that came before . While the debate over who is the best at shooting buckets will never be definitively settled, many younger fans unfamiliar with the work that Pistol Pete featured are unaware of the fact that his name clearly deserves to be in the conversation, if not Specifically, he leads the list of the best shooters in the history of college and professional basketball. The fact that Maravich died of a premature heart attack in 1988 at the age of 40 further alienates him from the youth culture that primarily consumes basketball.
Pistol Pete was born Peter Press Maravich in 1947. As the son of a former professional player turned basketball coach, Pete instilled the fundamentals from an early age. The Pennsylvania native eventually moved to South Carolina (while his father was serving as the head basketball coach at Clemson University), where he excelled in high school basketball and earned the nickname Pistol for his shooting of shot that involved picking up the ball from the hip like a cowboy. in the wild west gun shooting.
After finishing his prep career in Raleigh, North Carolina Pistol Pete joined the LSU Tigers, where his father was coaching at the time. The scholarship offer Pete received to play at LSU was not a gift from his father, as Pistol quickly demonstrated by scoring 50 points, dishing out 11 assists and grabbing 14 rebounds in his first game as a freshman. During his three-year college career, Pistol Pete averaged a staggering 44.2 points per game during a span from 1968 to 1970, when he led the NCAA in scoring each of those three years.
The 6’5″ guard scored most of his scoring on outside shots and all of those points were accumulated before the implementation of the three-point line. Years later, LSU head coach Dale Brown revisited the tapes of the games and made sure there was a three-point line in place when Pistol Pete played, Pete would have averaged a staggering 13 3-pointers per game, which would have increased his average points per game from a staggering from 44 to an incredible 57 points per game.In 2005, ESPNU (ESPN’s subsidiary that specializes in sports) named Pistol Pete Maravich the greatest college basketball player of all time, based almost entirely on his incredible ability outside shot.