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 relatively short history of the game, and international participation, as well as the general rise in popularity, has stimulated more great talent in the last 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 settled definitively, many younger fans unfamiliar with the work that Pistol Pete put forth are oblivious to the fact that his name clearly deserves to be in the conversation, if not specifically in the tops 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 a young 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 at high school basketball, earning the nickname Pistol for his shot. shot that involved lifting the ball from the hip like a cowboy. in the wild west gunfight.

After finishing his prep career at Raleigh, North Carolina Pistol Pete joined the LSU Tigers, where his father was coaching at the time. Pete’s scholarship offer to play at LSU wasn’t 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 made the majority of his scoring on outside shots and all of those points were racked up before the implementation of the 3-point line. Years later, LSU head coach Dale Brown revised the tapes of the games and made sure there was a 3-point line instead when Pistol Pete played, Pete would have averaged a staggering 13 3-pointers per game, which would have increased his PPG average by a staggering number from 44 to an incredible 57 points per game.In 2005, ESPNU (a subsidiary of ESPN that specializes in sports) named Pistol Pete Maravich the greatest college basketball player of all time, based almost exclusively on his incredible ability outside shot.