When Buddy Hield takes the court inside NRG Stadium in Houston Saturday night, he will become the first player since Dennis Scott in 1990 to carry an NCAA Tournament scoring average of 25.0 ppg or better into the Final Four. Hield, who has more points through four games in the Big Dance than any player over the last two decades besides Stephen Curry, will also become the all-time leading scorer in the history of the Big 12 when he scores his fourth point against Villanova.
Buddy Hield is the Final Four star college basketball deserves
For the past four months, and the past four years, college basketball fans have been gifted with the opportunity to watch the Oklahoma star tear up college basketball. Now, the Buddy Hield Show has arrived at its final destination.
The astounding numbers and the national Player of the Year honors are swell, but they only tell half the story when it comes to why Buddy Hield has become such a treasure that college hoops fans will hate to let go of whenever Oklahoma's postseason run comes to an end. You see, Hield has become the rarest of modern day rarities: a must-see college basketball star who the world has had the opportunity to see for a full four seasons.
The notion that college basketball has a "star power problem" isn't exactly a contemporary one. While the one-and-done era has gifted us with the opportunity to see the likes of Kevin Durant and Anthony Davis partake in March Madness, it's also created a less enviable phenomenon where those players are gone from the college game just weeks after the casual fan gets to the point where they can recognize those stars out of uniform.
In the one-and-done era -- which is about to turn one decade old -- only three first-team Associated Press All-Americans (Tyler Hansbrough, Jared Sullinger and Doug McDermott) have returned to college basketball for another season after receiving their honors. The constant turnover has created a situation where sports fans who are engrossed in football until after the Super Bowl are wowed by the abilities and personalities of college basketball's top talents for a total of 7-8 weeks before those players are gone from the game forever.
These days, being a senior college basketball star comes with almost as many questions as it does accolades.
Should he have turned pro last year? If he’s so good, what is he still doing here? How do you think his age will affect his draft stock? Hasn’t he been there since, like, 1997?
Even with freshman star Brandon Ingram putting up sparkling numbers for defending national champion Duke, and even with ESPN shoving future millionaire Ben Simmons down our throat at every conceivable moment, it's been a 22-year-old from the Bahamas who has been unquestionably the most captivating individual performer for the past four months.
Some have described Hield’s 2015-16 campaign as some variation of a “meteoric rise to stardom,” which is more than a bit misleading.
Hield was actually one of the best players in college basketball last season, when he averaged 17.4 points points per game and was named both the Big 12 Player of the Year and a third team Associated Press All-American. After admitting that he had been leaning toward turning pro, Hield made the surprising announcement in late April that he would be returning for his senior season.
The decision surprised most basketball junkies, but not because Hield was a major conference player of the year certain to be selected at some point in the NBA Draft's opening round. The reality is, most draft experts saw the Sooner star as a player who would more than likely still be around for a team to select in the second round.
The surprise over this particular decision to return was due to mainly to the fact that professional scouts saw a player who had already hit his ceiling and had nowhere else to go. Hield was a scorer, sure, but he was a scorer who could only put the ball in the basket one way: jump shots from the perimeter.
“It’s kind of embarrassing for me, because I’m always in the gym, but I never really work on my ball handling,” Hield said when he announced his decision to delay his NBA dream for another year. “I always work on my shooting. I need to accept the challenge and work on things I need to get better at. I’m ready to make that next jump in my game.”
Fans of basketball at both the professional and college level hear this sort of thing from dozens of players from late March through early May. While these offseason promises do sometimes result in a noticeable skill-set improvement by the player in question, the difference is rarely enough to change the NBA hopeful’s draft stock considerably.
Could Hield improve his ball-handling enough to be a more versatile scoring threat in Big 12 play? Perhaps, but this was a junior going into his senior season of college basketball. Any improvement in that area was likely to be minuscule when it came to Hield’s player of the year hopes and negligible as far as his draft stock was concerned. Old dogs, new tricks, and all of that.
The only ones who sidestepped this common thought were the ones who knew Hield well enough to know that if improvement was even remotely possible, Buddy would find a way.
To those who know him best, Hield’s work ethic was legendary long before he was a household name on the verge of carrying Oklahoma to its first national championship. Allow this chunk of an August 2015 story from Sam Vecenie to paint the picture.
It all goes back to that drive that he cultivated back in the Bahamas. Lindsted calls him one of the most competitive people he’s ever met -- he hates to lose in sports trivia games just as much as he hates to lose on the floor. Simply put, the guy won’t let up, and will work every single hour of the day if you let him. It’s something that Oklahoma’s staff noticed immediately upon his arrival to their program.
“I can’t describe to people the number of hours he puts in the gym,” Henson said. “His freshman year, we found out on the afternoon on game days he wasn’t even leaving the court. Most guys go eat pre-game, then run back to the dorm or go back to their apartments. He wasn’t even doing that. He was just shooting all afternoon. Then was there every morning early, just working, working, working. Don’t get me wrong, he has a lot of natural ability, but he’s just an absolute gym rat in every sense of the word.”
Lindsted remembers a conversation he had with Oklahoma’s staff about Hield’s work habits his freshman year.
“I tried to tell the Oklahoma coaches that you’ve never seen anything like this, but even his freshman year in college I remember them telling me to call him and tell him to rest his legs and rest and quit shooting and quit working out so much,” Lindsted said. “I was just like, well, I can try, but I have my hands full. You literally have to lock the balls up. You just physically have to lock them up to keep him out.”
Suddenly, Hield’s path from 7.8 ppg scorer as a freshman to one-dimensional Big 12 Player of the Year to the best and most absorbing player in all of college basketball becomes more clear.
If there’s one downside to the added scoring versatility that Hield has displayed as a senior, it’s that it has taken some deserved attention away from the fact that he is an outside shooter who is shooting the outside shot better than he has at any point in his career. By a lot.
Volume shooters aren’t supposed to flirt with becoming members of the ever-exclusive 50/40/90 club, and they aren’t supposed to own a true shooting percentage of just under 67%, a pair of claims that Hield has been able to make this season. In a period of time where seemingly everything and everyone associated with basketball is being compared to Stephen Curry, Hield might be the only hooper in the world with the game to legitimize the comparisons he gets.
Whether Hield winds up experiencing even a modest amount of the success that Curry has enjoyed at the next level is anyone’s guess. What we do know, and what we should celebrate, is that he has been a welcome throwback for college basketball fans who recognize why things are the way they are, but still long for more familiarity with their sport’s brightest stars.
We aren’t all that far removed from a time when landing a blue chip basketball recruit came hand-in-hand with a three- or four-year pass to watch the young man develop and hopefully put himself in a position to become a pro. As such, program stability was much easier to attain. Land one or two great recruiting classes, be a national title contender for six or seven years. The struggle for success in college hoops had little to do with deciphering the formula.
We are now more than a decade removed from the final vestiges of that era, and firmly entrenched in one where re-learning the rosters of the sport’s power programs has become an exercise on par with the one demanded of hardcore Major League Baseball fans each spring. Basketball’s top amateur talent no longer remains amateur talent for any longer than it has to, which makes every recruiting season a do-or-die time frame for the bulk of the game’s most well-known coaches. There aren’t many easily identifiable stars in the sport anymore, because the biggest boon that comes with attaining modern stardom has become the guarantee of a forthcoming professional contract, so long as you can go five or six weeks without getting hurt.
Since mid-November, college basketball fans have been gifted with a bon-a-fide senior superstar whose consistent evolution has been on full display for the past four years. When that phenomenon happens again, who knows, but it’s a concern for another day. For now, we should all be thankful that there’s still one final act of the Buddy Hield show to play out.
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