Shavon Shields, the record behind the numbers
Shields in his Olimpia jersey is averaging around 14 points per game.
The ante facts are obvious. Bob McAdoo scored his 1,292 points over three EuroLeague seasons (he added 192 more in the 1988/89 Korac Cup, a European competition but not the top one); Shavon Shields is playing his fourth. The number of games quadrupled. And McAdoo averaged 25.4 points per game which in today’s EuroLeague no one – at Olimpia or elsewhere – can come close to. Shields in his Olimpia jersey is averaging around 14 points per game.
It’s all too different to be compared: today we play more games, but in those days a player spent up to 38-40 minutes on the court, the pace was slower, and no one had more than two foreigners on the roster. After all, when McAdoo silently crashed the record for most points scored in the European top competition, someone could have argued that Bill Bradley had a higher average than him, 26.5 per game. But Bradley played a total of twelve games for Olimpia. They were enough to win the 1966 European title in Bologna.
McAdoo is beyond comparison. McAdoo has won the European championship twice. His role is cemented, it cannot be scratched. But Shields’ record has an important meaning, because in today’s basketball, playing four consecutive seasons on the same team doesn’t happen often and certain records require games, consistency, years of tenure in the same place. They are records reachable only by people who have earned the respect of a club, a coach, an ownership. It has an important meaning, because Shavon has not played all the games over these four years, he has missed 34 of them over two seasons, practically an entire season. It has great significance because no one had been able to touch this record in almost 35 years of potential attempts. Vlado Micov had come close, 60 points away, while all the others have always remained distant. Micov’s points average was 10.7 per game; much lower than that of Shields.
It is obvious that players from the past are penalized in this type of records: in the ranking of Olimpia’s top ten scorers there are only three champions from th old FIBA era, Bob McAdoo, Antonello Riva and Roberto Premier. In turn they had made those of the previous generation disappear, Gabriele Vianello, Sandro Riminucci, Gianfranco Pieri: they all won a European Cup and reached the championship game the following year.
It would be probably more appropriate to draw up two distinct rankings, one only for the EuroLeague in which Shields had become the leader by overtaking Vlado Micov and one for the previous, definitive era, in which Bob McAdoo precedes Riva, Premier, D’Antoni, Meneghin, Pittis in this order. But talking about records is what it is. We are talking about numbers, not absolute truths. And the fact remains that Shields – whose points average is essentially the same that the great Roberto Premier had – did something that will remain for a while in the history of a club that has won eight international cups.
All-time scoring averages (minimum 300 points scored): Bill Bradley 26.5 ppg; Bob McAdoo 25.8; Antonello Riva 22.4; Mike James 19.8; Rickey Brown 19.8; Keith Langford 17.4; Kevin Punter 15.6; Piero Montecchi 15.4; Gabriele Vianello 15.2; Roberto Premier 14.0; Shavon Shields 13.8; Andrew Goudelock 12.3; Massimo Masini 11.2; Vlado Micov 10.7; Mike D’Antoni 10.2.