One of the easiest ways to tell that it is late July and quickly bearing down on August is to take a peak at the kind of posts that are being written across the college basketball blogosphere.
And as Drew Cannon proved to us over at KenPom’s blog, times are getting tough when we’re forced to come up with new stats to determine who is a good three-point shooter.
I joke, but Drew actually put in some good work. His goal was to determine who the best three-point shooter in the country is while factoring in volume of attempts, the percentage of those attempts that went in, and the difficulty of the schedule that was played. For example, Joe Ragland of Wichita State was the nation’s second-best three-point shooter with more than 100 attempts at just over 50% (59-117), but was he really a more dangerous shooter than John Jenkins of Vanderbilt, who knocked down 44% of his threes while taking more than 300?
So Drew created a stat called Three-Point Score, or 3PS. I’ll save you the boring math, but he found that High Point’s Nick Barbour was the nation’s best three-point shooter while Jenkins, who was second overall, was the best shooter once schedule difficulty was factored in. Here’s the top ten:
2. Kenny Boynton, Florida (1.100)
3. Brady Heslip, Baylor (1.097)
4. Keiton Page, Oklahoma State (1.088)
5. John Shurna, Northwestern (1.087)
6. Jordan Hulls, Indiana (1.084)
7. Ryne Smith, Purdue (1.083)
8. Doron Lamb, Kentucky (1.077)
9. Darius Johnson-Odom, Marquette (1.073)
10. Kam Cerroni, Green Bay (1.072)
That’s not bad.
The irony?
Drew’s namesake, Isaiah Canaan of Murray State, was crushed by his team’s weak schedule. I don’t care what the stats say, there was no question whatsoever that he was one of the nation’s ten best shooters last season.
Rob Dauster is the editor of the college basketball website Ballin’ is a Habit. You can find him on twitter @robdauster.