Antoine Davis is on the verge of breaking a goalscoring record that was once considered untouchable – and in a way remains so.
Detroit Mercy’s star guard needs just 26 points to surpass Pete Maravich as NCAA career leader. Davis, who leads the nation with an average of 28.4 points per game, may break “Pistol” Pete’s revered 53-year mark in a Horizon League tournament game against top-ranked Youngstown State Thursday night.
Davis scored 38 points in a win over Purdue Fort Wayne on Tuesday night to move the mindful Titans forward and get closer to the mark Maravich set as a 1967-70 All-American for LSU.
Just weeks after LeBron James surpassed Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as NBA career leader, Davis has a chance to top Maravich, the Hall of Famer his father let him study while learning to play as a kid.
The lithe, 6-foot-1 Davis, a gifted shooter and scorer, will struggle to break the record against the Penguins, who held him to 15 points on Jan. 29 at Youngstown State. He also dropped 32 on her in the first meeting of the season.
Davis already holds multiple NCAA records, including consecutive games in double digits (143), 3 points (584), and he’s seven 3s away from Stephen Curry’s all-season record of 162.
If he manages to overtake Maravich and make history, the new scoring record will also belong to Davis. However, this one might need an asterisk — or two.
Davis has 3,642 points in 142 games, while Maravich only needed 83 to add up to 3,667 points in three seasons for the Tigers, when he was as well known for his shaggy haircut and sagging socks as he was for his on-court sorcery.
Unlike Davis, who was granted a fifth year of eligibility due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Maravich didn’t play as a freshman — it wasn’t allowed at the time — nor was there a 3-point line or shot clock. Put a bounty on every possession.
It’s mind-boggling considering Maravich, who died of a heart attack in 1988 at the age of 40 while playing in a pickup game, averaged 44.2 points without taking a single 3-pointer or raising make.
Aside from their penchant for scoring, Davis and Maravich share something else: they both played college ball while being coached by their fathers.
Mike Davis has credited losing his job at UAB and moving his family to Houston, where his son, then in middle school, coached with former NBA coach John Lucas to change the course of his playing career.
To supplement the lessons with Lucas, Davis had his son watch instructional videos from Maravich, who had a gift for making dribbling, passing and shooting look easy.
“Often people can do things, but they can’t teach them,” Mike Davis told Yahoo Sports. “Pete could actually teach it. The way he explained, the way he did things was so simple. You didn’t have to be a basketball coach to understand that.”
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