Thanks for the comment. Good stuff on your part. I’ll admit, Hazell was most definitely in the player pool for the All-Fryer team. One correction on your stat: Hazell had 105 3s and Rautins had 102, and JH had 12 more attempts (290 to 278). Either way, this is negligible, since both players shoot a similar percentage. Hazell 36.2 last year and 34.9 career; Rautins 36.7 and 35.9. As you can see, Rautins barely made the list, himself (indeed, there are a lot of “specialists” on there).

There was one real reason that I left JH just off this list, and I think it’s an aspect of his game that people mention often enough about him, and that has to do with shot selection. You note yourself that many of his attempts are from 25+, but I’d contend that those defenses presented to stop him are not just to keep him from shooting 3s. Hazell takes his share of “bad” threes, a fact made worse when considering that SHU did indeed have two other double-figure scoring options on that team. I know there’s a little skew there, because Hazell is asked to do so much, and certainly more than the stats show. But a lot of his attempts (esp. the REALLY long ones) came at times when a better shot would have been easily available. If you want to continue the comparison to Rautins, AR has proven that he can also shoot from “extra distance” but he shoots more of this threes within the flow of the Syracuse offense and therefore takes fewer “bad” threes than JH. Finally, the ability to shoot (and hit) from extra distance is common to all of the players on this list, and many more that were left off.

I agree with you, though, that Hazell is a special player; he deserves the pre-season accolades he’s received so far, i.e. the 2nd- and 3rd-team all-Big East selections we’ve seen. I know I don’t have to tell you that he’s got a lot more going on in his game than being a bomber. If the Fryer list were a top 30 list instead of 25, he’d probably be on it. But I had to draw the line somewhere, and in the end the shot-selection thing was something I had to count against him.

Love the comment, though, and thanks for checking out our lists. Hope you’ll be back.

John Stevens
RTC

He is the ultimate bomber.