WGAM's "Mr. Basketball" candidates announced

WGAM's "Friday Night Lights" is proud to announce the 15 candidates for the station's 8th Annual "Mr. Basketball" award. Click the following link to view the list!

www.fnlnh.com

Pete, I know you follow hoops quite a bit but to leave Scott ST.Lawrence off your list is just plain wrong.He was the BEST player on that team hands down.Whoever put this list together missed the boat. I was at every BG game this year,and he was the straw that stirred the drink.He made it happen on BOTH ends of the court.Hard to believe that the MVP of the team is not in your top 15.

I actually couldn't agree with you more Big Guy. In my humble opinion he was the best player on that team. They're going to miss him badly next year. He could go inside, outside and most nights was asked to guard the opposing teams best player. Judging by FNL site their basing most of the qualifications for Mr. Basketball on stats...while SSL didn't score with the big guys, he did a lot of the little things that won BG basketball games. When his teamates were getting pulled, he was left on the court to keep the 2nd string together.

I'm not saying he should be named Mr. Basketball, but I think he should easily be one of the candidates in the conversation.

I appreciate the response and totally understand where you guys are coming from regarding St. Lawrence. As I told coach Mig when I informed him that his team was the ONLY team to land 2 players on our list of 15, I also mentioned that the Cards JUST missed out on having 3 players on the list by the slimmest of margins. It was really that close! As a matter of fact, if we had gone to 16 players, St. Lawrence would have made the cut. The people who did the selecting(I came up with the list which was reviewed and agreed upon by my co-hosts Chris Shuker and Sean Sendall) did rely heavily on stats, but not solely on them as we did take other things into consideration like on-court leadership and what WE thought they meant to their teams. Also, things like what players were opposing coaches most worried about? Maybe it's not right, but I think another factor that played into it was that we tried to "spread the wealth around" across the different teams and even the different divisions...and with McClung and Green pretty obvious choices to be there, it made it difficult for us to include the entire BG "Big 3". Trust me, this is not something we took very lightly and just kind of threw it out there. It was time consuming and not very easy. I mean really, who should have been left out to make room for St. Lawrence? Perhaps we should go to 20 names next year?

Wow! If BG had 3 such good players wouldn't you expect them to win it all easily! On all the selections way too heavily weighted on scoring.

Mathieu should walk away with this one.

Barton is another kid sorely missing from this list. If you read either Dave Haley or myself over NHSportsPage you'll know why. He's the type of kid every coach wants on their team and was one of the best players in Class I this year.

I have learned after watching NH high school basketball for over 20 years that if you are a leading scorer you will always get a nod as player of the year awards. Doesn't matter if you took 28 shots to score 16 points. To me a Mr. Basketball is a complete player, that includes rebounding, steals, assists, FT%, block shots, and defensive ability. I see many players on this list who take way too many shots in games just to score their 15 points. Some of these players can score I don't dispute that at all, but if you take 30 shots and only score 15 points, you are not really having a good game even if you are the games high scorer, anyone who takes 30 shots should score at least 15 points. Not too mention some of the players on the list can score 20 points in a game and the man they are guarding will have 19. I also question the statistics, I don't think they are accurate. Coaches have been known to, "fudge the numbers". For example and maybe he did average the points stated, but the player representing Pelham. I saw play at least 3, maybe 4 times and he never scored more than 18 points when I saw him play. So did this player have a couple of 35-40 point nights to average 23? Also remember that many of these, "media outlets" are biased with certain schools.
Not too mention the list seems strange in that Milford's best all-around player is not on the list, nor is the POY for Class I on the list, how does that happen?

What about Proulx from Pinkerton definitely involved in the conversation of the top 15 in the state but does not show up in stat book as much as others.
It looks like to be considered for this award all you have to do is shoot alot. Forget about winning, playing defense or having an all around game just shoot alot! St. Lawrence should be ahead of the other two from BG as well.

There are a lot of kids that could have been put on the list maybe they should have made it bigger. And boxout what kid from Milford is the best all around player?

We all might have different criteria for a Mr. Basketball award, but in this case the players were chosen based on the criteria specific to the award.

Just saying that to keep perspective and because sometimes threads like this have a potential to get ugly with trying to discredit kids put on a list as opposed to promoting or listing merits of others....

Can someone explain the criteria for the Mr. Basketball award on WGAM. This is the second time I have heard the words criteria. So let me guess that the POY award and the Mr. Basketball have different criteria, please explain the differences. I don't see how you can get POY award and not even be nominated for Mr. Basketball, seems very strange seeing there are about 5 other players who play in the same class as this neglected POY.

I think the 4th post on this thread does the best job of it as Tarrier is connected to the award.

I just mentioned criteria because... hey Mr. Basketball could mean anything really...depending on perspective... but Tarrier explains in part they wanted to "spread it around" and what opposing coaches were afraid of in these candidates....

I concur with Tully on promoting the credentials of players as opposed to discrediting players. Criticizing players isn’t what this board is about. Promoting players is the right way of doing things.

Nhhoopguy: It is your right to promote players like Barton and Dunn. Criticizing a player like you did isn’t the right way of going about things. Please take this into consideration when making future posts.

You are right and I should't have used a specific player.
But that is the point of scoring is so important when all state , Mr basketball etc are picked.
In the current NH HS basketball scene, I would say the amount of shots, 2 or 3's taken by the leading scorers is high, but the shooting % is low.