Feeling Grand

As Addie Micir enters tonight's game against La Salle with 998 career points, TigerBlog began to think about some pretty good 1,000-point stories - and a cautionary tale.

There are all kinds of individual milestones in sports, and numbers like 300 wins and 500 home runs used to mean automatic Hall-of-Fame inclusion in baseball. As an aside, the 500-home run number was considered to be such a sure thing for Cooperstown that there was a wide-spread conspiracy theory that no Major League team would sign Dave Kingman after the 1986 season, lest he have a shot at 500. Kingman, who finished his career with 442 home runs, had his 35, 30 and 33 home runs in his last three years.

As for the college level, what are the magic numbers? In football, you could say 1,000 rushing yards, but that's a single-season number. For a career, there is no equivalent.

Nor is there one that TB can think of in any other sport, especially a career mark. To TB, 100 goals in lacrosse is a pretty special number that only an elite few have reached, though TB recognizes that the mainstream sporting public doesn't give that number a second thought.

Nope, TigerBlog is pretty sure that in the world of college sports, there's no career milestone quite like 1,000 points in basketball.

At Princeton, there have been 17 women's players and 26 men's players who have gotten there, so it clearly isn't something easily accomplished. Even harder is to reach 2,000 points - only Bill Bradley at Princeton has done so.

TB has always felt it was easier to get to 1,000 points in college than in high school, since the average outstanding player on the college level plays, what, two or three times as many minutes than he/she did in high school. Still, it's not easy to get there.

Chris Mooney, today the head coach at Richmond, was a forward for Princeton who happened to start every game his four years (1990-91 through 1993-94). If TB is correct, Mooney, Kit Mueller and Steve Goodrich are the only players who have ever done this in the program.

Anyway, Mooney scored his 1,000th career point in a game at Yale, and he finished that game with exactly 1,000 points. And what game was that for Mooney's career? No. 100. To TigerBlog, it seemed like Mooney scored 10 points every game, and he in fact finished his career with 1,071 points in 107 games.

Gabe Lewullis reached his 1,000th career point during the 1998 Rainbow Classic in Hawaii. TigerBlog went up to the PA announcer when Lewullis was at 998 or so and mentioned that the next basket would put him at 1,000 and could he perhaps make an announcement at the next timeout.

Lewullis then scored, and when the game reached the next media timeout, the announcement was made. And how did the Hawaiian audience respond? With a prolonged standing ovation that lasted the entire timeout, something that TB was pretty surprised to see.

That ovation occurred on the court at the Stan Sheriff Center in Honolulu, which just happens to be the Division I court furthest away from Princeton. After Lewullis, the next two 1,000-point scorers in Princeton history - women's players Kate Thirolf and Maggie Langlas - also reached 1,000 points on that same court. And they did it in the same game, no less.

Seems pretty wild to have two players reach 1,000 points in the same game, no? How often could that happen, right?

Well, for Princeton women's basketball, it happened again, when the next two players got to the milestone, in this case Maureen Lane and Allison Cahill, in the same game as well.

Will Venable was touch-and-go in getting to 1,000 points, and he didn't get there until the final game of his career. With 1,010 points, he has the fewest points of any Princeton 1,000-point scorer male or female; Kim Allen with 1,018 made it by the slimmest margin of any woman.

David Fulcomer, with 985 career points, came closest without reaching the number.

Among current Princeton men's players, Douglas Davis, a junior, currently has 911 career points, while Dan Mavraides, a senior, currently has 844 (with at least 16 games to play, at his current scoring average, Mavraides would score 225 more; if he does reach 1,000, he would have done so while scoring the fewest as a freshman of anyone since freshmen became eligible).

And then there's Sydney Johnson. The current Princeton head coach finished his career with 1,044 points, despite never being known as a scorer. Of course, he reached 1,000 in style in a way that few ever have, TB believes: Sitting on 996 points, Johnson hit a three, was fouled and then made the foul shot to get to 1,000 on a four-point play.

Of course, that might not have been Johnson's best 1,000-point moment. No, that would be a night at Brown, and TB's promised cautionary tale.

That night, Brown's Eric Blackiston, a fine player for the Bears, entered the game against Princeton with 999 career points. Plans were made to stop the game when he reached 1,000 - except, hounded all over the Pizzitola Center by Johnson, Blackiston got shut out that night, and his 1,000th point had to wait until the next night against Penn.

As for Micir, she's been shut out twice in her career, both her freshman year, including in the first game of the season (against Maryland) and then later in the year against Cal (in a game where she had five assists and seven rebounds).

So congrats in advance to Addie Micir, who will be the 18th player in Princeton women's basketball history to reach 1,000 career points.

Probably tonight.