Creating the UTEP Miners

I decided to base the UTEP miners on the current miners of the 2008-09 season. I avoided using the 2007-08 miners because I believe they had some sort of horrible record. In hindsight, my reasons were good, I just couldn't remember what they are.

The next step was to get rid of one of the Minerettes and create Brenda as a member of the team. This led to a little bit of difficulty.

First, I had an abbreviated version of Pistol Pete Maravich's stats from the LSUsports.net website. Unfortunately, it was partially incomplete. We had no information on his steals and blocks. Therefore, I had to borrow from the basketball-reference.com profile on Maravich to get an idea of how well Maravich stole or blocked.

The next problem was that while Maravich was playing at LSU, there was no offensive rebounding. Only overall rebounds were counted, and I needed offensive rebounding rates to create my new player's card. Good thing for most of Maravich's NBA career that offensive rebounds were totaled (they started differentiating between offensive and defensive rebounds in the 1973-74 season).

Finally, there was the problem of Maravich's (theoretical) 3-point shooting rate. If Pistol Pete was to be reincarnated as a female college player, we'd have to know what his/her 3-point shooting rate was. Basketball-reference would be no help, as the 3-point shot only entered NBA history when Maravich was at the end of his career and playing limited minutes.

All I had was that "57 points a game" statement to work with. After some mathematical finagling, I came up with a 3-point shooting rate for Maravich - .280.

That's not a very great 3-point shooting rate. For a modern WNBA shooting guard, you'd expect her to shoot better than .300 from outside the 3-point line. I decided to work with the limitation anyway. Brenda Dean would be a real point scorer, but would only shoot .280 from beyond the line - let's just say she was never really accurate with her shots until she could work her way in close.

I had Dean's statistics. I had the statistics of everyone else at UTEP, and I projected their current stats out to a complete 29-game schedule. All that was left were some name changes - the UTEP players would go under assumed names. It would be as if Michael Jordan were renamed "Jordan Michaelson" for copyright purposes on some XBox version of NBA Live 09.

Next up: creating the cards.