If you feel like you’ve never seen a Xavier guard going off like Quincy is, you’re not far from right.
This season isn’t off to the kind of start that makes you think it’s going down in Xavier lore. The Muskies are 5-5 so far and just recently snapped a three-game losing streak at home. Their resume is pretty sketchy at this point; there’s going to have to be some work done if they want to compete for an at-large bid.
None of that should take away from the scoring run that Quincy Olivari is on. In the last 3 games, he has dropped a cool 78 points on 21-40/15-25/21-23 shooting, or .525/.600/.913, if you prefer decimals. He has also thrown in 9 boards and 6 assists to only 2 turnovers, but I want to focus on just pure scoring for a moment, because I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a Muskies guard just carry the team like this. I mean, Xavier has scored 237 points over the last three games; Quincy has scored 32.9% of them.
So anyway, I decided to check.
Last year, Souley Boum’s best stretch saw him drop 73 points on 24-44/13-26/12-12 shooting. During that stretch, he provided 30.4% of the team’s scoring. That’s not quite the output of Olivari, but we’re off to a good start. The year before that, Nate Johnson got to 69 points in 3 games on 22-34/15-25/10-12. He provided 32.2% of Xavier’s scoring in those three games.
I’ll be a little selective with comparisons going back farther for a minute. Paul Scruggs got to 69 in 3 games in the covid season, but the team scored 267 total points in that stretch and he didn’t post staggering percentage numbers. Nate Johnson went 13-17 from deep over 3 games that year but only got to 49 total points.
Nobody even approached this kind of stretch in 2019 or 2020.
Now we’re getting back to Trevon Bluiett’s time, and – as many of you might have suspected – he put up a run to eclipse what we just saw from Olivari. As a junior, he had a three-game run in which he put up 85 points on 26-43/15-23/18-26 shooting. Aside from that number from the stripe, those are blinding percentages (.605/.652/.692, to be exact). That is a staggering run of output, though a cynic would remember that it included a Shootout loss. Tre scored 33.7% of Xavier’s 252 points in those three games.
In the 2013-14 season, underrated Xavier legend Semaj Christon put together a run in which he put up 75 points on 25-41/5-8/20-24 shooting. That was good for just 28.7% of Xavier’s scoring in those games and it didn’t come in the three-point barrage the other names mentioned here posted, but any chance I get to show Semaj some love I’m going to take advantage of.
In November of 2010, Tu Holloway ripped off a cool 83 points in 3 games, spurred by a 22-39/5-16/34-41 shooting line. That’s a free throw rate of over 100%; dude was a master of drawing fouls. His teammate Jordan Crawford dropped 87 in his last 3 games at X on a somewhat voluminous 33-65/12-30/9-11 shooting line. He wasn’t bashful, that’s for sure.
And that’s as far back as good play-by-play data is readily available. So what did we learn from this? Probably not too much that we didn’t already know. Quincy has no doubt be in a rare vein of form since the beginning of December, and he has earned the right to be mentioned alongside some legendary Xavier scoring guards. To pour home points like he has with such efficiency against some pretty strong opponents has placed him above all but the best of the best that have come through Xavier in recent seasons. He may need to stay similarly locked in until his teammates find their footing if this season is going to go anywhere.