Clark’s Performance No Mean Feet
Gary Clark scored 16 points against Holy Cross and the Deacons won by 11.
If his feet hadn’t been so big Fats Waller then he would have scored 19 and Wake would have won by 14. I counted at least three times that he stepped on the 3-point line while drilling a jumper.
Some coaches, Rick Pitino among them, are said to go apoplectic when a player does that. I wondered in the post-game gaggle if Jeff Bzdelik shares that pet peeve.
He doesn’t.
“The ball went in,’’ Bzdelik observed. “That’s first and foremost what I care about, and it did. We can nit-pick all we want. Sometimes my mistake as a coach is I nit-pick too much, as I’m sure they’re back there (in the rear of the interview room) probably smiling.’‘
Clark said he knows he has been prone to step on the line since he arrived at Wake. That’s one reason, he said, his 3-point percentage over his first three seasons was .324. He has certainly found the range, and is making .714 of his attempts from 3-point land this season.
“I think I’ve gotten better,’’ Clark said. “My first few years a lot of times I made shots I thought were threes and I stepped on the line. I thought my 3-point percentage should have been higher over the years.
“So my 3-point percentage from my freshman year is way lower (.278) than it should have been because I stepped on the line so many times. But this year I’ve gotten better. I try to shoot them a lot deeper if you look, and I’m not thinking much about the line. But if it does happen, I mean I’m not worried once the ball goes in. I’ll get the points back some kind of way, or we’ll get the points back as a team some kind of way.’‘
There is very little about Clark that Bzdelik can find fault with over the first eight games of the season. Clark, after averaging 2.7 points over his first three seasons, is scoring 11.1 points a game while shooting .538 from the floor and a cool .900 from the free-throw line going into Sunday’s game against UNC Wilmington at Greensboro Coliseum.
“Gary’s an outstanding shooter and he’s a very confident shooter,’’ Bzdelik said. “I want to say something about Gary Clark too. I had a fan ask me the other day on campus why isn’t Gary Clark – who is a senior and who is playing very well – why isn’t he starting? To Gary’s credit, he told me `Coach I don’t need to start.’
“So he put his own ego aside from a starting standpoint to just being a leading member of this basketball team. And that’s the kind of young man he is. He thinks about other people and he knows he’s going to play. I’m very confident in his ability. He’s an outstanding young man, and a player who played behind some upper classmen. And now he’s getting his chance to show what he can do and he’s walking the talk.”