Oakland's Travis Bader Scored 47 Points and Nobody Heard About It

By Ryan Darcy
Mike Carter-USA TODAY Sports

Oakland Golden Grizzlies‘ junior guard Travis Bader missed his final 10 three-pointers in a blowout loss to South Dakota and head coach Greg Kampe was asked if Bader was shooting too much. “He should have been 0-for-20,” Kampe said. “He’s the man.”

Bader is 6th in the country in scoring at 21.6 points per game but first in points scored, so . He hoists up nearly 16 shots a game and makes roughly six of them. He shoots 39.2 percent from the floor but 39.9 percent from deep. Is Travis Bader a ball hog? Ball hog, no. Volume scorer, absolutely. There has yet to be a game he’s played in this season where he hasn’t attempted at least 12 shots.

Ask anyone around the Oakland campus if they care and you’ll probably get a resounding no. He’s making the athletic department–namely Kampe–look like a genius. He also puts it down in the classroom–Bader was a DI-AAA SCHOLAR-ATHLETE for the 2011-12 season and currently carries a 3.32 GPA in Communications. Sounds like he’s got a future one way or another.

After all, where would the Golden Grizzlies be without him? My guess is way worse than their current 10-13 record.

Despite his unabashed shot selection, Kampe and the Griz need him to score. And score he did the next game against the lowly IUPUI Jaguars. He made 11-of-18 three-pointers and piled up 47 points–the most in Division I this season–in Oakland’s 89-71 win. Hey, when your coach wishes you’d miss 20 threes instead of 10, I guess to have free reign to shoot at will. Overall, he was 15-of-24 from the field and 6-for-6 from the free throw line. And only 2215 loyal fans saw the spectacle that was Travis Bader.

For the season, Bader has accounted for over 25% of the Grizzlies’ field goals made and better than 61% of their threes, good for 30 percent of the total points scored on the season for OU.

He’s cracked double-digit points in every game but one this year, against Michigan State, where he managed only eight points on 2-of-13 shooting.

Now that Reggie Hamilton and his 26.2 points per game have moved on to pro ball in Italy, Bader’s time finally came. I guess when your coach dubs you ‘the man’, you can shoot whenever you want.

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