I usually live in the land of cumulative season statistics
(I’m a sucker for large sample sizes), but it struck me today that it would be
interesting to go through the Individual
Game-by-Game Box Scores on the Calvin Sports page to try to get a glimpse
at how some of the players progressed throughout the season. You could pretty
much pick any range of games to do this, but I decided to stick with a simple
50-50 first half/second half approach (because small sample sizes tend to
frighten me). This is easy enough considering Calvin played an even number of
games (26).
I picked Tyler
Dykstra to profile first, but I’ll admit to not choosing completely randomly
(though his name immediately came to my mind). A quick glance at his numbers
confirmed my thought: although he was never a big scorer, he was a bigger part
of the offense as the year went on. He’s an ideal candidate to track
development though. He’s young, he played in nearly every game (25 of the 26),
and his length and athleticism leads to lots of potential.
32 - Dykstra
|
G
|
Min
|
MPG
|
Pts
|
PPG
|
1st Half
|
12
|
108
|
9.0
|
6
|
0.5
|
2nd Half
|
13
|
204
|
15.7
|
63
|
4.8
|
Total
|
26
|
312
|
12.0
|
69
|
2.8
|
As I said, he never became a huge part of the offense, but I was floored to realize that he only
accumulated six points through the team’s first 13 games (he only played in 12
after not appearing in the opener at Anderson). But this story isn’t about his
early season struggles; it’s about his strong finish to the season. Here are
his shooting numbers for the year:
