Xavier Season in Review: Trevon Bluiett report card

Thanks to everyone who participated in our Banners on the Parkway postseason player report cards. We’ll be breaking down each player’s grades for the rest of this week and on into next week and maybe the following, just depending on how time allows. We’ll also be assigning and explaining our own grades of each player. We’ll start with the player who got the lowest community ranking and work our way up to the MVP.

You can’t really put what Trevon Bluiett meant to this team in words. All he did was log one of the best scoring seasons the team has ever seen, shoot 41% behind the arc, sink a long string of game winners or clutch shots, and play 35 minutes per game. He wasn’t always demonstrative, but he also wasn’t afraid to let you know who had just stuck the dagger in. He, and fellow senior JP Macura, embodied Xavier with never say die attitudes and an unflinching belief in themselves. Xavier never felt out of a game when Trevon was lurking. The team may go on to find the heights of the Final Four, but they aren’t likely to ever have a scorer this good again.

Offense: A+

What more do you want? 19.3 points on an offensive rating of 118.7 and a shooting line of .437/.417/.848. That’s not a gunner’s line, that’s the line of a scorer who can also really shoot the ball. Trevon threw in 2.5 assists per game on a 13.3% assist rate and a turnover rate of only 13.4%. For a player with a usage rate of 24%, that turnover rate is excellent. Trevon was careful with the ball, he passed it well, and he shot it well. Not only that, he got to the line a lot and he converted well when he got there. Seriously, what more could you want in a leading scorer?

Defense:

Let’s talk more about how could Trevon was on offense, though he was the fourth best defensive rebounder on the team. KenPom awards an MVP for every game a team plays. Trevon won Xavier’s more than a third of the time this year. It’s vital for a team so reliant on one guy that that guy doesn’t go into a slump. Only once this season did Trevon have an offensive efficiency under 100 in back to back games. In both of those he still managed to score double figures. On February 14th, Bluiett served up a Valentine’s Day treat for everyone, going for 37/7/4 against Seton Hall in a game where Xavier needed every point they could get. Trevon was built to score, Xavier fans should remain eternally grateful he employed that gift here for four years. (And let’s maybe not talk about the way he played defense.)

Overall: A+

Trevon Bluiett is a Xavier great. He left with perhaps his best season, scoring dominantly on occasion and cracking the 20 point mark in 20 games. Every single game he was the focus of the other teams game plan, and every game he came out and delivered his best effort anyway. In four years, he turned himself into as close to an unstoppable scorer as the Musketeers are every likely to have.