Four years ago, an Oral Roberts freshman guard from Rockwall, Texas made his Summit League Tournament debut in the Denny Sanford Premier Center. He shot the lights out that day, leading the Golden Eagles in scoring with 20 points as they breezed past Omaha into the semifinals.
You probably know the rest.
That wasn’t the first time Max Abmas had heaped plenty of points on an opponent, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. The future All-American would go on to lead the country in scoring the following season by averaging nearly 25 points per game, all while returning to Sioux Falls to cut down the nets and, ultimately, send ORU to the Sweet 16. Two more seasons of big-time scoring in the Summit would follow.
“Max is as good as there’s been in this league, clearly,” North Dakota State coach Dave Richman said after Abmas had scored 26 points against his team in the 2023 championship game.
The thing is, as electric a scorer as Abmas was (and still is), he hasn’t been the only one in recent memory to grace Summit courts. The league has been uniquely stocked with scorers capable of posting historically gaudy offensive numbers.
Over the past 10 years, 59 Division I players have averaged 22.8 points per game or more over the course of an entire season. Four of those – Abmas, South Dakota State’s Mike Daum, ORU’s Omi Emegano and, this year, Denver’s Tommy Bruner – have played those seasons within the Summit, which is tied with the Big Sky, Big Ten and Horizon League for most among conferences in that span.
There was staying power in those numbers too, in large part because of Daum, the Jackrabbit scoring legend that in some ways passed the baton to Abmas.
“He was one of the best college basketball offensive players I’ve coached against,” said current Utah and former South Dakota coach Craig Smith. “His versatility and intelligence put defenses in a bind. You really had to have conviction in how you were going to guard him.”
Smith would know. His great Coyote teams, including the one that won the regular season title in 2016-17, had great offenses of their own and twice had to tangle with Daum’s Jackrabbits in Sioux Falls.
That offensive arsenal somehow never resulted in Daum leading the country in scoring, but it did result in three seasons averaging 23 points per game or more. The crown jewel of that was Daum’s 51-point offensive explosion against Fort Wayne in February 2017, where he hit seven three pointers and went 16-17 from the free throw line.
That was the fifth-highest scoring game of any Division I player in the last 10 years, period. And a fellow Summit player isn’t far away on that list.
Bruner, in the midst of his own bid to be the nation’s scoring leader this season, scored 49 points in the Pioneers’ instant classic double overtime win over South Dakota in January. That outing was the seventh-highest scoring of any player in the last 10 years, with the Summit being only the conference to place more than one player within the top 10 of that list.
The dynamic Pioneers guard has had plenty of eye-popping games over his career, heading into the tournament with 11 career 30-point (or more) games. That’s tied for 14th-most over the past 10 seasons, with Emegano (8 career 30-point games) just a few spots behind. Abmas has 20 such games (and counting) while Daum sits nearly atop the mountain, having scored 30 points or more a “makes you recheck the statistic” 34 times in his career. That’s good for second most over the past 10 years.
So why tune into the action in Sioux Falls? On top of everything else, chances are you’ll be watching a historic scorer do what they do best.
