Furman’s Matt Rafferty ’19 has landed on\u00a0Sports Illustrated’s list of the top 50 male NCAA Division I players in 2018-19.<\/p>\n
In a story headlined “The Top 50 Players in College Basketball This Season”<\/a> that was posted on March 14, Rafferty came in at No. 34 \u2013 just ahead of Villanova’s Eric Paschall. SI notes that Rafferty, a senior from Hinsdale, Illinois<\/a>, “led the nation by a healthy margin with 8.3 total win shares, filling up every part of the stat sheet for a Furman team that cracked the top 25<\/a> for the first time in program history.”<\/p>\n Win shares is a metric that calculates the number of wins a player produces for his team. Furman has set a school record for single-season wins with a 25-7 record.\u00a0Rafferty had 15 points and 17 rebounds in Furman’s 76-68 overtime upset of No. 8 Villanova, the defending national champion, on Nov. 17.<\/p>\n Rafferty leads the Paladins in virtually every statistical category this season, averaging 17.2 points, 9.1 rebounds, 4.3 assists and 2.5 steals. His 79 steals are a school record, and his 61.7% field goal shooting is the second-best performance by a Furman player ever.<\/p>\n A business administration major, Rafferty ranks third in Furman history in career steals and is also eighth in rebounds, 12th in assists and 23rd in scoring.<\/p>\n The Paladins will found out their postseason fate on Sunday when the NCAA announces the 68-team field for the men’s Division I Tournament.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Furman’s Matt Rafferty ’19 has landed on\u00a0Sports Illustrated’s list of the top 50 male NCAA Division I players in 2018-19. In a story headlined “The Top 50 Players in College […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":7892,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,24,20,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-athletics","category-business-and-accounting","category-in-the-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}