Every week leading up to the reveal of the nominees for the Class of 2020 for the Ultimate Hoops Hall of Fame, we’ll feature a possible candidate for the upcoming induction class. None of these articles will focus on anyone who has already been nominated for the Hall of Fame but has yet to be inducted. If you want to learn more about those candidates, you can visit the Hall of Fame section of our blog.

Today we’re focusing on longtime UH Arizona player Fred Dudley.

The case for Dudley

There are plenty of reasons why Dudley should be nominated for the Hall of Fame, but the one that sticks out the most to me is his consistency. No matter what league he’s played in, Dudley has put up numbers and had success. He’s averaged 26.1 points in 348 career games, with shooting percentage splits of 51/38/80. Here are those numbers across the four different types of leagues he’s played in:

Open (272 games): 26.8 points with splits of 51/38/79

Draft (39 games): 27 points with splits of 55/41/84

National Tournaments (24 games): 15.1 points with splits of 41/29/84

Vet (13 games): 30.8 points with splits of 52/38/91

The one outlier of these four is the national tournament numbers, which is understandable. Dudley is used to being the go-to scorer on his team, but that hasn’t always been the case in national tournaments. In the two tournaments where Dudley averaged the most shot attempts on his team (2012 and 2016), he averaged 23.4 and 21.7 points respectively, while shooting 47% or better from the field.

He’s always been a reliable scorer when he’s the primary option on a team, but arguably his brightest moment in UH came when he was a third option. He won the 2019 Las Vegas National Tournament with X Over as the team’s third-highest scorer at 13.3 points per game. He was converted into more of a spot-up shooter instead of a go-to scorer, and it paid off in a big way. Dudley scored 13 points against Ball So Hard in the semifinals and 21 points in the championship game against Never Off Work to secure the title.

That is the most notable of Dudley’s 12 championships. He has a national title, a vet title and 10 open titles.

The case against Dudley

The main reason Dudley has not been able to get nominated in the past two years is because of the logjam of Arizona candidates. There have been many arguments that Dudley, Brandon Walker and Donald Didlake should have all been at least nominated at this point. The only inductee Arizona has gotten into the Hall of Fame thus far is Adam Bickerstaff, and his success at the national stage contributed just as much, if not more than his success in UH Arizona.

Walker not getting inducted last year could really damage Dudley’s chances of getting inducted, let alone nominated. Given the past history of voting, I’d imagine Walker is a lock to get nominated again, since he has been the past two years. If Walker had been inducted last year, I’d say Dudley is a lock to get nominated, but now his chances are up in the air. We’ll see how well Arizona is represented come February.