Looking at basketball box scores are often times deceiving, and the perfect example of one’s gravitas outside the numbers is Norwich senior guard, Derek Hughes.

Hughes has just one game this season in which he scored more than 10 points, and as far as he is concerned, points mean nothing. “The only points that Derek cares about are the ones on the scoreboard,” said Norwich’s longtime varsity basketball coach, Mark Abbott. “Derek not caring about scoring, I guess in this day and age, that’s not normal.”

Hughes once described “his” perfect game to Abbott, and it was something similar to the statistics produced by Boston Celtics guard, Rajon Rondo. “Derek said he’d like a triple-double with something like 13 assists, 10 rebounds, and 10 steals,” Abbott said. Not surprisingly, points did not enter Hughes’ triple-double equation. “He said he didn’t care if he scored, he just wanted the other (statistics).”

In the span of five days last week, Hughes accumulated some of the best statistics of his career. Against Maine-Endwell, he had a career-high 14 assists to go with five rebounds and three steals. He followed that up against Owego scoring a career-high 13 points, while adding eight assists and eight steals in just about half a game’s time. Finally, against Oneonta – again playing about half a game – Hughes racked up seven more assists and three steals. The senior guard has proven an integral and invaluable component of this year’s Tornado team, and was selected as a co-Evening Sun/Smith Ford LLC Athlete of the Week.