I've actually been meaning to speak to Moore more on the WNBA board for a while, but wasn't sure in what context to do it. Having written the below, I thought I might as well just make a thread, and see where it goes. I'll look to post more later.
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Okay so I'm going to take the opportunity to give a love letter to Moore, who I would consider to be a bigger deal than almost anyone realizes, even in the women's game.
Maya Moore
In my assessment, she is the clear cut GOAT of the WNBA era of women's basketball - which also gives her a strong argument for all-time GOAT of women's ball - though I should be clear that this is a minority opinion as Diana Taurasi is the consensus GOAT.
If we look at pure winning, Moore stands out like no one else in history. 4 chips, and the highest career +/- of all-time despite playing only 8 seasons, which also causes her to be the most impressive impact player (using metrics like RAPM) in the history of the W in my assessment.
Moore was a player crowned in the WNBA as an MVP...but only once. Something very interesting happened to Moore's stature in the WNBA that caused her to get underrated: She was asked to play a jack-of-all-trades role rather than a volume scorer's role like she was known for at UConn where she still holds both the PPG & Win Shares records for both season and career over all other legends.
I think it's entirely possible that this was a mistake on (arguably GOAT WNBA) coach Cheryl Reeve, because I honestly think Moore could have ended up being something like WNBA LeBron with great 3-point shooting if Reeve had only adopted something more like her 2024 offense back in 2011, but the logic of it made sense. The team already had a star-level point guard in Lindsay Whalen and a star-level guard volume scorer in Seimone Augustus, and so they put Moore in a role that sacrificed both shooting and passing primacy, and that Whalen-Augustus-Moore trio would become a dynasty.
But it also led to Moore not making All-WNBA in her rookie year while Whalen & Augustus did, despite the fact that my impact-oriented assessment actually puts her as the MVP of the entire league as a rookie. Traditional box score and existing star status made it easy for people to talk about the Lynx championship success that year in terms of a team that successfully built around their two stars. However this negates an important fact:
The team had had those stars in 2010 and went 13-21, which was the 2nd worst record in the league, while in 2011 they went 27-7 which was easily the best record in the league. Their SRS improved by 11.5 points from year to year.
When you have that big of an improvement, I think we need to be skeptical that this counts as "building around a core" moment. Not that those who were there before didn't prove valuable to what was to come, but maybe just maybe, people should have been attributing more the new rookie who had just been the best player in UConn history and been drafted #1 overall.
Of course, as Moore improved to reach even higher heights, she would become the team's leading scorer, win MVP, finals MVP, etc, but I would suggest that we should see this as her rising to MVP levels, or people coming to recognize the scale of how valuable she was, but that Moore became so good that even if you just went by traditional box score and didn't factor in the massive non-box score impact, you still thought she was the best in the game.
But then, Reeve decided to acquire the aforementioned Sylvia Fowles, and to make Moore a secondary scorer again. Again, it works, but Moore's box score bigness drops and Fowles actually wins an MVP as Moore's teammate. My, probably not-so-surprising assessment: Moore was the most valuable player on the Lynx in all 8 years of her career, and should have won the MVP many times.
Okay, let me go back to the comparison with the consensus GOAT, and fellow UConn Husky, Taurasi.
If Taurasi shouldn't be considered the GOAT, and Moore should, why did people get confused?
1. Taurasi scored more, which people overrate the importance of...but to be fair, did it extremely well. I would say that in prime she had more scoring impact than Moore did.
2. In the lesser focused on parts of offense, I would say Moore was a better passer, rebounder, and off-ball offensive player than Taurasi, in addition to probably being the second best scorer of the era.
3. Less glamorous than offense entirely of course is defense. All would agree that Moore - who was honored as All-D - was a better defender than Taurasi. But here again, the impact data paints Moore as a considerably bigger deal than that, and I would say she should have been a DPOY, and been seen as arguably the best defender of her era.
4. I'll just also mention that Moore was arguably the best pure athlete in the WNBA - surely part of the reason why she was the first woman to become part of the Jordan brand - while Taurasi was not in that conversation. You wouldn't think that being a great athlete would hurt people's assessment of you, but people underrate the value of extremely high motor in the body of an extremely high BBIQ player.
5. Moore retired early at a time when the W really had faded from prominence, while a post-prime Taurasi (along with Sue Bird) to become a venerated elder stateswoman both with the WNBA and with the Olympics.
Alright let me end by discussing the end of Moore's basketball career.
After the 2018 season, Moore decided to step away from basketball to focus greater efforts in getting an innocent man out of prison. She was successful, and eventually married that man. She would have a child in 2022, and after that she would officially retire.
In terms of what it means for Moore's on-court GOAT candidacy, that's up to the eye of the beholder. But yeah, she literally stepped away from the game while still in-prime - she could have played great for considerably longer - and yet she still accomplished enough for strong career GOAT candidacy...in a sport that she stopped playing because she was doing something actually important in the real world.
Moore's just remarkable person with extreme drive and capacity to learn, and frankly I hope she goes on to do more great things in the future outside of basketball. There is no 21st century athlete that I have more holistic respect for than her.
