Doctor MJ wrote:Mephariel wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:
In reality, likely none of those players will ever be as good as Maya Moore was in the 2010s.
I'm not a hater of this new generation at all, I'm excited for every one of them, but what people need to understand is that what's happening is more about a chance in the hype surrounding women's basketball than it is a sudden escalation in female basketball talent.
Now I'm not saying it's completely unrelated to the actual basketball being played because it's not a coincidence that all the players you mention are non-bigs who play fast and shoot a lot, with 3's of course being the signature shot. I absolutely believe that pace & space is an important factor in helping women's basketball players get hyped right now.
The grand irony? The WNBA had a dynasty led by a player like this right form the jump in the '90s with Cynthia Cooper. Had the WNBA been a "copycat league" in the sense that whatever was winning WNBA chips got copied by all the other teams, the WNBA would have preceded the NBA in the 3-point transformation. Instead, what's tended to happen in the WNBA is that they copy from the NBA on a delay leading to a game that's slower and stodgier...along the lines of what you'd expect watching the NBA in the early '00s.
Why wasn't Cooper a bigger deal? Because Team USA has basically stereotyped her as a role player level player and perceived her European professional stardom as just a product of a weak league. So the WNBA, informed by that misclassification, hyped a group of younger players as the future of the women's game rather than looking to hype Cooper as something like the female Jordan come home to create the best pro league in the world.
And when you hype the wrong stars, what tends to happen is neither those wrong stars nor the right stars are able to gain the momentum they need to become a mainstream crossover celebrity.
I was there watching when Cooper was playing in the WNBA. I am sorry but I think Paige, Clark, Watkins, etc. are all more advanced players. Cooper doesn't have that peak offensive style that you crave in a signature star. Clark is Curry. Paige is Chris Paul. Watkins is SGA. They each have a very high level offensive blueprint that is pleasing to watch and think about. Plus, Cooper was 34 years old when she joined the WNBA. You can't hype up a 34 year old player. But you can hype up the next generation. Clark to me is hopefully the start of the step back, long 3, shifty guard, type players that brings next level interests.
Well, I don't agree with you're characterizing styles. Clark's not primarily an on-ball rover, but more of a traditional playmaker. She shoots without hesitation like Curry, but so does Trae Young and Young is also such a playmaker, so I'd say Young is the closer match to style, and I'd also say no one was saying, "You know what women's basketball needs, a bunch of Trae Youngs!". I might actually say Paige is more Curry, I'd also say Watkins is more Westbrook than SGA.
All of this may just come across as pedantic nitpicks, but the point isn't really about who is right and wrong about the analogues so much as that there's a lot more going on here than fitting into a small set of really popular archetypes.
Re: Current WNBA players more advanced than Cooper was in '90s. That's true, although I would say the same is just as true when talking about current NBA players relative to Jordan. That's not meant as a knock on Jordan to be clear - he'd change how he played if he saw others beating him doing things he wasn't doing - but in the '90s, Jordan played like a '90s player.
Re: Can't hype up a 34 year old but you can hype the next generation. Well, now you're getting to the essence of why their starting assumptions were such a handicap.
Back in 1996, the NBA thought - because Team USA's leadership thought - that they were seeing a "Golden Generation" of women's basketball talent that would allow them their best opportunity to launch a major league since Cheryl Miller broke through in the '80s. Of course they really did win the Gold medal - the first of many in a row - after falling short in 1992, so "Golden Generation" seems like an appropriate name, but only if you ignore the connotation of "A particularly special generation of players", because the reality is that none of the players they hyped (Leslie, Swoopes, Lobo) were actually that special.
In retrospect what I feel pretty comfortable saying is this:
After Cooper was born in 1963 & Miller was born in 1964, there wasn't another female player born until at least 1979 (Tamika Catchings) that even really has an argument of being at the same level, and the WNBA was launched looking to promote a cohort born in the 1971-73 range.
That's a recipe for disappointment.
Now to be clear, what I was suggesting was a long-term hype job leading up to Cooper coming back from Europe to come dominate her home country professionally. If you do that, and then keep hyping her up as such as long as she keeps leading her team to titles, then what you have a good chance to get is all sorts of buzz around the women's game as she takes her last victory laps.
Of course they couldn't even consider doing that, because Cooper was not on their radar as a player that would be a star in the WNBA at all, so I'm not saying this was so much a missed opportunity for them as much as it was a monkey wrench they weren't remotely prepared to adjust to.
And realistically, if you know that your best player is 34, and that nobody currently in their 20s is a generational player on that level, what you probably is hold off trying to make a league, a bit similar to why buzz around such a league in the '80s really died with Miller's injury.
