Happy Basketball Wednesday, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. I hope you all have plans in the days ahead to see family and friends, to take a necessary breather, and to take stock of the many ways, amid a difficult time for so many, we are also fortunate.
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Basketball Wednesday
I was reminded of the biggest reason I am so grateful for the work I get to do this weekend for a simple reason: watching the growth and development of Sarah Strong, the UConn do-everything star, during a tournament at Mohegan Sun Arena. (A lovely place, incidentally! They do the hosting thing right. It’s an argument I made long before the BIG EAST became our sponsor.)
It is impossible to reckon fully with what Strong is becoming as a player because we haven’t seen it before. Strong is a well-built, muscular 6’2, a physical comp for Alyssa Thomas, somehow, at just 19 years of age. She does many of the things Thomas does offensively, too, with an assist percentage north of 29%, and a rebounder extraordinaire, skills that are built around her hands as much or more than even her physical advantages over other young women her age.
But her skills are less pure force, the way Thomas plays, and far more advanced than what Thomas provided at a similar age back in Maryland. (And let’s just be clear, this is no slight of AT, who will be inducted into Springfield and Knoxville Hall of Fames alike someday!) Strong’s shooting range already extends beyond the three-point line. Her defensive abilities are so impressive, UConn built its transfer portal around moving her from a classic five to a roving 4/5, a position no one has really played at Connecticut since Breanna Stewart.
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There are many moments where her otherworldly combination of skills show out, but my favorite one was when she anticipated a pass to Michigan’s Syla Swords, who might have the quickest release on threes in the nation other than Strong’s teammate Azzi Fudd, and raced out to the three-point line, blocking Swords’ shot.
As she does with everything — much to the amusement of those around her, Fudd and her head coach Geno Auriemma among them — she expressed nonchalance when I asked her about the play.
“I mean, I no longer have to guard bigs all of the time,” Strong said with a shrug. “So I’m guarding guards, so I can get a hand up on the shooter.”
Right, an otherwise impossible closeout, like any 6’2 19-year-old can do, in the same game she grabbed 20 rebounds and dished out six assists. Oh, did I mention she’s shooting almost 90% from the free-throw line?
I asked three WNBA GMs if she’d be a top ten player in the league right now. All three agreed with me: she would be.
But while Strong is still coming to terms with why the ordinary things she does are so extraordinary, it is left to folks like Auriemma to put it all in context. I asked him simply: how surprised is he by Strong’s rate of development?
“You know, you can tell when you see a player play in high school, what kind of what kind of skills they possess and what kind of temperament they have on the court,” Auriemma said, implicit in his answer an assumption that everyone can evaluate talent the way he, Chris Dailey and the UConn staff can. “And I always knew this was going to happen for Sarah. Nobody knows if it’s going to happen like it happened in the NCAA tournament last year, or like it’s happening now. [But] you always knew it was there. We can play differently defensively when she’s in the game, when we have a traditional big in the game, we can play differently offensively, because we can put her anywhere on the floor, and we’re good. Now, I’m not thrilled that she had to play 40 minutes tonight, and I wish I could have given her a breather.”
Coaches are going to struggle with the notion of taking Sarah Strong out of games for the rest of her career.
And for me? Well, I was grateful he didn’t. I got to soak up every second of experiencing a new frontier of talent right in front of me. And when people ask me what I am most thankful for in this career, it is simply this: seeing something I have never seen before.
I experienced that as a teenager, when I saw a freshman phenom at Georgetown named Allen Iverson play live for the first time. Since then, I’ve chased that feeling in my professional career, and I have an informal list of times I’ve experienced it covering basketball. There was the high school tournament in Trenton where a senior named LeBron James turned the crowd into a collective of stunned disbelief. There was that night I watched a freshman at Davidson named Steph Curry wow a Madison Square Garden crowd used to seeing plenty of stars come through New York. There was the first time I saw Stewart on the floor, and Elena Delle Donne, and Caitlin Clark.
And there was that first time I saw Strong live last year. And it is all happening for her, just the way Auriemma saw it, faster than anyone had any right to expect. I am grateful for the front-row seat to chronicle how it unfolds from here. Thank you all for taking this journey with me.
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This week in women’s basketball
Terrific long piece by Jesse Dougherty on Azzi Fudd.
Jane Burns on the first Drake team.
Jackie Powell explains the new Liberty head coach selection.
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Five at The IX: Geno Auriemma, Sarah Strong, Azzi Fudd, UConn
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