A basketball game with 10 Tim Duncans would be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean and reverent. Also, boring as holy heck.
Give me personalities. Give me a Patrick Beverley. Give me a Xavier McDaniel, a Charles Barkley or a John Starks. Give me a Bill Laimbeer. Give me somebody to boo.
So you be you, Angel Reese. You, too, Caitlin Clark. Talk as much trash as you like. Wherever you like. Whenever you like.
“If I scored a 3-pointer, I’m not raising three fingers in the air as I’m running back,” Jane Wahl, the trailblazing first women’s basketball coach in CU history, told me Monday from her home in Nebraska. “But I’m not that level of athlete, either.”
LSU and Iowa played for the NCAA women’s basketball title Sunday, and folks were still talking about it Monday. Why? Because the Hawkeyes’ Clark is this insane hybrid of Steph Curry, Pete Maravich and Nikola Jokic. She’s fun. She’s fast. She shoots from the half-court logo without batting an eyelid.
She’s also copped actor/wrestler John Cena’s “You Can’t See Me” hand wave to throw at foes, especially after plunging another metaphorical dagger into a defense. So, as Reese’s Tigers were putting the finishing touches on the Hawkeyes in a 102-85 victory, the LSU forward gave the Cena gesture right back. And then pointed to the finger where her championship ring was going.
Oh, how Twitter howled. It’s tasteless! It’s hurting the team! It’s a bad example to little kids! It’s …
Hang on. Hang on.
One, these are adults. Two, they’re intense competitors. Elite competitors. Three, Clark had it coming. If she dishes it out, she’s gotta take it. (And she did.) Four, if Reese vs. Clark has got you watching women’s basketball, and arguing about women’s basketball, that’s not a good thing.
It’s a great thing.
The CU-Iowa hoops game during the women’s Sweet 16 drew 1.29 million viewers on ESPN. Context: Nuggets-Grizzlies a month ago got 1.21 million on the Mothership. The highest-rated Buffs football game last fall was 1.25 million for CU’s opener against TCU, also on ESPN.
“I mean, everybody wants to watch Caitlin Clark,” CU icon and former women’s basketball coach Ceal Barry told me Monday. “If you’re a sports fan, if you’re a basketball fan, you’ve got to watch Caitlin Clark. People that aren’t even basketball fans are talking about her. I’ve never seen a guard that good. She’s athletic, she can make shots, she can hit the open player, she can play the point, she can shoot with range.”
And she’s more, um, chatty than Barry would prefer.
”Well, I’m old-school,” the Buffs legend laughed. “I wouldn’t let my players jaw (like that), because you can get a technical. To me, taunting hurts your team, as you can get a technical foul. I think that’s a function of the transfer portal. If you come down too hard on your players, they’re going to transfer out. Well, you’ve got to keep your players in line and explain to them that, ‘That’s going to cost us.’
“I think the coach’s job is to help educate the players on what’s going to help us win. And what’s going to detract from that is if you’re yelling at officials and you’re getting a technical on the biggest stage. That’s two shots and the ball. That’s a four-point swing. You can’t do that. And habits take over under stress. I think if you do it all season, it becomes a habit. That’s on the coach.”
So would you have punished Clark? Or Reese?
A pause.
“Ohhhh …”
A chuckle.
“I coached (17) years ago,” Barry countered. “I can’t comment on what somebody else’s players (do), (what the) camera catches people doing.”
Because what’s “bad” for the game can also be good for the sport. If the NCAA could twist a few arms to tip the ’23-24 women’s basketball slate with LSU against Iowa, by all means, do it. Play it in Aruba. Play it on an aircraft carrier. Play it on the moon. We’ll watch.
Longtime girls basketball coach Carl Mattei, now at Denver East, is like Barry in that he’s old-school and doesn’t love the yapping. But he’ll watch, too.
“I always say you need a villain in sports,” Mattei said Monday. “So yes, I think it’s fantastic for the sport. It’s bringing people in to talk about women’s basketball, girls basketball. If it makes you think about what CU did, going to the Sweet 16, I think it’s tremendous.
“It’s tremendous for our sport right now, because you’re getting villains, you’re getting energy, you’re going, ‘Hey, these girls have got swag.’ You’re (getting), ’OK, what is that all about?’ from people who don’t even watch women’s basketball.”
Storylines sell. Rivalries sell. Villains sell.
Per ESPN, LSU-Iowa drew 9.9 million viewers across all platforms, making it the most-watched women’s basketball game ever recorded, with a peak of 12.6 million. Like the saying goes, it ain’t trash talk if you can back it up.
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