What We Talk About When We Talk About Brittney Griner

Couple thoughts:

• DD has said - and I may not be getting it exactly right - that people who criticize women's basketball don't watch it or don't know the game. But they do. They watch men's basketball. They know basketball. And if your contention is that they are two different games, two different sports, I could post about 500 links about UConn "breaking UCLA's record" a few years ago that will illustrate that, when it's convenient for them, women's basketball fans claim otherwise.
• The best men's basketball comps to Griner are probably Yao Ming and Manut Bol. Both received plenty of grief for their out-of-place looks. In women's basketball, you get shit for "looking like a man." In men's basketball, you get it for looking like a foreigner.
• Lots out there about how Sam Cassel looked like an alien, too.
• ESPN: The Magazine just had a piece about Greg Craft, tying it to the fact that white guys who can't shoot in the men's game are reviled.
• Yes, the writer set up straw men. DD and others can go cherry-picking comments on Deadspin for support, but why didn't the writer of the piece do this? Why didn't she attribute her representations of public opinion to, oh, I don't know ... somebody?

 

I tend to agree with this... You can even add Cheryl Miller to this list...

 

Why would you agree with that? The greatest women's basketball player ever line is pretty simple: Babe Didrikson --> Nera White --> Nancy Lieberman --> Cheryl Miller --> Lisa Leslie.

Any other players in the debate are in it for the same reasons people suggest Kobe Bryant for the greatest debate: talking points.

 

People debate about this?

 

There are 114 posts about women's basketball on the first page of the Sports and News forum today.

 

Annie Myers and Carol Blazejowski want a word with you.

 

Griner is probably the first "greatest ever" in women's hoops to come about in the era or social media.

Basically the best compliment you can give a women's basketball player is "She could play with the men..."

I'm sure the Kate Fagans and the Christine Brennans of the world hate hearing that, but it's basically people saying, she's at another level than the rest... It's a compliment.

And we heard that about Lieberman, Miller, Swoopes, Leslie, Holdsclaw and plenty of others over the years...

 

She couldn't play with the men, though, at least not at the highest levels. How many 6-8 forwards are there in college basketball every year who dwarf her in athleticism and ball skills?

"She could play with the men" is an empty, stupid thing to say.

 

The only woman I've ever seen that I thought could play with the men is I think Cheryl Miller could have been an OK rotation player in the West Coast Conference. Never the Pac-10.

But that's just not much of an argument. As I said earlier, the NCAA men's champion would get killed by the Bobcats. It's just a matter of what the sport is within itself.

 

I wonder how the best team in the WNBA would fare against a top men's college team.

Back in the ABL days, I watched an ABL team beat the fuck out of a bad major conference DI men's college team in a scrimmage.

 

No you don't wonder that. A WNBA center is smaller than a DI shooting guard.

 

I'm thinking Teresa Edwards.