TAMPA—Twenty-four years ago, for the first and only time in the history of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament, the Most Outstanding Player award went to a player who did not win the championship. Her name was Dawn Staley. If she had made a contested layup at the end of regulation in the title game, she would have scored 25 points in a Virginia win over Tennessee. Instead, she scored 28 points in Virginia’s overtime loss.
The final score did not really change anybody’s assessment of Staley’s play, and America had not yet overcooked the word “legacy.” The loss was hers to process; the performance was ours to admire. And this brings us to Paige Bueckers.
Bueckers and the UConn Huskies face the Staley-coached South Carolina Gamecocks in Sunday’s championship game, and if Bueckers plays well, she should be the MOP, no matter who wins. The award goes to the most outstanding player in the tournament, not just the Final Four. In five tourney games, Bueckers has averaged 26.4 points on 55% shooting, including 52% from three-point range, and she has been an offensive playmaker and a defensive force. The only players who have come close to her impact are UCLA’s Lauren Betts and Bueckers’s teammate Sarah Strong.
Bueckers is the rare UConn superstar who has not won a championship. In her final game, Bueckers has a lot to achieve and nothing to prove. The distinction is important.
“A great freakin’ player,” Staley said Saturday. “Anybody would start their franchise with Paige because of her efficient way of playing, because she’s a winner, because she cerebrally just knows the game, just has an aura about her. And she’ll be the No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft. And she’ll be an Olympian. She’ll be all those things. …
“She’s a great player. But just because you’re a great player doesn’t mean you need to win the national championship to legitimize it. Paige is legit. She was legit from the moment she stepped on this stage or prior to [growing up] in Minnesota. Her career is legendary.”
People get this backwards all the time. Even if you don’t watch the sports-yammer shows that are a daily exercise in intellectual dishonesty, they have an effect on the discourse. Kevin Durant would never admit this, but he has allowed this problem to shape his entire NBA career: He left Oklahoma City for Golden State to prove he was a champion, but when he did it and people said he was a front-runner, he left to prove he wasn’t. It was all absurd, because anybody who watched Durant with the Thunder understood he was an all-time-great player already.
Bueckers is an all-time great college player—just as Caitlin Clark was, even though Clark lost in two straight title games. Bueckers has played in four NCAA tournaments for UConn. She missed the 2023 postseason because of an injury, part of an awful run of injury luck for her program. UConn coach Geno Auriemma said candidly Friday, almost as an aside, that “we had no chance to win it those years, because we didn’t have enough players.”
The Huskies have a great chance to do it now, because they are healthy, because they are deep and because they have had the best player in the country this month. This doesn’t mean the Huskies will win; South Carolina is loaded, too. But this is the first time in Bueckers’s four postseasons that her team is favored to win a championship—and, of course, it will be the last time. That creates more pressure.
“You don’t want to get caught up in the moment of being so anxious and trying to win the national championship in one possession that you’re just psyching yourself out,” Bueckers said Friday. “Be present with the team, be where your feet are and try to win every single possession that’s in front of you. Play the entire 40 minutes.”
Judging Bueckers’s career by whether she wins a championship is both reductive and distortive, and it’s a disservice to everybody: to Bueckers, to her teammates and, as Staley pointed out Saturday, to her players as well. South Carolina is trying to win a third championship in four years, and a second straight without a truly dominant player.
“It happened to us last year,” Staley said. “Everything was about Caitlin Clark and her legacy and her ability to win a national championship. Yet we were coming into this thing undefeated, doing something that’s unprecedented at the time, because it’s hard. It’s hard. We find ourselves back here in a similar situation.”
Twenty-three years ago, a year after Virginia’s championship-game loss to Tennessee, Staley found herself back in a similar situation: Final Four, seven seconds left, trailing Stanford by one. Stanford missed a free throw. Staley grabbed the rebound but lost control of the ball. Stanford won, then beat Western Kentucky for the championship. The TV footage is fuzzy, but Staley’s accomplishments were not.
An extraordinary career will end Sunday. But so will the seasons of two fantastic teams. Bueckers does not seem to be caught up in the narrative about her needing a championship: “I think we all want it. Both teams want it. We all want it as individuals, as a team.” If UConn wins, it will be a day she’ll always treasure. If not, the loss will be hers to process; the performance will be ours to admire.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Paige Bueckers Has Something to Achieve, but Nothing to Prove in Title Game.
