Well, pointing out that women aren't as big, strong, fast or athletic as men is a pretty lightweight observation, intellectually. There are hundreds of years worth of statistical data that pretty much make that a "duh".
Also a "duh": athletics is conducted pretty much universally in such a way that athletes compete against their own peer groups. There are college sports (broken down by division) high school sports (broken down by school size), little league and Pony League, senior tennis and golf, the amateur champion in the US and British Open, paralympics, weight classes in boxing and wrestling, U-18 soccer, age groups in road races, etc. And, yes, women competing solely against women. If athletes of lesser athletic ability weren't allowed to compete against each other, we'd just have one pro league and be done with it.
Many of you are probably old enough to follow - and get into - Trumbull and Chris Drury beating Taiwan. I know I did. That was flippin' awesome. They couldn't have hacked it against a decent high school team either, but it didn't make that less fun to watch them win.
Yesterday certainly wasn't a sterling example of our women's team at its best. But the biggest matchups don't always produce masterpieces in any sport. I love soccer and the last World Cup final was perfectly dreadful between Spain and the Netherlands. I wouldn't let anyone near that tape if I was trying to convince them that soccer was fun to watch (I know I'm setting up for some anti-soccer jokes here, but there have been many Super Bowls that sucked too). I happened to love the Butler final, especially in the second half, but I know casual fans didn't.
I still say, though, that two of the best basketball performances - in terms of artistic merit - I've ever seen on a big stage in 50-50 games were by our women, the Stanford semi in 1995 and the final against Tennessee in 2000. The Stanford semifinal was a clinic in how to run a high-low offense, and the Tennessee final was a clinic in motion offense (backdoor layup, open 3, backdoor layup, open 3, repeat). I put those games ahead of other blowouts where we were just simply better - since both of those games were tossups. We split two close games with Tennessee in 2000 and Stanford was expected by most (or many) to beat us. But it isn't always that easy - sometimes the other team devises a game plan to stop you and it works.
The "better fundamentals" is kind of a weak argument, though. The point of basketball is to get high percentage shots - and if you can use your athleticism to get them by jumping over people, then you should. There's nothing not fundamental about throwing the ball up near the rim and letting Blake Griffin or Andre Drummond go get it. You don't have to do a three-man weave and throw a two-handed bounce pass for a layup.
(Geez - I was all over the place with this post, wasn't I?)
.......clueless. Smaller ball hurts shooting. Are you trying to see how many stupid things you can come up with in one post?
