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Message: [QUOTE="diggerfoot, post: 4883847, member: 1673"] I know we have been at odds regarding Clark due to our respective biases, though it appears you believe you do not have a bias, you just believe those who disagree do. When I once wrote that Clark is not in the same league as Bueckers defensively I later admitted that was a touch of hyperbole. Clark is better at defense than I initially gave her credit. I still do not think she is as good at keeping her opponent in front of her and other attributes of good defense as Bueckers, while perhaps you do, but I’ll chock that up to our biases. The certainty that you have your own bias emerges when you say Clark is a step ahead of Stewart. Even if you want to give an edge to Clark offensively, there is no way her value approaches Stewart on defense. Other teams had to change their offense because of Stewart in the line up, the same cannot be said for Clark. Holdsclaw, Parker, Miller, Griner and Beard are also players whose defense surpassed Clark’s; that’s not really debatable regardless of one’s bias. As for offense, Stewart averaged about 16 shots per game. I do not know what Clark’s is, but I will take a wild guess it’s substantially more. If you go right outside the three-point line they are comparable shooters. The farther out you go the more that is Clark’s territory. The closer in you go the more that is Stewart’s. They are both capable of making shots the other can’t. As for taking over a game, in Stewart’s freshman year UConn faced a ND team in the FF that they had lost to 3 times previously that year. Despite missing the first game of the tourney Stewart had finally realized her potential. She put the team on her back to score 29 points against a team that had repeatedly demonstrated they were better throughout the year. That’s much like what Clark did against SC, except Stewart did it as a freshman. If you want to run with talking point that Stewart had better teammates: 1). those “better” teammates still were not as good as ND that year and 2) Clark’s teammates shot collectively better in the SC game than she did. That we might differ on the offensive worth of Clark vs Stewart or Bueckers, fine, we have our own biases, whether recognized or not. To overlook the defensive end of the equation to proclaim Clark a step ahead of Stewart is about as blind a bias as you can have. [/QUOTE]

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