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Message: [QUOTE="jonson, post: 3843581, member: 6034"] While I believe that your initial point in this thread is a crucial one, I do wish that UCONN fans would (could?) get off the "better than" bandwagon. I believe that Paige is, in the current parlence, "a generational player," and, if I had a vote, I would certainly chose her as POY. But--to repeat myself one more time--[I]context matters[/I]--and in this case Paige's and Sabrina's could hardly be more different. When Sabrina came to Oregon she joined a program that hadn't had a decent WBB team since (about) 2000, had more recently been nearly destroyed by a previous (part-time at best) coach who wanted the team to shoot as soon as the ball passed half court, and whose play left Geno almost speechless when the teams met sometime in the early teens. The next best player on the team (Hebard) was a very raw freshman from Alaska who actually considered redshirting and who likely had not been on, would never have been on, Geno's radar. Everything, [I]and I do mean everything[/I], had to be built from scratch, with Sabrina at the center of it all. That's not the kind of challenge Paige faced this year, and will face in the years to come. I'm not saying she doesn't have ones of her own and that being at UCONN doesn't bring its own special set of burdens, but they are [I]very [/I]different from the ones Sabrina encountered, and Paige has had, and will have, a lot more help: most importantly from a long-established culture that assumes winning is a given and knows how to do that, but also from a wealth of talented teammates (in the current recruiting rankings, #1, #2, #6, #22 ,#25, + Nika, etc.) that Sabrina could hardly have imagined. (Hebard was ranked #40 and considered a major "catch"--as she turned out to be--for Oregon at that time.) Maybe Paige could have willed/led Oregon to the success it had with Sabrina; maybe Sabrina would have looked very different in a UCONN uniform. Who knows? What truly does make them comparable is the impact they have had/will have on their teammates and so the success of their respective teams. As for your first post with which I agree completely: since the Stewie years the UCONN offense has to me too often looked (for lack of a better word) "cramped" rather than the kind of masterclass in basketball at its best that had been the norm previously. Perhaps too much overthinking and/or worrying about making mistakes, and maybe some passivity as well. But, in any case, it didn't always seem to flow as it had in the past. (This seemed to me one of the major differences between UCONN and Notre Dame during that time.) This year's freshmen (but not the juniors) are, I think, already moving past that--due to Paige mostly, but also to Nika's fiercenesss, and the quiet but very formidable "don't mess with me" aura that Aaliyah exudes. And that, to me, is what makes this class quite different from some (very talented) recent ones, and I believe it will be a major difference maker going forward. [/QUOTE]

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