I don’t deny that Caroline played well. But watch the game and you’ll see that she takes a while to find herself. I was very hopeful from that outing for her season. But then bad things happened to her. Still, as good as Caroline was in the end, I think if you rewatch the game you’ll see that Azzi was the star.
You seem to be cherry picking here. I didn’t and don’t dispute that Caitlin played well especially in March (see my comment above) and carried her team when it counted. That’s when the SC game occurred. In my opinion she earned the NPOY in games like that. But head-to-head competition gives a clearer sense of relative merit than indirect comparisons with mutual opponents or generic stats, especially in a case where one player’s season was marred by injury. If you object to my extrapolation I trust you’ll be so good as to admit that also only offered it as a very sketchy thought experiment. If you reject this, then you are in effect saying we don’t get to speculate about what could have been… at all.
Also, you cherry picked the stats from the game itself: Azzi’s stats are clearly better than Caitlin’s in that game. And trying to excuse it by conjuring up phantom fouls by Nika is a little thin. As if no one fouled Azzi (lol).
