Canzano: Is this as good as it gets or what?
Four great teams and one great tournament... melting before our eyes.
LAS VEGAS — The lobby of the MGM Grand Garden Arena was a fun place to post up between basketball games on Thursday.
Oregon State center Raegan Beers appeared there at one point wearing a backpack, shorts, and a T-shirt. She stood in a pair of slides and talked with her family. Not long after, Stanford’s Cameron Brink came up the stairs from the locker room with a bag of ice wrapped around her right elbow and another affixed to her lower back.
I can’t wait to see those two giants square off in Friday’s semifinal of the women’s Pac-12 Conference Tournament.
Tip: 5 p.m.
Bigger tip: Don’t blink.
Beers is here in Las Vegas. So is Brink. So is USC star JuJu Watkins. The Washington Post dispatched NBA writer Ben Golliver to Las Vegas this week to write a feature story about Watkins. As Golliver told me: “She has the talent. She has the size. She has the ball skills. She has the experience. She even has the signature (hair) bun you could put on the front of a magazine.”
On Friday, the top four teams in the conference standings meet in a mosh pit of great women’s college basketball and I have a question.
Is this as good as it gets?
Four years ago in this same tournament, I sat on press row down the street at Mandalay Bay Event Center watching the final. Sabrina Ionescu and Oregon dismantled Stanford in an 89-56 to win the championship. Ionescu’s line: 20 points, 12 assists and eight rebounds.
UO coach Kelly Graves came running over to his wife, Mary, as his team was celebrating and preparing to cut down the nets. He bounded over, then leaned over the media table, directly next to me, and planted a kiss on his wife.
I like Graves.
But maybe not that much.
I never thought I’d see anything more magnificent than Ionescu and her teammates throttling the tournament’s No. 2 seed by 33 points. It was a knockout performance. Unmatched, until I saw the four teams left in this bracket loading up for what is a Friday night college basketball bonanza.
5 p.m.: No. 4 Oregon State vs. No. 1 Stanford
7:30 p.m.: No. 3 UCLA vs. No. 2 USC
The conference has given us some great teams and featured a line of skilled players (See: Cheryl Miller, for one) but I’ve never found Pac-12 women’s basketball this compelling. The four teams still alive in the bracket are deep, talented, and well-coached. They’re all capable of reaching the Final Four.
I’ve spent a lot of time in this space writing about football and the downfall of the Pac-12. That event was laced with greed, media-rights dollars, TV, ignorance, poor leadership, and short-sighted foolishness. I’ve often talked about the “non-revenue generating sports” being dragged off to the Big Ten, Big 12, and ACC because of it. But there is no greater example of that blend of sadness and absurdity than seeing these four great teams playing out what amounts to the Pac-12’s last great stand.
The Pac-12 Network was a source of frustration for a lot of us. The content was well produced, but the network was a distribution failure. I won’t ever forget arriving at the conference basketball tournament years ago to discover the Pac-12 Network wasn’t available in the rooms of the media hotel.
As one long-time conference sports information director told me at the time: “What did you expect? I can’t even get it at my house.”
The Pac-12 Network was terrific for women’s college basketball, however. It was jet fuel for the basketball programs because it provided a guaranteed number of broadcast appearances. The coaches used the network as a recruiting tool. Players bought in. And the programs blossomed in what became the deepest and toughest women’s basketball conference in the country.
Oregon State and Washington made the Final Four together in 2016. Stanford got there the following year. In 2019, Oregon reached the Final Four and probably would have won the national title in 2020 if the pandemic hadn’t killed the season. The Ducks were that good. And in 2021, the national title game featured two Pac-12 teams (Arizona vs. Stanford).
We keep talking about major college football splitting off and someday allowing the other sports the opportunity to compete in regional leagues. Will it take a year? Two? Three? I don’t know when or if Pac-12 women’s basketball might potentially be put back together again, but I do know that on Friday we’ll be watching the closing act of something that worked.
The greatness shouldn’t be ignored.
And it’s melting before our eyes.
Stanford is ranked No. 2 in the latest Top 25 Poll. USC is No. 5, UCLA is No. 7 and Oregon State is No. 13. This conference event feels like an NCAA Regional.
Brink stood in the lobby on Thursday, talking with her Stanford teammates. Beers was nearby, visiting with her family. USC’s cheer team and band filtered through on the way to their quarterfinal game. Watkins walked past, talking with teammates. UCLA — capable of winning this thing itself — bounced by, too.
Four great teams.
Only one can win it.
Will it ever be this good again?
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Great article John. I totally agree. Just when women’s basketball has gotten to the peak of the mountain in the Pac12 and looks for greatness, the mountain crumbles under them due to the ineptness of two commissioners and total lack of oversight/greed for the almighty $ by the conference presidents!!!
These young, so very talented, women and amazing coaches deserved a hellva lot more than this!!
So very sad!😪
Is this as good as it gets? In a word, Yes. Will it ever be this good again? In a word, No. (And yet another reason why the unprecedented incompetence of the aggregate of the conference presidents should carry personal civil liability.)