During the Championship game ( which I recorded & did not know the outcome), I saw her seemingly reluctant to shoot. There were several instances during the comeback where she had the ball, drove to the key and did not appear to want to shoot. Counter to Arike, who never has been reluctant to shoot.
Jackie is good, but unless you need a guard/forward, to compliment your team, I don't see her being the top pick.
Don't they have McBride, Plum and Jefferson at guard? Seems to me they would want the best post player available to complement Wilson. That might complete their starting lineup unless I'm missing something.
Another possibility might be trading down to get more picks since I think first round is the only pick Vegas currently has.
Which is sort of it's own problem.
Last year Tamera Young was their 3rd-leading player in minutes played (behind Wilson and McBride). That would be the spot Jackie would fill, playing on the wing alongside McBride.
Laimbeer said that Durr and McCowan are the top two players in the draft in a pre-draft conference call last week. But that was before he was allowed to talk about Young.
They could very well just take McCowan to go alongside Wilson in the frontcourt. But they also could just take Young or Durr if they think one of those two are the best player available.
I think McBride can play either 2 or 3, so either Young or Durr would allow them to replace Ty Young in the starting 5 and get a nice upgrade to the lineup.
can stay afloat being underwritten by the NBA.
Sure wish that were the numbers coming in next year
I would like to see the WNBA push back the draft another week and give juniors who are eligible a week to decide
they want to leverage the FInal 4 into the draft into the start of the season. Also Weds is the last day of the NBA regular season and everyone knows more basketball TV eyes go on the NBA when they are in the playoffs. WNBA does not want to compete with that. They start their season as the NBA playoffs is finishing of the conference championships and right before the NBA finals which start May 30.
First preseason game starts May 9 (a month from now) with the CHinese National Team playing the NY Liberty. How's that promotion with Xu. The WNBA season starts May 24th. Oh and by the way the major funding source for the WNBA is the NBA and ESPN.
It's not fair but they need the draft midweek after the NCAA championship if they want to promote the WNBA and launch the season while the NBA is still playing it's most watched games. They get the college players who still are fresh in mind from the recent tourney and season. It's not a bad business model.
It's not like football - you don't have to scout thousands of players.
It's hurt us twice with these hurried decisions. They can't focus on the game because of the choices weighing on their minds. If they had a couple days at least, they could wait until after the tourney to make the decision.
It's not fair to the young ladies and not fair to the teams
but truth is the whole stay or go to the WNBA has been out there for Jackie for quite awhile and I seriously doubt this is something that she wasn't aware of before the season started. I'm be shocked if she and her family haven't thought this through and made what they feel is the best decision and that they weren't really under the gun with new information/opportunity that comes up suddenly.
She wasn't herself - I'm guessing this decision was the reason. Maybe Ionescu staying affected the decision - if there was more time, Ionescu might have waited too.
While Jackie knew all season, her stock rose towards the end of the year when mock drafts were coming out.
Now even with a few extra days, we don't know her play would have been any different, but some time after the season ends would seem more fair.
This is ridiculous- The only thing that happened was the final. Jackie has 4 points on one of her worst shooting days and then announced she's coming out. Now she's #1. Jess gets a double double and drops 8 places to the second round. It is also the lowest she's been all year on any ESPN mock drafts. No change for Arike, Bri,and Marina. Other big changes were Kalani Brown moved from #11 back to #5 and MVP Jackson from #35 to #22 moving up one round (as I predicted) replacing Buffalo's Dillard (#23 Sat dropped to #26 Tuesday). By the way I posted the Sat mock in the attached link.
The other big change which is telling me the for ESPN the WNBA draft is more a made for TV event was that the Chinese player Han Xu, a 6-9 center moved up from her Sat #17 to #11. Basically they swapped Jess down for her and put Xu in Kalani Brown's Sat spot and move the Baylor champion back up to #5.
Guess what, the 12 players invited are now the new top 12 picks. MY guess is they were hedging their bets if ND won to invite 3 players and when we lost they wanted an international player., either Austalia's McGregor or Xu and got the Chinese center to come. Also it's more fun to have a controversial #1 pick of an entering Jackie who declared early vs Durr. It's just a mock so they can use it to promote and still be wrong.
I will be watching Wednesday, but those changes were not justified based on changes in player's scouting over those 2 days, but TV purposes only. I do hope Jackie get's number 1, but I still think Arike will be the star from this draft.
I wouldn't think too hard about it.
Probably Voepel heard some chatter that caused her to revise her projection.
In reality, the players stat lines in the Final Four won't affect their draft status at all. The overall body of work is what matters.
makes it even more ridiculous how overlooked she was for various awards.
Professional teams are drafting based upon projected production; post-season college awards are supposed to be based upon past production.
Not enough production to even get first team All-ACC?
Samuelson was a WBCA All-American with 18.5 ppg, 6.8 rpg, 3.9 APG.
Basically, Jackie didn't score enough points to get these honors, which is the type of "production" that gets attention.
That's the way things go but I still think she earned way more recognition than she received.