Notre Dame won an NCAA championship without a point guard (or one who played only 14 games), then almost won it again. Last year we found a true point guard and disaster struck. Of course we didn’t win because we had no point guard nor lost because we had one, but how important, really, is the almighty point guard? ND pretty much exposed the myth of the traditional point.
In the last 25 years, AP’s Women’s College Player of the Year included 7 centers (incl. Ruth Riley), 11 forwards, but only 5 point guards, including recently Sabrina Ionescu and Kelsey Plum. There are a bunch of articles pointing out the same for the NBA and WNBA—that point guards are overrated. Only point guards Cynthia Cooper in 1997 and 1998, and Diana Taurasi in 2009, have ever won WNBA MVP's.
Does this indicate that, in order to win championships, teams need great centers, forwards, or shooting guards more than point guards? Are we overrating point guards?
On the other hand, if we look at Efficiency Rating [(Points + Rebounds + Assists + Steals + Blocks - missed FG - missed FT - Turnovers) / Games Played], last year Sabrina led all college players with 32.4 adjusted for 40 minutes. Stella Johnson, a point guard from Rider University, was third, after Rhyne Howard. William & Mary’s Eva Hodgson and Creighton’s Jaylyn Agnew were also in the top ten in Eff (Efficiency Rating). Add Breanna Wright, Valerie Higgins and Kelly Campbell, all in the top 15 in Eff, who were also point guards, and we begin to doubt these articles disparaging point guards.
Indeed, one of the criticisms of Eff is that it heavily weighs points and rebounds, not the intangibles like desire, defense, distribution, and direction of good point guards. Yet so many of the top players in Eff this year were point guards. Is this an anomaly, or are point guards, in fact, underrated?
Of course these are all scoring point guards. Is that the key to an impactful point guard? The so-called point guard must be a scoring, rebounding, assisting machine.
Now that Notre Dame has two coaches who played the point, we would expect significant emphasis on that position. We already have two coming in. Are either Alasia Hayes or Olivia Miles scoring point guards?
One more complication for your consideration—It has been argued on the Bench that Niele Ivey’s flirtation with the NBA was more or less a joke. Niele, as expected, says what she learned is translatable. How believable is that? You decide, but one thing she had to learn was that the NBA is embracing positionless basketball. Tall, long armed, and often huge men are running around and jumping like gazelles. Is this a translatable idea from the NBA? Will Niele pursue positionless basketball and go after those types of recruits?
The point guard position — overrated, underrated, important, but not as important as shooters and rebounders? And how do you think the new coaching staff will regard point guards? Will they, should they change the traditional point of women’s basketball?