Spurs legend hopes McDonald can win title that eluded him

The shortest woman on the court slung a lifetime of slights over her shoulder, but not even they could slow her down. She flew down the Alamodome sideline in a blur, daring everyone to catch her, then she stopped so suddenly the national player of the year went sailing right out of the picture.

Aari McDonald was toying with people again. And after she used all the space she’d created to swish a

3-pointer with scrolling-throughInstagram nonchalance, she folded both of her arms across her chest, cocked her head to the side, and just stood there for a second.

“I was thinking in that moment, ‘I'm the dog, I'm the stuff,' ” McDonald said of one of many highlights in Arizona's resounding upset of Connecticut in the national semifinals Friday. “I was thinking, ‘Nobody can stop me.' ”

Across the country, a million riveted viewers believed that sentiment. But a few miles away, just across town, one guy in particular understood it.

Of all the 3-pointers ever made in the Alamodome, Sean Elliott swished the most memorable one. He knows what it's like to stand on that floor and feel like “the stuff,” but the 1999 “Memorial Day Miracle” is not the only experience linking the entrenched Spurs legend to an

emerging Arizona one.

Like McDonald, Elliott knows what it's like to build something in the desert from the bottom. Like McDonald, Elliott knows what it's like to lift the Wildcats to where they've never been. And like McDonald, Elliott hopes her NCAA Tournament story ends differently than his did.

“We came out of nowhere,” Elliott said of the 1988 Arizona men's team that made the Final Four. “But we didn't finish it.”

He thinks McDonald's version of the Wildcats can Sunday against Stanford, in no small part because he loves everything about the 5-foot-6 dynamo's repertoire.

Elliott hates the term “twoway player,” insisting everybody should take both ends of the floor seriously, but even he can't help be impressed by McDonald's penchant for applying relentless pressure on defense while still leading the NCAA tournament in scoring at 25.4 points per game.

“She's shifty, she's clever, and she's got such a quick trigger,”

Elliott said. “It's really something to watch.”

It is the story of a charismatic pro prospect teaming with a culture-changing coach to bring national prominence to place once thought incapable of it.

And in some ways, McDonald and coach Adia Barnes are even more spectacular in their roles than Elliott and Lute Olson were 33 years ago.

The parallels aren't perfect, but they're close enough.

Three years before the current Wildcats' trip to the national title game, they finished their seventh consecutive losing season with a 6-24 record. Four years before Elliott's Wildcats played in the 1988 semifinals against Oklahoma, Arizona's men finished their fifth consecutive losing season with an 11-17 record.

As was the case with Elliott in the mid-1980s, McDonald had little reason to think a Final Four trip was possible when she decided to go to Tucson. But after being recruited by Barnes — then an assistant — to Washington, she transferred with Barnes when she took the Arizona job.

The first year was brutal. But the Wildcats won the WNIT in 2019, and last season looked primed for an NCAA run before the pandemic canceled the event.

And now? In a women's tournament routinely dominated by only a few teams at the very top, McDonald's Wildcats are a bona fide Cinderella as a regional No. 3 seed that knocked off Texas A&M and mighty UConn on the way to Sunday.

Everybody in Barnes' lineup is playing well. But much like three decades ago, when a couple of role players named Steve Kerr and Tom Tolbert followed Elliott's lead, there's no doubt about who's in charge.

Said Barnes of McDonald, who was once overlooked as a recruit because of her size and somehow did not make first-team All-America this season: “She's not afraid of anything, or anybody.”

That includes Stanford, who entered the tournament as the top overall seed and has been listed as a nine-point favorite against the Wildcats. For McDonald, it's another slight to sling over her shoulder, the same way she did with an NCAA promotional Final Four video that inexplicably left out Arizona.

“OK, y'all think it's the final three,” McDonald said. “OK, we're going to show y'all. We shocked the world tonight. Keep betting against my teammates and I, we're going to (prove) you wrong.”

Just across town, Elliott doesn't doubt it, even if his alma mater's opportunity evokes a rough memory. He went on to NBA glory, but to this day, when he and his Arizona teammates get together, they can't help reliving the heartbreak of a championship that slipped away. “We still feel that,” Elliott said. But if McDonald can replicate the Memorial Day Miracle with one on Easter?

Maybe she can feel something Elliott didn't.