The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Stevens chooses the present over chance at national title
NEW YORK — She did not win a national championship. She did not go first in the WNBA Draft.
Azurá Stevens could have done both in 2019.
Allow me to assert Azurá Stevens would have done both in 2019. Now she will do neither. After Stevens was taken sixth by the Dallas Wings Thursday night, the 6foot-6, stretch-four stretched, smiled and said all the right things. It would not only be wrong, but it would be wrongheaded to say Stevens will not be a productive professional player.
She will be. Jonquel Jones, another 6-6 stretch four, also went sixth in the 2016 WNBA draft to the Connecticut Sun. It’s hard not to see lots of Jonquel potential in Azurá. Long, lean, talented, yes, keeping up with the Joneses would serve Stevens well.
It also would be wrongheaded for fans in Connecticut not to wish Stevens well. Life is too short and UConn has won it all too many times for Huskies fans to get all bitter about Stevens foregoing her final year of college eligibility.
Yet it also would be disingenuous not to assert that Stevens’ decision has likely cost the Huskies the 2019 national title. This is not seashells and balloons anymore with the UConn women, folks. Those days of innocence are long gone. The transfer game is a tough game, one side using the other for their own gain.
Stevens’ right, even it assures she’ll never be nearly as popular as Breanna Stewart or Diana Taurasi, is to do what’s right for her. And if on this night when she insisted she is doing exactly that, who are we to tell her she’s dead wrong?
We’re just here to tell her she’s not getting all out of her game, out of life’s experiences as she could have. It was all there for her. She could have expanded her game next season at UConn, she could have become the next huge name in the college game, could have gone into the 2019 WNBA Draft as the Next Kevin Durant.
Instead, she comes out with enormous potential, a player who did not start for a 2017-2018 UConn team that did not meet its national championship destiny, a player who made no All-American teams.
“Connecticut has been nothing but amazing to me,” Stevens said. “It was a really tough decision, but I don’t regret it.”
After Stevens announced last week she was leaving, rumors spread that she would go as high as second to Indiana. Stevens didn’t. UConn teammate Gabby Williams went two spots higher than Stevens to Chicago. There were some rumors she had colluded with WNBA teams by discussing her decision.
“Despite all these rumors going around, I did not talk to anybody throughout the year,” Stevens said. “It was just a decision I prayed a lot about and God led me to this decision.”
Stevens said No. 1
wouldn’t have meant much more than No. 6.
“Once this all kind of dies down and gets back to reality, you’ve got to go out and play,” Stevens said. “It doesn’t matter if you’re one or 10 or not even called in the first round.
“Would it have been a little bit cooler? I guess. It didn’t really make that big of a difference to me.”
OK, let’s try this. Not winning a national championship at UConn, is it tough to miss out on that chance?
“Setting out to go to UConn, I wanted to be challenged and pushed in a certain way,” Stevens said. “And that’s what I got. I also would have loved to have won a national championship. That was hard. Seeing us lose last year and the way it ended this year, but what are you going to do about it?”
I got an idea. You could have stayed.
“Would her game get significantly better with one more season of college play?” Mechelle Voepel of ESPN wrote the other day. “Especially with so much of that in the American Athletic Conference, where UConn has yet to lose a game? Probably not.
“And while this year’s draft is very solid in the first round, next year’s looks even deeper. Stevens’ chance to be a lottery pick — in the first four selections — seems better now than in 2019.”
Voepel knows the women’s game as well as anyone. But, wow, I really disagree with this assessment. UConn had the second best strength of schedule ranking in the nation last season.
So much of Stevens’ improvement has been at the most relentlessly intense practices in women’s college basketball. Stevens has gone against the best college players — her teammates. More than that, she has gone against a bunch of male practice players.
She developed a better inside game in Storrs. She made nearly 70 percent of her two-point shots, also indicative of UConn’s elite passing that leads to easy hoops.
She still needs to get stronger. Ask yourself this: If Stevens went down on the post against Sylvia Fowles, Tina Charles or Brittney Griner who do you think she’d handle the pounding this summer?
With 6-8 center Liz Cambage on Dallas, the good news is Stevens has a chance to avoid much of this.
“She’s a really talented player, really big, too,” Stevens said. “I think we’ll complement each other really well. I’m sure we’ll be able to dominate down in the post.”
As much as her inside game improved, her outside shooting was terrible last season. She was nine of 51 from outside the three-point arc. Don’t get this wrong. If you watched her in practice the past two years, you’d see what terrific range she has.
Only she couldn’t hit diddly this past season. She needs to reestablish her perimeter game.
By dropping to sixth, Stevens will not get the $52,564 for a first season the top four picks get. The next four picks get $48,626. Over the three-year first contract deal this obviously is not a great discrepancy.
Yes, she gets a chance to play in Europe and make considerably more next winter. Yet it has been my argument by staying in college another year, greatly expanding her brand, she could have made more overseas. Why not play one year at the end of her career for $1 million rather than $250,000 next winter?
Asked how the discussion went with Auriemma when she went to tell him she was leaving, Stevens said, “It was a conversation full of a mixture of things, but coach supports me in the decision I’ve made. I know I’m really happy to have that
“And getting drafted in the first round with Gabby and Kia Nurse is really special. We’ve been through a lot together. Getting to see all our dreams turn into reality is amazing.”
That reality, of course, will not include a national championship or getting drafted No. 1 for Azurá Stevens. But, hey, play on, Z. I just don’t think you got everything out of it, A to Z, that you could have.