Caitlin Clark, not Paige Bueckers, is the Final Four’s peerless star

On Apr 5, 2024

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CLEVELAND — When it comes to the big shot, the breath snatcher, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark reigns, and there’s no competition. To borrow a phrase, Clark’s the Grand Canyon, while Paige Bueckers is a very large ditch. Twelve million viewers aren’t wrong: There is something expansive and monumental about Clark’s game that invites new audiences and renders other great players — even a fellow generational talent such as Bueckers — almost ordinary-seeming. That’s not an insult, it’s just a description.

The Final Four meeting between Iowa and U-Conn. is a stylistic matchup for the ages, and go on and luxuriate in all the arguments that come with it. Iowa is the nation’s top scoring offense, but U-Conn. is the dynastic blue blood with a ferocious defense. Then there are the coaches: the masterly, underrated Lisa Bluder against Connecticut’s Geno Auriemma, who may have done his finest job at the age of 70, which left him pausing in a back hallway at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse to call it also his hardest ever.

“Like working in a steel mill,” he said.

Still, no question is more intriguing than who has the preeminent X-factor, the player who can elevate everyone around her to a ring. Is it Clark or Bueckers?

Yes, yes, it’s a team game. “I don’t think there’s just like one thing that’s like, you do this, you win the game,” Clark said. “I think it’s — you have to play a complete basketball game.”

Understood. And good luck with that. Because what these two women do best is score — and lead — and the ball is likely to find its way into their hands more often than the hands of others. It seems inevitable that some sort of duel must take shape.

“Who says it won’t?” Auriemma said. “Kids are competitive. They want the win. They know what’s going on out there. They know who’s who. They know what’s what. And Caitlin comes down and makes a huge three, don’t think that Paige is going to pass the next one up and pass it to somebody. So I think there will be a little bit of that.”

Choose your pleasure: Do you believe more in the hot-pan sizzle of Clark, crackling up the floor off the dribble to launch one of those arches from the logo that vaporizes the net? Or the more tranquil poise of Bueckers, gliding in circles around the court like an osprey, so pretty but predatory? Their career tracks are remarkably similar, save for Bueckers’s unfortunate interruptions with knee injuries. Both have swept every individual award in the game; neither has been able to capture the ultimate ratification of greatness, a championship ring — yet.

They’ve known and competed since middle school: Bueckers was the top recruit in the country who committed early to U-Conn., while Clark was rated No. 4. Bueckers was the earlier star, who swept player of the year awards in 2021. “I know freshman year I was like the media darling,” she says. They met once, back in that 2021 season, when U-Conn. decisively defeated Iowa in the Sweet 16. Bueckers had 18 points, nine rebounds and eight assists, while the still-nascent Clark had 21, three rebounds and five assists.

“Honestly, that game is super blurry,” Clark said. “It…