Stanford Wins N.C.A.A. Women’s Basketball Title for First Time in 29 Years
“Playing in the Pac-12, we got better as they got better,” VanDerveer said in a postgame interview.
Stanford beat Arizona twice this season, winning by 27 points in January and by 14 to win the regular-season title. Through previous matchups and lessons learned from Arizona’s tournament run, Stanford determined the key to winning was to suppress McDonald, who led her team to the final by scoring 26 points against UConn in the national semifinals. This was her 93rd consecutive game with double-digit scoring, the longest active streak in women’s college basketball. Redshirt senior Anna Wilson, the younger sister of Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson, and freshman Cameron Brink had her locked down for significant portions of the game.
McDonald, the Pac-12 player of the year, fought her way through Stanford’s defense to earn 22 points on 5 of 20 shooting from the field and 4 of 9 from 3-point range.
“Aari, hands down, no doubt, is the best player in Arizona’s history,” Arizona Coach Adia Barnes said in a postgame interview.
The matchup with Arizona marked the first time that two Pac-12 teams faced each other in the finals; out of six in-conference championships for the national title, three were between Southeastern Conference teams, two were within the Big East and one was in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
The last time the Cardinal played in the national championship — 2010 in the Alamodome, when it fell to UConn — was the last time that a Pac-12 team did as well. At that point, the league was still the Pac-10, and Stanford was largely the national face of it. Since welcoming the University of Utah and University of Colorado, Boulder, in 2011, Pac-12 teams emerged as a staple of the women’s Final Four with appearances by Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, the University of California, Berkeley and Stanford.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/04/sports/ncaabasketball/stanford-arizona-ncaa-womens-basketball-championship.html