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Though she appears destined to fulfill a bold prediction from her late father, Charli Collier s path to the top of Thursday s WNBA draft was anything but preordained.
Now that the 2020-21 women s college basketball season is over, we finally know which players will be available for the April 15 WNBA draft. With the NCAA s blanket eligibility waiver due to the coronavirus pandemic, seniors are able to return for another season, and some players who earlier were on our draft board opted to do that. Among the prominent draft-eligible juniors, one of our projected first-round picks UConn s Evina Westbrook is also remaining in college for 2021-22.
WNBA coaches and general managers use the NCAA tournament for evaluation, and sometimes it can boost a player s stock. Arizona s Aari McDonald, for instance, started at No. 2 in our first mock draft last December, then dropped to No. 8. Her March Madness success has her back in the top five.
Two No. 1 seeds fell Friday night in the 2021 women s Final Four. Now two Pac-12 teams are headed to Sunday s national championship game.
Behind a smothering defense and 26 points from senior point guard Aari McDonald, third-seeded Arizona upset No. 1 seed UConn 69-59 as the Huskies lost in the national semifinals for the fourth consecutive NCAA tournament. Paige Bueckers had 18 points and wrapped up her freshman season with 108 points in the NCAA tournament.
Stanford, the overall No. 1 seed, awaits after beating No. 1 seedSouth Carolina 66-65 on Friday in San Antonio. It s the first time two Pac-12 teams will face off in the final, and the first championship game featuring two schools west of the Mississippi River since 1986.
Photo by Elsa/Getty Images
The Arizona Wildcats earned a No. 2 seed in
Swish Appeal’s hypothetical NCAA Tournament bracket in 2020. So did the UCLA Bruins and Iowa Hawkeyes. The Northwestern Wildcats and Oregon State Beavers were 3 seeds and the Florida State Seminoles and Indiana Hoosiers were 4 seeds.
That handful of non-dominant programs represented the parity in women’s college basketball, which had only increased since the 11-time national champion UConn Huskies last won the title in 2016. Related
At the beginning of this season we knew that UConn still wasn’t back to being a prohibitive favorite (even though they had added No. 1 Hoop Gurlz recruit Paige Bueckers) and by season’s end the door was wide-open for any of the top seven overall seeds to win the national championship. We also knew that many of the teams in the 3- to 7-seed range could make runs as well.