This is part two of a two-part interview with our Kyle Ratke and Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve. You can read and listen to the first part of the interview here. 

https://soundcloud.com/kyle-ratke/cheryl-reeve-talks-lowering-the-rim-uconn-basketball-and-the-draft

KR: One topic that’s been floating around is lowering the rim. What are your thoughts?

CR: For me, I’ve always been someone that’s tried to be open-minded to improving anything. Improving the way that I coach, improving the way a player does things, improving the game. And the way that I view the lowering of the rim is one, it’s simply not practical. It creates further challenges for women who want to play basketball, much like having a smaller ball created challenges. How many gyms do you walk in and you see a smaller ball? You better bring your own ball. Well, that means you have to buy your own ball. Where are you going to get that ball? So that creates challenges for the women.

Lowering the rim, can you imagine… we’re going to walk into YMCAs and playgrounds and is everybody going to have an adjustable rim? I don’t think so. So how are we going to train? It’s going to further set us back, in my opinion.

And I think the larger issue for me is, what are we trying to do in lowering the rim? Are we trying to say that our game isn’t great because we don’t play above the rim? Then the idea of playing above the rim, let’s talk about that. An NBA game has 98 possessions per team. So 98 times two is close to 200. On average, only 7.5 dunks occur in a game. The perception is more, because when you tune into ESPN, that’s all you see, so surly that must happen every other possession right? No. So really, what is the appeal of a dunk that happens occasionally? Dunk contests, sure. Let’s watch people defy gravity and it’s entertainment, that’s great. I think for us, you brought up the Spurs. The Spurs are one of the teams in the league that dunk the fewest, second or third fewest in the league. Oh by the way, they’ve only been good for about 20 years. They are called boring. Too bad. They’re just going to win games. Win, win, win, win and win championships.

I’m really happy that the Golden State Warriors have come along because shooting has become really fun to watch and really exciting. So we’re kind of conditioning ourselves to the idea that maybe the women’s game and what we do, which is actually harder, we are playing with a smaller ball, which actually gives us a disadvantage. People talk about ‘well you missed too many layups.’ If we didn’t have a smaller ball, I’d suspect we wouldn’t miss as many layups, and then again if you chart (shots), that’s not really a true statement that we miss a lot of layups. So I think there are so many things embedded in that and I think the No. 1 thing that has to happen is the social conditioning that goes on, where women are constantly portrayed to being inferior to men. So naturally I wouldn’t be somebody that would be in favor of something that would do that to us. There are a number of layers to the answer that I just gave. All in all, I think we need to celebrate all of the tremendous things that are going on for women, particularly women in sport in 2016.

KR: That’s why I made those Spurs and Warriors comparisons earlier. I probably didn’t prove my point, but we all think it’s so much fun to watch the Warriors move the ball around and with the WNBA, the greatest thing is the team ball play and it’s beautiful. If you’re moving the rim down, I don’t want to say you’re taking a step back in a way as a league, but look at what the league has already grown into and let’s just be patient. The product is still growing. It’s gotten better every single year. Let’s not press the panic button if we don’t have to.

CR: I couldn’t have said it any better. And I think, too, I’m a little bit of a history buff when it comes to the NBA and the evolution of a league. If you look at the NBA in the ‘40s and the ‘50s and the ‘60s, when the league was kind of getting its footing. It went through merging two leagues, much like the WNBA did. We had the ABL and the WNBA and we merged and it just became the WNBA. They had contraction where they started with X number of teams and lost quite a bit. We have gone through contraction. They had less than 10,000 in attendance for a number of its first 15 or 20 years.

They needed the Harlem Globetrotters to promote the games to kind of get people interested. Then along comes someone like Dr. J (Julius Erving) who was probably the only one in the game at the time that could probably do the things that he did. The game did not change, the game did not become the NBA until Larry Bird and Magic Johnson came in and created a rivalry, something really interesting to watch. Throughout the ‘80s in the NBA, there wasn’t dunking, there wasn’t high-flying. So now we’re in the NBA today and it’s a lot different. What you see is evolution of bigger, faster, stronger, so the longer the WNBA’s around, and we’ve already seen it through our first 20 years. There has been a revolution of the female athlete playing. The same thing is going to continue to happen. Exactly what you said. Let it happen naturally. It’s called evolution. It’s going to happen.

KR: It’s funny. I just listened to something on the Warriors the other day and somebody brought up ‘should they move the 3-point line back?’ and it’s like hey, let’s settle down. We didn’t get the 3-point line all that long ago in the first place. Pump the brakes.

CR: We always want to change. We always want to change things. Just enjoy things.

KR: I heard a theory of maybe each home team could have their own line. If you’re a bad 3-point shooting team, you’d have it really far back. Let’s not do things just to do things.

CR: Exactly. Gimmicks.

KR: Before we get back to the draft for a little bit. The UConn situation. They win. People think it would be more fun if UConn didn’t win. They want them to win less. And I agree. Obviously if there was a huge rival to UConn, the women’s college basketball game would be better. But I don’t know how you get there and we’re acting like this is Geno Auriemma’s fault. But do we want them to not try to win? What are your thoughts on that?

CR: Well, I’m angry. My angle I come in is coaching. I’m angry that a top-10 ranked team can get beat by 30, 40, 50 to UConn women’s basketball. I’m angry about that. Because there should simply not be that much separation between two top-10 teams. Obviously Connecticut will probably have three of the top three picks in the draft, like you said, that’s not Geno’s fault. Without Geno and UConn, what are we striving to be? They set a standard of excellence that we are all chasing. That the rest of college basketball is chasing to be better.

So we need excellence. We need to be shown the way of what excellence looks like. If you don’t have that, then the game doesn’t improve. I think in the end, Geno’s going to get a lot of credit for improving our game which is what should happen. I think athletic directors need to step their games up. They need to make sure that not only the hiring process, but that they’re scrutinizing, holding accountable, all those sorts of things. But I also think resources that you’re putting into it. They have a responsibility in growing this thing.

I think we need to look at Connecticut and say ‘we can’t let this happen.’ It’s not Connecticut’s fault. You keep being Connecticut. You keep doing you. We need the rest of the college population to improve. Coaches, players, in terms of accountability, training – what’s going into it, how hard the players work. Because I have to tell you, I’ve been around UConn and been in their practices. I’ve been around USA Basketball, so I’ve been in the trenches with Geno from a coaching perspective and it’s not that Connecticut has players that are head and shoulders, or not even head and shoulders, light years ahead of players they are playing against.

Breanna Stewart is special. UConn gets those special players. OK, those are harder to contend with. But there’s not enough of them that you shouldn’t be able to neutralize in more of a balanced effort if you don’t have a Breanna Stewart. So I just think that the accountability, how you approach, what you accept in practice. What coaches accept. I have observed a number of practices and shootarounds and it astounds me that there’s only a few programs that hold the kind of secret to what it takes. And if you heard what it is, you’d be like, ‘that’s all they do? That’s it?’

Quite simply, if you ask each of the Connecticut players, there is an expectation of whether it’s excellence, striving for perfection and what that means to them. You can say that and people say ‘yeah, that’s great. We’re all striving to be perfect.’ No, you’re not. Because what the difference is what UConn does in practice. Come to our practices and watch Maya Moore and you’ll see a UConn player at work. They’re all like that and that’s because it starts with Geno and that he pushes them to reach those heights and there’s an expectation in that environment that there are minimums – non-negotiable – that you’re going to do every day. And it’s the highest level of competition. Whether you’re in a drill, whether you’re in a scrimmage, whatever it is. It seems one of those things that’s simple, but it is amazing to me how it’s so lost on so many players and coaches.

KR: You mentioned Stewart and don’t get fired, Kyle, but she’ll be at the top of the draft board. It’s a week away. Seven days away. I want to say it’s on ESPN 2 from Connecticut. Is the work done? Probably finishing some scouting, the draft on Thursday, maybe taking some calls… You don’t really know what to expect, right?

CR: Yeah, you don’t know what’s going to happen 13 places ahead of you. But you’re pretty sure you know what’s happening at No. 1, I’m pretty sure I know what’s happening at No. 2, even No. 3 I could go out on a limb. So that’s not even a consideration. The draft really starts at No. 4 and what begins to happen around there. What we’re doing at this point, so all the evaluations are done. We’ve got our rankings, our top-20, ranks by position. You might move someone subtly in-between now and Thursday.

Your own roster dictates where you might go with us having two picks in the second round, relatively close, there’s going to be some probably some big challenges on what you do at 14 vs. 22 with what happens ahead of you, so it’s really about draft day having all scenarios laid out, possibilities, and work through them. If this happens, this is what we’re doing. If this happens, this is what we’re doing. If this and this happens, this is what we’re doing. And so that’s what you have to try to anticipate. What phone call you might get within now and next week that could change things. Maybe something that you have to consider that a team says, ‘hey, when you’re picking at 14 and so-and-so is available, we’d like your pick and here’s what we’ll give you for it.’

You have all those things kind of swirling in your head and written on a board of possibilities and you work through them because when it’s the time of the draft and the minutes you have between the selections that the scenarios have already been worked through. You’re not debating anything in those two or three minutes you have. You’re just executing what you’ve already discussed so that’s what between now and next Thursday, that’s what we’re going to be working through – the number of scenarios that might present itself.  

The WNBA Draft will air on ESPN 2 and will start at 6 p.m. CT on Thursday.