Lauren Betts and UCLA are for real — Karl Smesko talks Atlanta Dream
The IX: Basketball Wednesday with Howard Megdal, Jan. 22, 2025
Welcome to Basketball Wednesday, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. I spent a chilly Monday at the Coretta Scott King Classic, a terrific event put on by Playfly Sports at the Prudential Center in Newark. There was plenty of talent on display all afternoon, but one figure loomed over the entire proceedings: Lauren Betts of UCLA.
Continue reading with a subscription to The IX
Get unlimited access to our exclusive coverage of a varitety of women’s sports, including our premium newsletter by subscribing today!
Already a member?
Login
Basketball Wednesday
The Bruins bear the Baylor Bears, 72-57, holding Nicki Collen’s team to 27.5% shooting from the field. This was most evident at the rim — Baylor shoots 65.4% at the rim this season overall, per CBBAnalytics. But that includes a 7-for-30 mark at the rim against Betts and UCLA on Monday, and Collen was under no illusions about why this happened.
“When you have someone like Lauren Betts at the front of the rim for much of the game, you rush your shot,” Collen told us in the postgame press conference. “You mishandle the drop pass that you normally catch and lay in because you’ve got to go up really quickly. So I think a lot of of our misses can still be attributed to [Betts and UCLA], because they speed you up a little more than you want to because of their length.”
Baylor was a top-20 offensive efficiency team entering the game, and even after this game, still checked in at 26th in the country. But Betts simply wasn’t containable. Her nine blocks didn’t feel like anything out of the ordinary, though she set a new UCLA record in the process. She leads the country in block percentage, after all.
But her complete package is devastating. She’s just as capable of ending possessions with a rebound, or prolonging them on the offensive end in the same way, ninth in the country in offensive rebounding percentage. She’s comfortable on switches, and found herself in front of multiple speedy Baylor guards on Monday without any mismatch, a ludicrous thing for a 6’7 junior in college to manage.
And the most dangerous part of her offensive rebounding capability is how efficient she is. For the third straight season, she’s hitting more than 60 percent of her shots from the field, despite a significant increase in volume of attempts. Put another way: per Synergy, she’s averaging 1.33 points per possession on shots at the rim, meaning that a UCLA miss controlled by Lauren Betts is a far more effective offensive play than any other team’s entire offensive output in the country.
Here’s my favorite part of how much better Lauren Betts is than even the precocious sophomore I watched in amazement early last year at UCLA — she’s fast now. Not fast for 6’7, but legitimately quick, with a correlating sped-up ability to make decisions — she’s doubled her assist percentage, too — that only enhances how deadly her next-level footwork makes her.
“With the mobility part, I’ve got to give a shout out to Ash [Samaniego], our trainer, because he kicked our butts all preseason long this summer,” Betts said with a smile, reflecting on how far she’s come following the game. “Just working on fast sprints, just getting moving a little bit. And I think that has to do a lot with how I’m moving this year.”
I wish I could share the full clip of Betts’ seventh block of the night — you can see the last part of it here on this tweet — but imagine, as you see the end of it, what Betts did to reach the shooter, which was a full-on sprint down the floor, simultaneously anticipating and then beating her to the spot, before simply shutting down the attempt as much as swatting it away.
It’s this final part that matters, a lot, for what Lauren Betts can bring to the WNBA. Much of the afternoon on press row was spent trying to find recent comps to her, and there really aren’t any. She’s so far ahead of the offensive polish and skill we saw from Teaira McCowan, even Kalani Brown at this point in their college careers, that the 6’7 height isn’t a helpful guideline. Imani McGee-Stafford, who had more offensive moves, was a very different player, more range but not nearly as strong as Betts, and less efficient at the rim, too.
There are elite bigs in the league right now — A’ja Wilson, Aliyah Boston and Jonquel Jones, to name a few — but the first two aren’t quite at Betts’ size, with games that force the action to come to them, and Jones is far more hybrid big than traditional big. The last player with a profile anything like Betts is Brittney Griner, who was not as efficient or skilled an offensive player as Betts is at this point in her collegiate career.
But Griner, who is expected to test the free agent market, isn’t necessarily the easiest fit for a team looking to play the modern WNBA offensive game. There were real questions whether when Griner and Sylvia Fowles retired, we’d ever see another dominant classic big as a critical part of a WNBA championship team moving forward. Lauren Betts is a forceful rebuttal to that idea.
That’s not to suggest that the Betts fit will be easy, or necessarily work on the first try. But the flip side of the decline of traditional jumbo bigs will be that as a WNBA team fits its personnel around Betts effectively, no one else will have an answer for her, either.
That’s what happened to Baylor, certainly, who began the game with 6’3 Aaronette Vonleh on her, an experienced, dynamic big who quickly committed two fouls and headed to the bench. Things deteriorated for the Bears from there.
“She had a near triple-double tonight, and I don’t think we obviously had an answer without Nettie at the defensive end of the floor for her,” Collen said. “We didn’t have the ability to neutralize her.”
Who does? Betts finished with 24 points and 9 rebounds to go along with her 9 blocks. UCLA retained the number one spot in the country, still undefeated. And the mystery deepened — not whether Baylor had an answer for Lauren Betts, but whether anyone in the country does, either.
Readers of The IX save 50% on subscriptions to The Next!
The Next: A basketball newsroom brought to you by The IX. 24/7/365 women’s basketball coverage, written, edited and photographed by our young, diverse staff, dedicated to breaking news, analysis, historical deep dives and projections about the game we love.
Subscribe to make sure this vital work of creating a pipeline of young, diverse media professionals to write, edit and photograph the great game continues and grows. Your subscription ensures our writers and editors creating 24/7/365 women’s basketball coverage like what you’re reading right now get paid to do it!
This week in women’s basketball
She’s averaging a double-double. Not so crazy, right? Well: she’s 5’2.
Cassandra Negley ran down all of the action at the CSC event. (I’m going to need to talk at length about Texas soon, and don’t miss Texas-Tennessee Thursday night at 7 p.m. ET on ESPN.)
Maybe the best game of the day was Columbia-Princeton, though.
Promising start from Unrivaled.
Great to see Kelsey Plum honored by UW.
Make time for this Kelsey Ransom piece by Tee Baker.
Is this the turning point for Arizona?
Want women’s hockey content? Subscribe to The Ice Garden!
Here at The IX, we’re collaborating with The Ice Garden to bring you Hockey Friday. And if you want the women’s hockey goodness 24/7? Well, you should subscribe to The Ice Garden now!
Five at The IX: Karl Smesko, Atlanta Dream
Order ‘Becoming Caitlin Clark’ and save 30%
Howard Megdal, founder and editor of The Next and The IX, just announced his latest book. It captures both the historic nature of Caitlin Clark’s rise along with the critical context, over the previous century, that helped make it possible — interviews with Clark, Lisa Bluder, C. Vivian Stringer, Jan Jensen, Molly Kazmer and so many others were vital to the process.
If you enjoy his coverage of women’s basketball every Wednesday at The IX, you will love “Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar.” Click the link below to order and enter MEGDAL30 at checkout.
| Mondays: Soccer |
| By: Annie Peterson, @AnnieMPeterson, AP Women’s Soccer |
| Tuesdays: Tennis |
| By: Joey Dillon, @JoeyDillon, Freelance Tennis Writer |
| Wednesdays: Basketball |
| By: Howard Megdal, @HowardMegdal, The Next |
| Thursdays: Golf |
| By: Marin Dremock, @MDremock, The IX |
| Fridays: Hockey |
| By: @TheIceGarden, The Ice Garden |
| Saturdays: Gymnastics |
| By: Lela Moore, @runlelarun, Freelance Writer |
Written by Howard Megdal
Howard is the founder of The Next and editor-in-chief.
