Paige Bueckers vs Caitlin Clark
Injury a potential limiting constraint on Bueckers ability to generate the career Clark has generated. Maybe that changes tonight?
Injury: A Limiting Constraint to Matthew-Like Effects
At Absolute, we like to use current real-life scenarios to expand our knowledge of human performance at the highest level to become better strength practitioners. Tonight's Women’s Final Four gives us another opportunity to do just that when two of the best college basketball players will be competing on the court against one another - Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and Connecticuts Paige Bueckers.
One has to have lived under a rock for the past couple of years not to know who Caitlin Clark is. Clark's play and Iowa’s team success have garnered her rock star status - and rightfully so, as she has no doubt earned it. What is interesting to casual observers like us, who only follow during the March Madness part of the season, is that there are some basketball analysts in the media who have the opinion that Bueckers is a better basketball player than Clark.
Now, we are not going to get into the ongoing debate about who is better, as that is way outside of our circle of competency and, in our opinion, just media noise - it is not stimulating to think about in this matchup. What is interesting to think about as strength practitioners watching these two athletes and their teams compete against one another and propel women’s basketball to new heights is: what if Buecker had not been constrained by injury? What if instead of having to work to rehabilitate a tibial plateau fracture one year and then an ACL the following, she was able to train to build more internal capacity and practice cultivate even more skill?
Both Clark and Buecker are the same age, but their careers have obviously been different. Clark has been unconstrained from an injury perspective and, as a result, has been able to elicit Matthew-like effects through her play at the level of competition. Buecker's career, on the other hand, has been defined by injury behaving as a limiting constraint and, as a result, has not been able to attain the same Matthew-like career effects of Clark. Who knows, maybe that will change the outcome of this head-to-head matchup tonight.
What do you think?