Click for the new 25 new teams in the Value Add Basketball Game and on click here for the 10-minute video rotating highlights of the two Birds above - Sue and Larry. Scroll down for the updated Bird vs. Magic line-ups. UConn's 2002 team with Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi - who will we will play next - could be the best team in the game at first glance. For 2002 they both hit an incredible number of threes, and just never let their opponents score.
See this blog for the incredible first game of this tournament - featuring Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi against upset-minded Delaware and Elena Delle Donne.
The 25 new teams include 16 women's teams to make sure we had cards for all 40 of the greatest college women's players of all time, then nine men's teams. NC State and Purdue were added for their first Final 4 in years, while the other seven won an NCAA game this year and did not have a team in the game until now.
The week of the biggest college women's game to date (Caitlin Clark's Iowa vs. Dawn Staley's South Carolina) we updated the line-ups for the biggest men's game in history (Larry Bird's Indiana State vs. Magic Johnson's Michigan State). We did the latter because a reader noted we did not have the players in the same positions and the Spartans usually ran - so we corrected that and looked up the title game and saw Larry Bird was actually the center for Indiana State that day so did their line-up as well (see both revised below). The biggest change is at point guard, where Steve Reed is now the starter for Indiana State and Terry Donnelly for Michigan state in the game.
UConn is the number 1 seed in this new tournament and looks every bit as good as Tennessee 1998, who won our tournament of the teams already in the game, and Connecticut 2016 with Maya Moore, who we seeded as #1 in that tournament. But all of the teams in this tournament have one of the greatest 40 players of all time, and for the 16-seed that is Elena Delle Donne trying to pull her team to a huge upset.
It looks uphill as we rank this UConn team a +14 to be tied for first of all great teams, and Delaware a -12 compared to the other great teams in the game (so still much better than most teams in their season) so it will take some great die rolls just like it would take a great game by Delaware and off night by UConn in real life to make this one close. The #5 seedVirginia team in the tournament is Staley's team as a player.
The 9 new men’s include two teams that made their first Final 4 in many years – NC State and Purdue, and the other teams who won at least one tournament game and did not yet have a team in the game; Colorado St., Duquesne, Grand Canyon, James Madison, Oakland, Utah St. and Yale.
Here are three starting line-ups. First, yes the "other Bird" from
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