This post is part of a larger list looking at some of the top individual performances in all of sports history. Check out the full list here.
When two-way great Shohei Ohtani turned his slugging slump into the greatest game in baseball history in Game 4 of the National League Championship Series, it started a discussion in the Sports Illustrated newsroom: What are some of the other top individual performances in sports? And how do they compare to Ohtani’s 10 strikeouts and three home runs?
Here are our picks for the WNBA and women’s college hoops.
WNBA: Maya Moore in the 2015 semifinals
There are (just a few) other players who have dropped 40 points in the WNBA playoffs. But there are none who have done it to lead their team to victory in such a close game, while also making an impact on so many other areas of the floor, and while repeatedly coming up so big down the stretch. The Lynx’s 72–71 win over the Mercury hinged entirely on Moore, who also had eight rebounds, four assists and three steals to send Minnesota to the Finals. In a fourth quarter that had five ties and six lead changes, Moore personally tied it twice and provided all three leads for the Lynx, notably engineering the critical final one with a steal in the closing seconds.
Greater than Ohtani? Not quite. Moore certainly had the edge in terms of clutchness. But Ohtani had a greater overall impact.
NCAA: Sheryl Swoopes’s 47-point national championship
While there are some compelling possibilities here—Caitlin Clark’s 41-point triple-double in the 2023 Elite Eight certainly stands out among recent performances, and Candace Parker dragging Tennessee to the 2008 Final Four with a dislocated shoulder has always been a favorite, too—it’s best not to overcomplicate this. There’s a reason that Sheryl Swoopes’s 47 points in the 1993 national championship traditionally gets this nod. No one has ever come up bigger in a title game. Swoopes was a virtually unstoppable scoring threat in the lane, behind the arc and at the line, which is to say, everywhere. It meant that she brought Texas Tech its first and only title with an 84–82 win over Ohio State.
Greater than Ohtani? No. Swoopes’s performance gets a bump for coming in a championship game. But a scoring record cannot quite match the all-around nature of two-way greatness.
Is there an all-time great NFL feat that tops Ohtani, or does a certain Olympian’s performance edge the Dodgers star? For more discourse on the “greater than Ohtani” debate, click here.
More WNBA on Sports Illustrated
This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Greatest Women’s Basketball Performances of All Time.