I always felt the criticism of Jones has been unfair. What she had her sophomore year was a dynamic guard in Kiana Williams who could run the point, allowing for Jones to play other roles. Her last two years she was very much a point forward which took away from other parts of her game. Haley was very much a victim of recruiting misses.
A second 10 would be really interesting. Some more possibilities I'll add, Brooke Smith, Brittany McPhee, Erica McCall, Kiana Williams. Recency bias for me, but I don't know their teams from the 90s very well. Lindsey Yamasaki?
Jones is a tough one to place. If she'd continued her trajectory from her Soph year she'd be well up the list. Problem is she didn't even plateau, she went backwards from there. She really doesn't measure up to the all time greats, despite leading them back to a Championship after a LONG drought.
I'd like to put forward a qualified defense of Jones unrelated to the lack of a true PG at Stanford her Junior and Senior year.
As most of you know, our national championship season was peak COVID (2020-2021), during which time the Stanford WBB couldn't practice or play in Santa Clara county, which meant that for several months they had to live out in Santa Cruz, play their "home" games in a high school gym, and undergo extraordinarily arduous testing and social distancing. There's a
great story about the mental health price the team paid for that win. (To say nothing of everything else the country was going through from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2021...)
Then, just before the post-season of Jones's junior year, the Stanford WSOC goalie Katie Meyer committed suicide, and it's arguable that aspects of the Stanford administration's policy choices were
contributing factors, including a lot of "post-COVID" restrictions on socializing that had almost no basis in public health. Meyer was
really close to the WBB team,
including Jones.
Her senior year, Jones lived off campus and was pursuing a lot of NIL deals, starting her own podcast, and getting ready for the W. I obviously don't know her personally, but I've just gotten the sense that Jones was ready to move on from this chapter in her life and get past some of the adversity of that period. Jones is a class act, and I doubt she'd ever say anything publicly, but this quote
from the NYT profile on Tara really stood out to me:
Know that if your senior leaders are unhappy, your whole team will be.
Tara could of course be referring to other prior years. But given that the coaches went out of their way to exclaim in the pre-season how happy the team was and how much they were all enjoying themselves -- in contrast to the very obvious lack of gelling our team experienced down the stretch last season -- I can't help but think there was more going on behind the scenes than we were aware of as fans.
www.espn.com
