Preseason Player of the Year

HoopGurlz.com's preseason Player of the Year for the 2007 class also is the most competitive and hardest working player in the country.

STORY & PHOTOS BY GLENN NELSON

When her team finally won a meaningful national championship, at Nike Nationals last July, Maya Moore sought out her Georgia Metros coach, Kathy Richey-Walton, and wept as they embraced. Seven months earlier, during the finals of the Nike Tournament of Champions, Moore had pulled from herself a performance of epic proportions for Collins Hill High School, only to be removed from the game in overtime by an incorrect call by the officials. She then was forced to watch in saddened silence as Tina Charles celebrated Christ the King's triumph by running the court in jubilance and halfway jerking off her jersey, the way men sometimes do and Brandi Chastain once did.

The contrast in celebratory styles, reflected also by contrast in cultural-geographical upbringing, illustrates the main differences between the No. 1 player in the Class of 2006 and her successor for 2007, Charles being prototypically "East Coast" - in other words, effervescent and regal - and Moore, her soon-to-be teammate at Connecticut, being more "Southern" - understated and blue collar.

At big tournaments, you most often find Moore, who is from Lawrenceville, Ga., hanging with her teammates with the family-like Metros and, if you didn't know her, you might not be able to distinguish her from the rest.

Off the court, that is. We've had little trouble picking her out of a national crowd for her on-court exploits. After talking about Moore being the best in the country for more than a year, today we finally coronate her as such, naming her the HoopGurlz.com Preseason Player of the Year for the 2007 class.

Maya Moore

Moore earned the distinction as much for the period between the two aforementioned tournament performances as the performances themselves. That's because, during the invervening seven months, she strapped on a tool belt and went to work on adding a significant chunk to her game.

It wasn't as if Moore didn't have much to work with. During what many called one of the greatest girl's basketball games ever played, Moore scored 38 points and seemed single-mindedly determined not to let the national high-school championship slip away. It can be argued that she was denied only by what an official admitted afterward was an errant call. Months before, she'd played a similarly sensational game against Boo Williams Summer League during the End of the Trail championship in Oregon City, soaring for her trademarked scoop shots, pulling up for short bankers and, when needed, calling forth three-point accuracy that belied her form and previously displayed ability.

Remade by last spring into a star determined to make her teammates better, Moore was a glue player for Team USA during the Americas U18 qualifying tournament. After leading the Metros to the U.S. Junior Nationals title, she paced them to the championship at Nike Nationals. There, she thoroughly dominated a game against powerful All-Ohio in spite of scoring only nine points. When her scoring acumen was questioned by this website, she rained 42 points down on The Family in the semifinals, then, chilly as ice, dribbled the length of the floor and knocked down a shot that sent the championship game against the Tennessee Flight into overtime.

And, oh yeah, Moore accomplished all of that last stuff with a thigh so badly bruised, she applied an electro-stim unit to it when she was not playing.

So overwhelming is Moore's determination, competitive nature, work ethic and role modeling, those qualities sometimes obscure her athletic greatness. She has the wingspan of a condor and soars the airspace around the rims like a hawk. She possesses a combination of hangtime and body control that allows her to manufacture any manner of creative means to put the ball into the basket. Her balance is impeccable, the reason she is able to attack so effectively off the dribble with ballhandling skills that still are in the development stage. Finally, she has an elite athlete's focus, which allows her to transform into a three-point specialist or a defensive theft artist with a game on the line.

We are pleased that, for the second straight year, our No. 1 player is the most competitive and hardest working in the country. Like Tina Charles, Maya Moore won't likely be a player defined by the way she changed the game, whether by prodigious dunking or ballhandling wizardry. More likely, she will be known as a restorer, of values that seem in danger of going out of style in such a look-at-me generation. We hope she and Charles herald a return to the classic superstar, defined more by how much she wins and conducts herself than by how much style with which she plays the game.

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HOOPGURLZ'S RANKINGS PACKAGE FOR 2007:

Preseason Hot 100 (Part II)
Preseason Hot 100 (Part I)
Preseason Player of the Year
Preseason All-Americans