Breanna Stewart’s WNBA Finals Accomplishments Are The Latest In An Historically Great Basketball Career

There is hardly any precedent for what Breanna Stewart has accomplished as a basketball player.

The 2020 WNBA Finals MVP just capped off a clean sweep through the playoffs with her Seattle Storm that ended in her second championship. That upped the ante from a 2018 campaign in which she won regular season MVP and swept Washington for her first title and Finals MVP. And before she ever was drafted, Stewart won four national championships at UConn as well as four NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player trophies and three College Player of the Year awards. There’s also a gold medal at the 2016 Olympics in the middle. At age 26, with just five professional seasons under her belt, the 6’4 scorer is unparalleled in her accomplishments.

From Stewart’s perspective, standing with her teammates in the WNBA’s Bubble and celebrating a championship was anything but guaranteed. It was almost exactly 18 months ago that she ruptured her Achilles tendon during a game overseas. She missed all of the 2019 WNBA season and it was an open question what she’d be capable of this year while rehabbing such a serious injury in the Bubble.

While Stewart did make it back to play in Russia last winter, the WNBA is the best women’s league in the world, so the level of competition is much higher, and this year’s condensed regular season schedule meant teams played every other day for basically two months straight. The Storm committed as a team to playing this season out even as racial justice protests raged around the country and Stewart (along with teammate Sue Bird) continued to recover from major injuries. What they would be able to accomplish, even as the title favorites, was unclear.

Stewart made it known quickly. She scored in double digits in every game but one this season and played the best defense of her career as the Storm rolled to an 18-4 record, tied for best in the WNBA. With a career-high 28.9 percent usage and an elite 57.8 true shooting percentage, Stewart came back equally impactful as a shot creator, if not quite as efficient. Not many bigs are fluid enough to be used like Stewart is, flexing through screens and knocking down shots from everywhere.

Seattle’s depth and institutional knowledge made it easier for Stewart to come along slowly during the regular season (yes, her version of that is a near-MVP level), and the Storm got nine days off before their first playoff game by way of finishing No. 2 in the league. Despite a cold streak late in the regular season, the final four games of Stewart’s playoffs were unthinkably good. She awoke, like every Hall of Fame player, once a championship came within reach.

From Game 3 of the semifinals against Minnesota through the three-game sweep in the Finals, Stewart averaged 29 points, 7.3 rebounds, and 3.5 assists per game while shooting 63 percent from the field. Again, that was in a Bubble, less than 18 months removed from rupturing her Achilles. It’s hard to imagine a better couple of weeks than that. Now, Stewart faces forward. What comes next for someone who’s already accomplished basically everything? First, of course, there will be a celebration of what the Storm just accomplished.

But after that? It was difficult for Stewart to take stock of her career in the immediate aftermath of the championship, but she was rightly proud of her journey back from injury to retake the WNBA throne.

“To be able to be here, to get through all that we’ve gone through as a team obviously individually, it’s an amazing feeling,” Stewart said postgame. “There’s so much of an unknown that you don’t know after rupturing my Achilles, but I’m super … I don’t know if I’m proud of myself but, you know, proud of what I’ve done. I think it’s hard to see it because it was so close, but really proud of just being able to be back.”

As someone whose standard operating procedure is filling up her already gigantic trophy case, you believe Stewart when she says winning was the only indicator she was looking at this season. Head coach Gary Kloppenburg called her “one of those generational players who come through once in a while who can face adversity and get stronger because of it.”

Yet Stewart did allow herself the blessing of perspective for a few moments after Game 3. This second WNBA championship gave her, if nothing else, hope for the future.

“To be here and see myself playing like this and having so much potential going forward, it’s exciting,” Stewart said. “I guess it just makes you appreciate more, and I’m just appreciating my basketball career (more).”

Stewart now sits on a tier of basketball greatness rivaled at her young age only by Bill Russell and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Both Hall of Fame inductees won multiple championships in college and rose to the top of the NBA in short order. Abdul-Jabbar famously boycotted the 1968 Olympics, but Russell won a gold medal in 1956 prior to his rookie season at a time when NBA players did not participate in the Games. True greatness felt easier to come by back then, when basketball was less visible and the most athletic and competitive folks tended to have the upper hand. Yet Stewart is matching them even as the widespread growth of sports theoretically means nobody should have the huge advantage she keeps over her competition.

Stewart’s resume is the type of stuff most don’t believe possible in this era of player movement and modern medicine. At this rate, Stewart is reconstructing our perception of a player’s ceiling. The most damning injury basketball players can suffer did not slow her down. After what she did in the Bubble, it’s fair to wonder if anything can.