Breanna Stewart, In Pursuit of Perfection

Breanna Stewart has been bowling, and going to the mall. She saw the latest sequel in the Paranormal Activity franchise with her friends recently, which she described as "good, but a little scary." She's hoping to see the Weeknd at Mohegan Sun this month. And then the University of Connecticut senior will set out to accomplish things no women's basketball player ever has.

"What's been working so far for me is understanding what's at stake and so important with basketball, but also going out and remembering that there's this other life, my social life with my friends, my classmates," Stewart said at NCAA Media Day, held on the ESPN campus earlier this month. "After this year, we're all going to go in different directions. And so I'm enjoying that, and sometimes closing down thinking about basketball 24/7, and living in the moment with them. And yeah, the next day, I'm probably going to wake up thinking about basketball, because that's who I am, that's what happens." Stewart was wearing a Connecticut warm-up suit, and she leaned back in her chair as she spoke, seemingly as comfortable discussing her greatness as she is practicing it on the court.

Stewart knows that she's widely regarded as the future of her sport. Put simply, she is the most physically talented player ever to come along in the women's game—at 6'4'', she has the size of a post player but the broad-based skill set of a guard. Cheryl Miller plus two inches, as her coach, Geno Auriemma, once described her. She arrived at Connecticut in 2012 and declared that she wanted to win four national titles in four years, something no one has done in the long and stellar history of basketball in Storrs. Stewart now stands on the precipice of accomplishing that lofty goal, and it wouldn't be her only unprecedented achievement. Three NCAA titles and three Most Outstanding Player awards? That's a first, and she has one year to go.

So yeah: she's cool talking about her greatness. It's a fact of life, for her and the rest of women's basketball.

As a result, Stewart faces questions that no one else in the world needs to think about. How do you measure improvement in someone this far ahead of the rest of the basketball world? No fewer than a dozen talent evaluators have described her to me in precisely the same terms: as someone whose career floor is that of Elena Delle Donne, the WNBA's reigning MVP and herself a transcendent figure.

For now, in college, there's no Russell to Stewart's Wilt; for at least another year, Delle Donne is a USA Basketball teammate, not a WNBA rival. Which means that Stewart has to put her own performances up against the highest standard that she can devise. "The best way to set goals, individually and as a team, is doing things as close to perfect as possible," Stewart says. "So every time I'm on the court, I want to shoot 100 percent. If I'm at the free throw line, 100 percent. Three-point line, around the court, same thing. And obviously, you're going to miss. That's just the way of the game. But having that perfect thing, where you didn't make any mistakes on the court, even as a team—if we want to try and have a game with zero turnovers in the game, that's going to be very hard to do. But if we could do that…"

Connecticut is heavily favored to win the NCAA tournament once again this season. That would give Auriemma his 11th title, which would move him one ahead of John Wooden's career mark, the gold standard in the men's game. If anything, the women's game today most closely resembles the men's game during Wooden's time, when the best players stayed in school for most or all of their eligible time in the NCAA, giving coaches a chance to fully develop their talent.

"I've had the opportunity to coach the two biggest winners that there's been in the WNBA, Diana Taurasi and Maya Moore," Auriemma said last week, sitting in an ESPN conference room. "Now I have an opportunity at UConn to coach someone who's put herself in a position to do something no one else has ever done. And I know how fortunate I am to get to do that."

Auriemma, by placing Stewart in the same discussion as Taurasi and Moore, is tacitly acknowledging her place within the Connecticut pantheon. But the physicality of Stewart is what separates her, potentially even from Delle Donne. Both Auriemma and South Carolina coach Dawn Staley, who assisted USA Basketball on its recent European tour, describe Stewart as more athletic than Delle Donne, the 6'5" do-it-all star with the Chicago Sky. Both provided the caveat that Stewart isn't yet as strong as Delle Donne, or as knowledgeable on the court. "Yet" is the most important word here: strength and know-how are both acquired skills, and Stewart, who says she hopes to elevate her shooting to Delle Donne levels, hasn't been failed by her work ethic so far.

Say this is the limit for Stewart, though, and she's just a 6'4" player with guard skills. Even so, Stewart would still be a freakish basketball talent: a two-guard who Auriemma says would lead the nation in blocked shots if they played her at center.

"That's not normal. That's not out there," he said. "You may be the same size as Stewie, but when she pulls up to you, she's jumping over you, so you can't reach where she shoots the ball. And that's just unusual."

As it is, Stewart is already tracking well with Delle Donne, the most dominant player in the pro game. In their junior seasons, Stewart held an edge in effective field goal percentage, 56.7 percent to 56.2. Stewart also led in block percentage (6.7 percent to 5.7 percent) and steal percentage (3.1 to 2.0). Delle Donne edged Stewart in rebounding percentage, 18.1 percent to 17.3 percent, and held a 41.3 percent to 31.3 percent lead in three-point accuracy. It is notable how similar their stat lines are at this point in their careers. When they played together on Team USA, Stewart said, there was an "unspoken acknowledgement" of their parallels.

And yet, Stewart might enter the WNBA in a better position than Delle Donne, who famously left Connecticut for the University of Delaware because she wanted to play closer to her family. Stewart spent her college years not only winning but practicing against the very best players in the sport. Minnesota Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve, who had four UConn alums on her title-winning team this season including Moore, put it last month: "The benefit of it, I always say this with UConn players, they know how to play offense. You don't have to teach them a whole lot. What it comes down to is players making reads." That's virtually word-for-word how Stewart described the Connecticut offense to me, and it's a recipe for success in the pro game.

"When they leave here, they're not surprised at how good the other players on the team are," Auriemma said. "That's what they're used to…. So I think our players have had so much success in that league because one, they're talented, they wouldn't if they weren't, but mentally they go in there saying, 'You know what? These are the players I just beat for four years in college. And now I'm going to go play in the pros with them."

Before Stewart meets Delle Donne in the pros, though, there's a small matter of making history. Stewart and the WNBA both hope her pursuit of four-in-four brings more eyes to her, and then to the league she's about to enter.

"Regardless of what she does this year, she ends her career as one of the most accomplished players in the history of the sport," Auriemma said. "She's already done things no one has ever done—three straight championships and three Most Outstanding Players. But now she's put herself in a position where only one conclusion is going to validate her in her mind."

And then?

"My long-term goal as a basketball player is just to become as good as I can be," Stewart said. "I don't know exactly what that is, because there are so many things I can get so much better at. But if I can continue to have success, work to become a special player, then it's up to the viewers to decide what that means." She swiveled her chair sideways as she spoke, and stretched her legs—the picture of a player at ease in her role as basketball's one-woman revolution. All that was missing was a yawn

"It is exciting," Stewart continued. "Because you're asking the question, and I don't know the answer. I don't know what you would call it, how you would name it. But to have that almost limitless potential, because there are so many things I can get better at—and even if I do, I can still get better. Because to be perfect is almost impossible. It is impossible. But if I continue to strive for it, I'm going to get as close to it as I can."