Madison Booker is a perfectly polite, charismatic young woman, but there is no other player in her sport for whom the word "rude" comes to mind as often. In basketball, rudeness is a two-pronged trait: It's being good enough to make a hard game look easy, but more than that, it’s being good enough to make your opponent’s hard work seem like a waste. It's strutting into a department store, knocking over a stack of neatly folded sweaters, and heading home. What you feel when you watch a defender stay in front of Booker, only for her to rise up and nail a midrange jumper over their head, is overwhelming pity.
If Texas was likely to be a one-seed in the NCAA tournament anyway, the SEC Tournament championship Booker led them to this past weekend should ensure that the Longhorns end up with the third overall seed, in the Fort Worth regional not far from home. In three tournament games—a quarterfinal against Alabama, a semifinal against Ole Miss, and a final against South Carolina on Sunday—the junior Booker averaged 20 points and 8.3 rebounds, shooting 61.4 percent from the field and earning tournament MVP honors in her very rude way.
Most coaches will tell you they're happy if their team can force the other team's star into lots of midrange attempts. But Booker measures "degree of difficulty" a little differently. If you give her enough space to get one of those shots off—and she doesn’t need much—you're going to end up tipping your cap a lot. It’s one of the skills that make her basically unguardable. Strong on her feet and 6-foot-1, Booker enjoys a physical advantage against most of her defenders at the three. Her experience at point guard, where she spent some time as a freshman after teammate Rori Harmon tore her ACL, means she can create even when an opponent has some size on her. She also comes by some of that rudeness through rebounding. There is nothing quite so rude as the emphatic defensive rebound (enough of your nonsense!) or the soul-crushing offensive board (silly you, you thought you’d won!).
"I remember when we played them at our place," Ole Miss coach Yolett McPhee-McCuin said after Booker's 31-point performance against her team in the semifinals Saturday, recalling Texas’s Booker-led comeback against the Rebels last year. "We had them beat, she missed a shot, followed it, got the rebound, and scored. She just has a knack for making those plays."
It isn't unusual for a skilled and physical freshman to burst on the scene then stagnate for the rest of her time on campus, but Booker has kept getting better. After two seasons of a below-average effective field goal percentage, she's in the 74th percentile this season and making over 55 percent of those twos. And just in time: The Longhorns have come up short as contenders for the last few years—and their lack of three-point attempts will always earn them some scrutiny—but this team looks like Vic Schaefer’s best and most balanced group at Texas yet. "I don’t think any moment is going to happen where it’s too big for these kids," he said on Sunday. Of the other probable No. 1 seeds, Texas has already played and beat UCLA this season, albeit in an early-season Thanksgiving tournament. UConn, which is projected to be the first overall seed, is a less familiar beast.
No team has experienced Booker’s rudeness as often as South Carolina, which should be the other No. 1 seed. South Carolina and Texas have now played each other seven times in the last two seasons—"I'm tired of seeing them," Booker joked after losing to the Gamecocks in January—and Dawn Staley didn’t have anything to add in her postgame remarks on Sunday. "She played like Maddie Booker," the South Carolina head coach said after the game, no further explanation needed. Across their four wins in those seven games, Staley's Gamecocks have had some success against Booker with long and quick defenders like Raven Johnson and Bree Hall, who can deny Booker the ball. But once she has it, there just isn't much left to do—pray for a little mercy, maybe, but don’t expect any kindness.
