Vicky Bullett

When thinking about women's professional basketball, I sometimes think not about what has been won but what has been lost.  The Women's Professional Basketball League (WBL) is known of by some mavens and we know who the high scorers of the league were but we really do not have comprehensive player statistics. There were a smattering of attempts to refound women's pro ball between the end of the WBL and the beginning of the ABL, all of which faltered - imagine trying to find game statistics for WABA games sometime.  The ABL's record is a bit spotty in places, but can reconstructed by anyone willing to pay five figures to Stats, Inc. and the WNBA's stats are matters of public record.  

As for those players who might have been great pro players before the founding of the WBL - those players are lost for good.  There is very little way to judge their overall worth.  Was Nera White a better player than Lisa Leslie?  We'll never know.  We know that she was a great AAU player for Nashville Business College in the 1950s and 1960s but is there a real stat line to look at?  Could we obtain one even if one existed?  Is there any film of Nera White at all?  This leaves statheads in a bind, where we have to do what we don't want to do - we have to take someone else's word for something.  Part of the reason statheads become statheads is because they don't want to take someone else's word for something, because many times in their lives someone else's word turned out to be worth very little.  We can't even look at film because there probably isn't any film.  We have no stat line, we don't have the evidence of our own eyes, all we have are a bunch of yellowing newspaper articles telling us all that Nera White was the bee's knees.  As we all know that the media gets so much wrong when it comes to women's basketball, despite the preponderance of evidence how do we not know that those old sportswriters didn't get that wrong, too?

The great women's basketball players in history fall in a few classes.

* The great ancestors:  those who were lost to history, who were good but whose exploits simply weren't recorded.
* The Nera Whites:  women who have left a record of objective accomplishment but have left us with no way to evaluate the worth of that accomplishment.
* Women who played in established pro leagues whose records are difficult to obtain:  the Molly Bolins and Nancy Liebermans of the world.
* Women whose careers partially overlapped the establishment of the WNBA:  Cynthia Cooper is the best example.  Even the fraction of her career spent in the WNBA made it painfully obvious that given more time, her list of awards might have reached the stratosphere if the league had been founded ten years earlier.
* Women whose careers are well documented:  Leslie, Jackson and company.

While working on another interesting side project, I decided to take a look at a rare WNBA feat - the scoring of fifty steals and fifty blocks in a WNBA season.  It is a significant achievement, a combination of speed and dominance.  Players fast enough to steal usually aren't tall enough to block, and vice versa - to combine both is a great accomplishment, and those players belong to a special group we call the 50-50 Club, all of who are tall, quick posts:

Members of the 50-50 Club

1997:  Vicky Bullett, Charlotte
1999:  Yolanda Griffith, Sacramento
2000:  Yolanda Griffith, Sacramento
2001:  Vicky Bullett, Washington
2001:  Taj McWilliams, Orlando
2001:  Lauren Jackson, Seattle
2004:  Lisa Leslie, Los Angeles
2005:  Lisa Leslie, Los Angeles
2006:  Lisa Leslie, Los Angeles

Very impressive company.  Three of these players:  Leslie, Jackson, and Yo - are lead-pipe cinches for the Hall of Fame.  Taj McWilliams isn't a lead-pipe cinch - she's not at the level of a Jackson or Leslie for which you go "Duh!  Of course she's in!" - but I'll be astonished if she doesn't make it someday.

So what about Vicky Bullet? As it turns out, Vicky Bullett is already in the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in Knoxville, Tennessee or will be in 2011.  She is one of only three women in WNBA history to join the club multiple times.  And if you only started following the league recently, you might not even know who Vicky Bullett is.

So let's give the thumbnail description and follow up in depth:

Born: 1967

College:  Maryland, 1985-1989.  She set Maryland records for total points, field goals and rebounds. (Crystal Langhorne would later break Bullett's scoring record.) The Terps won three ACC championships while Bullett was playing in the post.  Her #23 was retired by the university, and rightly so.

International career:  Gold medal 1988, FIBA championship 1990, Bronze medal 1992.  Played for Italian and Brazilian teams as a professional.  Her 1998 Brazilian team won its national championship, and she was a member of the Italian League All-Stars in 1992, 1995, 1996 and 1997.  She also spent four years overseas at the end of her WNBA career.

WNBA Career

1997-99:  Bullett played for the inaugural Charlotte Sting.  She would appear as a reserve in the 1999 All-Star Game, appearing in place of Rebecca Lobo - it was her only All-Star appearance.  In 1998 she would receive 16 Most Valuable Player votes, putting her far behind Cynthia Cooper at 426.  These would be the only MVP votes she would receive.

2000-02:  Bullett finished her career with the Washington Mystics.  She helped the Mystics reach the playoffs twice, and retired from the league after the 2002 season.  She never missed a start in her 186 career games in the WNBA.

Post-WNBA Career

Bullett returned to overseas play and pursued graduate work in education.  She worked as a special educator while pursuing a master's degree and coached AAU teams while not teaching.  In 2009, she was named to the Mystics as an assistant coach but was not on the 2010 coaching roster.  In July of this year, she was named to the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame along with Val Ackerman, Ruthie Bolton, Muffet McGraw, Pearl Moore and Lometa Odom.

(* * *)

The Hall of Fame Projector has her as the 51st-ranked player based entirely on her pro career, giving her a Hall of Fame Probability of 9 percent.  This is solely based on her pro career; the bulk of Bullett's case for HoF inclusion comes from her college and international career.  What hurts Bullett?  No MVP votes (Dawn Staley outranks Bullet there), no All-Star appearances (which is why Teresa Weatherspoon is ahead of Bullett) and no rings (which is why Janeth Arcain beats out Bullett in the projector).  Bullett's accomplishments at least equal these other three - Weatherspoon is also a women's Hall of Famer - but Bullet's probably the least remembered of the four.

Part of the reason is that Bullett's career overlaps the origin of the WNBA - she was around 30 by the time the WNBA started, missing at least seven seasons worth of play. If you look carefully enough in the portion of the statistical record that remains for Bullett you can see greatness.  The fact that her two 50-50 club appearances are four years apart testifies to that; it's the greatest gap in years between 50-50 appearances and 50-50 membership was much harder to get 50-50 in 1997 when the season was only 28 games long.

I suspect that Bullett was the sort of player who could have cared less about establishing a legend - she just wanted to go back to her hometown and teach when her career was all over.  She was honored during a day in June of this year by the Mystics organization and she'll be honored again during the Hall of Fame induction ceremony.  But before she goes, a spotlight deserves to be shown upon the aspects of her game that made her so special.