I've never liked the comparisons of Brittney Griner to Wilt Chamberlain, even as an analogical comparison.
Wilt was a powerful presence on the basketball, who, in the words of Yago Colas, "...was blessed (or cursed) with a powerful physical presence which he used to neglect team play.”
Griner was never quite that type of presence.
Defensively, her shot blocking has transformed the way that teams approach the game, with most retreating to the 3-point line and occasionally getting hot enough to challenge the Lady Bears or having a big who can step out in space and force Griner away from the basket. Yet when she entered college basketball she lacked the strength to establish position in the paint and even now she doesn't crash the offensive boards in quite the way you'd expect from a player of Colas' description.
However, in the way she has developed an array of face up moves around the basket and has learned to score over and around opponents rather than overpowering them, the Lew Alcindor comparison that Connecticut Huskies coach Geno Auriemma made in his chat with Bobby Knight is on point.
"She's probably in the women's game what [Lew Alcindor] was in the men's game where there's just no other person like that," Auriemma said. "So you can't go into a game and feel like there's anything you can do to neutralize her, as I'm sure Coach Wooden had with Lew Alcindor at the time: every game we go into, we have an advantage that no else can match. They might be able to take away this guard or that forward or something like that or whatever, but they can't do anything about this kid that we've got."
Ultimately, Griner has to be in the conversation as one of the most dominant college basketball players ever - I confess that it's splitting hairs to say whether she's more Alcindor or Chamberlain - and the fact that she has forced us to search among the greatest posts of all-time for comparisons just accentuates how great she has become as a NCAA player.