1 Vindicated? Not really. It's all about the quality of people one plays against. There are a LOT more women who play basketball than play hockey in the US. Women who play hockey play against a very, well, shallow pool of talent. You're only as good as the folks you play against. Lady ballers, by contrast, have a lot of other lady ballers to go up against. Naturally, the better people you play, the better your game gets. In contrast to hockey, if you put the women's Olympic track team up against even the best boy's high school track squad, the ladies would beat the high schoolers. Not by a whole lot, mind you, but they'd still win convincingly. The reason? Women's Track and field has a lot deeper pool for women to pull from. Hockey's pool is pretty shallow for women. If more women played hockey, or if girls played more against boys, they'd do better.

2 There is one thing. The pool of men playing basketball is a lot larger in the US than the pool playing hockey. Male basketball players have a far larger pool of very skilled players to compete against than hockey players. So even with the larger number of women playing basketball they're incredibly outnumbered by the number of men. I'm sure that if every woman in the US played hockey you'd find some NHL caliber, but still less than male players, but at the current level of female participation you end up with a total of one (Canadian, who from my male chauvanist pig perspective was both talented and hot). So I don't think your analogy proves your point. After all, current WNBA stars playing future NBA all-stars are probably still going to have a hard time.