Happy Thursday, Ball-Knowers!

It’s a busy news day, as Houston’s WNBA expansion franchise held their first press conference complete with a couple of eyebrow raising comments. At this point, it wouldn’t be a W sanctioned presser unless there were a few quotes that made your head explode. What was it they said in Game of Thrones? ‘A Dothraki wedding without at least three deaths is considered a dull affair’? That’s kind of how I feel about these pressers now. If I’m not irate about something the league is doing, then it’s more a surprise.

But more on that a little further down.

We had some good games and interesting takeaways last night. Indiana won their first game of the year, Chicago crawled out of a big first quarter hole to defeat Golden State, Toronto notched their first win in franchise history while Las Vegas cruised past Connecticut.

Now that we’re starting to get some sample data, our crew hopped on Streamyard last night to record this week’s Ball Up Top: A WBB Podcast. I can confidently say it’s one of the most chaotic (in a good way!) episodes we’ve done in awhile. When the pod starts with Chauny by calling the W’s officiating the work of “Phee-del Castro”, you know you’re in for a masterclass.

Enjoy that, and enjoy the newsletter. Let’s ride!

For the Ball-Knowers (And if you haven’t subscribed to the paid subscriber tier, now would be a good time!), Tyler was down in Dallas for Wings vs. Dream and got to chat with Aziaha James and the golden opportunity she’s seizing with this new look roster.

Andrew, Chauny and Tyler put on their best Gordon Gekko suits and made the WNBA into the stock market. Who are we buying in on? Who are we selling? Or shorting? Or buying on margin? We run through all 15 WNBA teams this week.

A Comet enters, a Sun dies.

Something cosmically poetic about that, I guess…

To be clear, this is a wonderful and triumphant moment for the city of Houston. I don’t want my nostalgia for the Sun or my misgivings about how the league treated the Mohegan Tribe on the way out to cloud the fact that this is THE WNBA franchise that everyone has wanted back. This is the franchise that gave us one of the best starting fives in league history, anchored by two players — Sheryl Swoopes and Cynthia Cooper — who have legitimate GOAT cases to make. That, mind you, is before you consider the other first ballot Hall-of-Famer in Tina Thompson and a gone-too-soon great in Kim Perrot.

The franchise deserved to be revived and the city deserved a team. I don’t think there’s any debating that.

I just hate that it had to be done in such a cloak-and-dagger fashion, handed on a silver platter to a former ponzi scheme vitamin salesman whose most notable contribution to American culture is helping destroy the small-town mom-and-pop restaurant.

Rainforest Cafe, Bubba Gump, Morton’s? Tilman Fertitta has expertly destroyed them all to sell the same mutated American Dream that only a boy growing up in a mafiosi family could think is actually noble.

In a way, taking a franchise from a Native American tribe and handing it to the real-life version of Michael Corleone’s second nephew is actually about as American as you can get in the year 2026.

And what does the league get back? $25 million less than what the Boston and Hartford groups had bid for, no immediate standalone plans for a practice facility (which both aforementioned groups had) and an uncertain future over the actual name ‘Comets’ due to the league and the new owners not actually bothering to trademark it. Hip Hop star Travis Scott allegedly is now the one in possession and I’m going to assume there will be some type of payment in order to get it back.

All this to say — aside from the fact that Tilman Fertitta is a man whose ascent in this country is legitimately offensive to me as a third-generation Sicilian-American — it’s kind of a bit of a mess structurally. The whole point of bringing in NBA money was that they’d operate with the same type of care that Golden State would initially. But right now, these franchises are mostly behind the eight ball even though they have a good runway to get started.

I’ve discussed at length what it the league is losing in the Sun (that video is hyperlinked above) but it just grinds my gears that the Comets ownership is treating this like some sort of foregone conclusion as opposed to the gift that it truly was. Maybe Tilman will actually be a good owner for this team and actually invest accordingly. Or it’ll be like going to Morton’s these days. A decent steak, but devoid of any soul and maybe not worth the trip in the first place.

Now, speaking of an Italian-American that I legitimately do respect (even if I have been hard on him in the past)…

The early returns on this Chicago Sky team are making GM Jeff Pagliocca look like a pretty smart dude. The Sky grinded out a nasty first half against Golden State on Wednesday night and rode a solid second half to a win. Rickea Jackson, a key acquisition in the offseason, is averaging 18.5 points, 6 rebounds and 4 assists per game. Even if her shooting efficiency isn’t where they probably want it to be yet, she is a certified bucket getter. As a New York kid that grew up on Carmelo Anthony (from Syracuse to Denver and to the Knicks), I will always ride for a master of the midrange and Rickea has that feel to her.

Broadly speaking, I like what I’ve seen in a limited sample size so far. Skylar Diggins is exactly what Chicago was missing last season, Jacy Sheldon feels like another Jackie Young-type development project for head coach Tyler Marsh and Kamilla Cardoso is active. And when I say active, I mean she’s involved for all 27 minutes on the floor which has been a critique of her in the past.

So far this year, no one has taken the 2-3 game sample size and ripped apart the field which gives me the impression that this season might be a dog fight for playoff spots. But there’s something I really like about this Sky group that I want to put in writing now. And also to offer up some praise for a guy I have roundly criticized at different points in the last two years.

Game is game. Point, Jeff Pagliocca.

I started writing about women’s basketball in 2014, getting my first bylines for my student newspaper at the University of Colorado. But my interest in women’s basketball has existed since childhood, growing up in the tri-state area where UConn reigned supreme. You’d see Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird everywhere, from the sports pages of the Journal News to the covers of Sports Illustrated for Kids. But the real star that you saw everywhere was Lisa Leslie.

At about ten years old, I got my hands on a copy of Backyard Basketball, one of the many of Humongous Entertainment’s electronic triumphs. While the normal stars of the NBA were there, DT and Lisa were players that you could pick up and put on your team. In a lot of ways, that game was a huge part of allowing me to understand that sports was an all-inclusive space for anyone that wanted to play. That eventually led to blacktop runs at Edgewood elementary school where our grade would play boys vs. girls sometimes. And credit to Liz Felix, Kate Hennessey and some of our other classmates, they held their own routinely.

It took a really long time to really put that into its proper context — let’s just say I was lucky to have people in my orbit who helped me unlearn a lot of bad and relearn a lot of good — but as I look back now, it’s pretty remarkable how normal the idea of integrated sports and respect for women’s basketball was with regard to the media I consumed.

Which is why I find myself nostalgic today reading the news of Lisa Leslie getting a statue down in Los Angeles outside the former Staples Center (now Crypto.com Arena). She’s the first Spark to be there, joining Laker legends like Kobe Bryant, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Magic Johnson to name a few, and just the second WNBA player in league history to be enshrined like this.

But it’s incredibly well earned for a player that I like to say was a proto-Caitlin Clark. When the Fever rookie guard entered the league, there was a lot of talk that a crossover star of this nature had never been in the W before. Maybe not to that extent, sure. But Clark stands on the shoulders of Candace Parker, who both stand on the shoulders of Leslie. And while she has her own legends, from Cheryl Miller to Nancy Lieberman, that she stands on herself, Lisa Leslie is really the foundational bedrock that the WNBA is built on.

So the newsletter ends with a round of applause. For Lisa Leslie, for her achievements and the litany of ways she continues to give back to the game and inspire the next group of athletes who will one day shoulder the next generation behind them.

Minnesota Lynx (1-1) vs. Dallas Wings (1-1): 8:00 PM ET, Prime Video

Paige Bueckers vs. Olivia Miles? Sign me up. Not only are we in for some serious pace-and-space but I have a feeling we are going to see a different game from Bueckers tonight. Plus, it’s Alanna Smith and Jessica Shepard’s first matchup against their old club. Smith, specifically, has had a rough start in Dallas so far. A positive game here could work wonders.

How the WNBA Players Union Secured Massive Wins in Their New Contract by Damon Daniels, Center for Economic & Policy Research

Valkyries’ Natalie Nakase takes the blame for first loss after rough shooting by Kenzo Fukuda, Clutch Points

‘Baby, that city was electric!’: when the Houston Comets ruled the WNBA by Jacob Uitti, The Guardian

And be sure to subscribe to the newsletter (or have the Ball-Knower in your life subscribe) if you haven’t already!