Happy Monday, Ball-Knowers!

It is officially FIBA World Cup season, which gives us a two week break in the WNBA action to train our eyes on Germany and the biggest international competition outside of the Olympics.

A’ja Wilson and Kelsey Plum, who are pulling out due to injuries, will be replaced by Kiki Iriafen and Sonia Citron, adding some last minute intrigue to this tournament. We’ll be here providing coverage daily, from previews to reviews and so much more, to keep you in the loop internationally.

This is also a great time to be a paid subscriber to our Ball-Knowers tier, as our bank of storytelling will start to empty in these next few weeks. If you want to support independent women’s basketball media and love a good player profile, film session or hoop history, we have some great stuff on the way for you. Click the button below and join our community!

Now, onto the column!

Tyler broke down Team USA’s roster changes…

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Women’s basketball fans around the world were surprised to wake up on Monday morning and see the news that A’ja Wilson would be pulling out of the 2026 FIBA World Cup to rest and get healthy before the WNBA playoffs. The Las Vegas Aces superstar, along with Phoenix Mercury guard Kelsey Plum, were taken off the Team USA roster and replaced with Washington Mystics stars Kiki Iriafen and Sonia Citron. While the Americans remain the runaway favorite in the sports’ biggest international tournament outside of the Olympics, Wilson’s absence is extremely important in a number of ways.

For starters, that’s the GOAT.

Of course your attack and defense are going to be less potent if you don’t have the best player in the sport available. But it also means Indiana Fever center Aliyah Boston is likely to see substantially more minutes while Atlanta Dream forward Angel Reese is the natural pick to slot into the five where she can help be a defensive anchor. It also means that this American frontcourt is going to be receiving something of a trial by fire. Outside of New York Liberty forward Breanna Stewart and Minnesota Lynx forward Napheesa Collier, this is one of the younger big groups Team USA has had in some time.

Where Wilson’s absence will be felt the most acutely is in the potential matchups with Australia, France and China. The Aussies bring a group laden with WNBA talent while China and France have starters that can hold their own against some of the best American bigs.

I still have Team USA taking home a gold medal when all is done and dusted in Berlin, but without A’ja, it might make things a bit more interesting in the knockout rounds.

How do we define a team that looks like they can win a title? For me, it’s about ceiling.

When there’s fewer games, fewer calls, more stakes and more physicality, the teams that win championships either tend to rise to a level we haven’t seen yet or live up to their best performances in the regular season. If I think a team has a title ceiling, it means I’ve seen a performance against a top team in which something about the character of the roster is revealed.

Lately, Atlanta has revealed to me that they do, indeed, have the dawg in them to at least be in the Finals mix. The addition of DeWanna Bonner, who already is making her presence and energy felt on the floor, looks like a late masterstroke by GM Dan Padover. Along with Angel Reese, there’s now another figure who can breathe that energy into and complement their star guards, who are more silent-killer types.

In their Sunday win over the Minnesota Lynx, they played with an edge and set the tone physically in a way we usually associate with Natalie Nakase’s Golden State Valkyries rather than Karl Smesko’s Atlanta Dream. Which drew the ire of Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve, who decried the physical play of their last two opponents while also challenging her own players to ‘toughen up’.

There’s been past seasons where talent feels like it’s enough to ride the wave to a WNBA title. But with the playoff field being so even this year — and with so many younger stars hungry to win a title for the first time — it really does feel like this postseason defined by two things: who has the most energy left in the tank after the World Cup, and who just plain old wants it more.

I’ve covered the WNBA for about seven years now and I can’t recall a playoff field in which every single team felt ‘real’ as a championship contender. Even New York, who doesn’t look like itself right now, has enough star-power and experience that I don’t doubt their ceiling.

So try to, if you can, not get sucked up in what’s going to be some of the worst discourse you’ve ever seen from the worst people our media world (in sports, politics or wherever else) has to offer. Because this is going to be a truly special October and November.

Kelsey Plum didn’t just pull out of the FIBA World Cup, she also announced on Monday morning that she’d be done the rest of the year to better rehab the injuries she’s picked up this year. It’s been a frustrating season for the Phoenix guard, who was truly having a career year and proving a lot of people that believed ‘she’s no more than an Arike variant’ wrong. While the Los Angeles Sparks were disappointing on a number of levels, Plum put together several memorable performances in what looked like to be a first team All-WNBA caliber season.

I don’t think any Phoenix Mercury fans should hold the choice against her, especially considering there were some alarm bells early in the season that her usage in L.A. could lead to this kind of situation. But I’d certainly be looking at General Manager Nick U’Ren and wondering why this was worth a first round pick in a loaded 2027 WNBA Draft.

This was looking like a lost season for a team that made the 2026 Finals. The trade deadline was far enough into the season that the Mercury had to know the mountain they had to climb to get back in to the playoffs was too high. Not to mention Plum was clear that she still plans on testing free agency next season once her one year, $999,999 contract expires. Maybe she comes back and runs it back with Alyssa Thomas and Kahleah Copper, but that’s a lot of faith to put on an aging core. Especially as the league gets younger, faster and more dynamic.

There’s been a mountain of issues in L.A. this season, from Raegan Pebley’s head scratching moves as GM to Lynne Roberts’ struggles as head coach. But somehow, even after a historically disastrous trade of Rickea Jackson for Ariel Atkins, L.A. is going to be rewarded with two potential shots for Juju Watkins. Not that I’m complaining as a writer, but I sure would be if I was a Mercury fan.

The Atlanta Dream forward broke another record over the weekend, overtaking Alyssa Thomas as the WNBA’s single-season double-double leader. Say whatever you will about the scoring, the efficiency or the shooting mechanics, but you can’t say she isn’t a very, very good WNBA player and consider yourself intellectually honest by any metric.

It’s small, and not fully fleshed out by any means, but there’s plenty of moments in which Reese is actually showing the developments in her mechanics. On Sunday, I watched her try to take Lynx guard Kayla McBride off the dribble from the top of they key on a first half possession. Reese didn’t get much of a step on McBride and ended up falling in the lane as she drove to the hoop, but the replay showed me something I didn’t think she was doing in the run of play: she had the ball up high immediately after her gather step.

A skeptic, or a doubter, or a hater (the unethical ones, that is) might read that anecdote and say ‘*THAT* is what passes for praise now? That low bar?’ but when the rest of the game is pretty refined and high level, the margins become the differences between Reese being an All-WNBA level talent and one of the undisputed best players in the league. It’s year three, and at the beginning of the year I openly wondered about when we’d see the development jump for the 2024 draft class. Between Reese and Caitlin Clark, the bell has been answered when it comes to taking a leap.

When I was fresh out of college, I worked as a local sportscaster in Casper, Wyoming and my time overlapped with Josh Allen’s Cowboy football career. In a lot of ways, I see parallels between his athletic development curve and Reese’s. Players that had clear mechanical deficiencies that many analysts, scouts or fans believed you just could not fix. But through a combination of unique mental makeup and supreme athletic gifts, they took a jump in year three and became outlier cases of superstardom.

Allen is pretty widely regarded as one of the best players in the NFL and even his biggest doubters would now say ‘I wasn’t wrong to doubt it could happen but I was wrong that he couldn’t do it’. While sadly, some folks may never be able to set aside their personal animus of Reese, I’d like to think there’s a subset of fans who came around on Allen on the basis of merit can do the same here. It may not be apparent yet, but if you’re watching the big picture, there’s a clear path to future MVP status for her that’s more achievable than ever.

As Royce White brought his unique brand of loser to Indianapolis to continue a sideshow that should be beneath your lowest contempt, a July Heritage Foundation report was recirculated around social media by Vox reporter Rachel Cohen Booth.

The report, summarized by Cohen Booth, ‘argues Title IX imposed a male model of competition on women, encouraged us to become dominant and aggressive, and pulled us away from traditional femininity and motherhood.’

Almost immediately, that caught my attention. In the first volume of our ‘Legendarium’ series, which covers the history of women’s basketball through the lens of those who lived it, I’ve come into repeated contact with an organization called the Women’s Division of the National Amateur Athletic Foundation, or WDNAAF.

This is back in the 1920’s, right as women’s suffrage is becoming a major issue in American culture. In a 2012 paper for SUNY Cortland, Dr. Lynn Couturier wrote, “As athletes, women challenged notions of what competitive sport had historically been — a proving ground for masculinity.” Interestingly enough, one of the biggest factions voicing a concern over these potential shifting cultural norms were women’s physical educators. Senda Berenson Abbott, the consensus mother of women’s basketball, wrote in her foundational text Basketball For Women…

“It also shows as that unless a game as exciting as basket ball is carefully guided by such rules as will eliminate roughness, the great desire to win and the excitement of the game will make our women do sadly unwomanly things.”

Throughout the early 1900’s, this battle over basketball and perceived femininity was waged within the women’s community and more broadly in the world of athletics. The WDNAAF, comprised of primarily women physical educators like Berenson Abbott, was trying to negotiate incremental wins for athletic participation and trying to make sports fall within the existing norms of the time was a concession they appeared willing to make. But running parallel to that pragmatism was a belief that sports would masculinize women.

By the late 1920’s, the WDNAAF’s mission had become the eradication of women’s scholastic athletic competition. Part of the push was rooted in steering women clear of perceived abuses — improper recruiting benefits, commercialization and player eligibility (very strange how familiar all this is, just as an aside) — while the rest was a desire to make sports more a recreation and participatory activity that retained femininity. By 1927, they got the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) to cancel their national women’s basketball tournament and by the mid 1930’s, many states had put into place legislation that wiped out competitive women’s hoops.

So what does all this have to do with this Heritage Foundation report?

The report, published on July 8th of this year, argues that Title IX — the 1972 Nixon Administration legislation that, in part, mandated equal treatment for men’s and women’s athletes at the collegiate level — is part of a sustained social engineering effort to masculinize women. It points to the Girl Scouts, and its early effort to promote recreational activities while, as the paper asserts, ‘celebrating distinctly feminine virtues of service, grace and character.’

It’s, in many ways, a roadmap to eliminating women’s access to interscholastic competitive sports by creating a wedge issue out of the relationship between sports and femininity.

If you’re someone who sees everything laid out above, someone who maybe has a woman in their life that is, has been or dreams to be a competitive athlete, and thinks it’s ridiculous to even advocate for that kind of rollback, read the next portion very carefully.

This Heritage Foundation paper opens its introduction by (falsely) accusing Olympic gold medalist Imane Khelif of being Tunisian (she isn’t) and a biological man (she’s not). By the second sentence, it references ‘calls to keep men out of women’s sports’, and by the end of the first paragraph, it argues that ‘we must therefore revisit the deeper feminist settlement that has governed athletics for decades.’

I wrote last week that the conceit people need to be aware of is that the push to eliminate women’s sports take the form of an otherwise reasonable-if-not-obfuscatory rhetorical premise (men shouldn’t be in women’s sports) and takes you on a magic carpet ride straight towards dissolving Title IX. So if you’re someone reading this, who says ‘wait a minute, I just want men out of women’s sports, not for women’s sports to go away entirely’, then ask yourself this question: If I achieve my desired outcome of men out of women’s sports, will those that argued alongside me pick up their stakes and go back to normal? Or will they eventually come for my daughter’s opportunities? Or my sister’s? Or my friend’s?

History teaches us that this push won before, and while the major players and underlying rationale for their conformity or compromise might be different now, it does reveal a truism: Trojan Horses can take many more forms than a wooden gift to Athena.

Mystics’ Georgia Amoore backs up bold Sydney Johnson claim with career night vs. Mercury by Josh Valdez, ClutchPoints

Sky forward Rickea Jackson is choosing to bedazzle her ACL rehab by Alissa Hirsh, Chicago Sun-Times

Liberty get revenge with rout of Sky despite rough Sabrina Ionescu outing by Madeline Kenney, New York Post