Happy Tuesday, Ball-Knowers!

As we prepare to welcome the 2026 WNBA postseason, this week’s column covers pretty much everything under the sun. From the dialogue around award races, particularly WNBA Defensive Player of the Year, to the many tiebreaker scenarios on the table to an alarming story out of Kentucky that reminds us that sports is sometimes not the mental escape that we want it to be. It’s customary that the column starts with the basketball and then zooms further out, and you can expect that this Tuesday.

In the weeks ahead, we also have some long awaited features that will be rolling out as well. The NCAA women’s basketball season is around the corner and our annual preview interviews on Luxury Tax kick off starting Wednesday. We’ll be welcoming Iowa head coach Jan Jensen, Notre Dame transfer Madison St. Rose and No. 1 overall recruit and USC forward Saniyah Hall and have more spotlight features on the way to get you ready for the winter ahead.

So hang with us here at NCS. Subscribe to the daily newsletter or upgrade to the Ball-Knowers tier to get access to all of our work and our Discord server. Our YouTube channel is also on pace to cross 10,000 subscribers before the WNBA Finals, a huge milestone for our crew and one of the first goals we set when we made the outlet.

And yes, Chauny will be back with some content in the next couple of weeks as well. I know you, our loyal Ball-Knowers, have missed her on here.

Now, onto the column!

The video version of this article…

Tyler recaps his thoughts on last night’s games…

Let’s be honest, awards voting in any sport is imperfect.

Players don’t really have the ability to watch every game during the season. Coaches don’t either. There’s also the case of them not being the most unbiased of voters. With contract incentives tied to certain honors nowadays, executives are also not the best brokers of honest adjudication. Which leaves the media, who everyone always loves and trusts to do a good job, right?

Ultimately, it will never be what the fans want and if there was a better way, we probably would’ve figured it out by now. As the year comes to a close and media members start to publicize and defend their picks, it’s been interesting to see who what values what and which metrics or narratives tend to prevail. It can sometimes be as simple as counting stats. Some go the full distance and adhere to certain advanced numbers, go off the eye test or have their decision informed by the people around the league they speak to on-or-off-the-record. While certain media members may disagree, and others may just not factor it in at all, there are certain biases that can creep into the decision making. Recency is one, and how stars play in high-profile matchups is another.

It’s why I’m sort of interested to see if the last handful of games this week will have any bearing on certain races, specifically All-WNBA first team. It’s probably one of the most difficult choices on the ballot this year, with around eight players (by my count) that have real deal cases to be selected to one of the five spots.

Four teams — Atlanta, New York, Minnesota and Indiana — have players that are all vying for those spots. While other playoff teams, from Las Vegas to Golden State, take on teams firmly out of the postseason picture this week, the aforementioned four face each other in what will be primetime tilts with playoff seeding implications.

How much will performances there matter towards those All-WNBA votes? I think of Breanna Stewart who is now getting MVP buzz from her head coach on the back of a dominant FIBA World Cup. At the start of the month, there was a fair argument to make that she’d be right on the cusp of first and second team. So if she dominates? Or if, say, Angel Reese dominates her this week, how does it factor into the end of the year? It’s a unique situation but it may lead to some interesting vote patterns when all is said and done. There’s going to be some fanbases that will be upset, but I guess that’s par for the course this time of year.

So, with that said, let’s talk about Defensive Player of the Year.

Every season, there’s a quiet conversation about how assessing defense is probably one of the hardest things to do as a voter. It doesn’t matter the sport, it’s just hard without as many counting and advanced stats out there (although there have been substantial advancements in recent years). In my eyes, one thing that makes assessment so difficult is how scheme-specific and matchup-dependent good defense can be. And good luck getting coaches to openly explain on record the intricacies that give their best defenders a competitive advantage.

So it comes down to the statistics you value, whether they’re counting stats or catch-all metrics like RAPM, VPM, JUNKIE, RAPTOR, LEBRON or any of the other acronyms out there. Past that, there’s the eye test. What do you see? Who are the players guarding? Are they switchable or are they being hunted? Are they forcing traps, helping defensively or covering up flaws of their teammates? The trick there is the multiple variables at play, from the other defenders on the floor to the lineup on the other side.

If I had a vote, I’d be putting down Angel Reese as DPOY but I wouldn’t begrudge a voter for writing in A’ja Wilson or Gabby Williams or even Kiah Stokes or Shakira Austin. It might be, in my opinion, one of the closest award races we’ve had in quite some time and the votes will be dictated by what metrics, eye tests or matchups are valued the most. I don’t have a good answer as to what they should be, but I do know that the lack of consensus is inherently part of the beauty of the game. As long as you have some kind of educated and informed process that led you to your vote, it doesn’t really matter if fans think you’re wrong. That’s kind of the exercise, isn’t it? Everyone is doing their own analysis, and how right anyone is comes down to the players themselves and what they do on the floor every night.

In past years, it felt easy to project who would be making a deep run in the WNBA playoffs. It also felt easy to think about which matchups favored certain teams and whether or not there would be some gamesmanship to maneuver yourself into the right place in the standings to achieve that.

This year, it’s a total free-for-all.

I’ll be honest, I have no clue who is winning the WNBA Finals this year. I don’t even know what the most plus matchups are for teams heading into the playoffs. Initially, it felt like the Fever had an inside track while the Liberty were surging. Now the Dream look like the peaking group as Minnesota dropped a game to New York. Part of me wonders, like it is with the awards voting, if the breakup of the schedule is messing with our ability to properly perceive what we’re seeing. Sure, the Mystics beat Indiana last night, but is that a regular season one-off or a sign of which team actually has the goods?

While I’m not sure of the endgame, I do know this: there will be absolute chaos in this opening round. Aces coach Becky Hammon reignited calls to change the playoff format, keeping the first round a best-of-three series but allowing the home team to have two games at home and one on the road versus the 1-1-1 format that we have. She’s right in the sense that the 1-1-1 doesn’t favor the higher seed and introduces much more variance. So I’m expecting chaos, from the tiebreaker scenarios (of which there are many) to who actually shows up in the semifinals in October. But that’s what makes this fun. Buckle up.

To the Mohegan Tribe,

Thank you for standing up for the WNBA when few others would. When the DeVos family wanted to jettison the Miracle and the nascent league faced a legitimate crisis of faith, you stepped up. You saw the groundswell of support for UConn women’s basketball, bought a franchise, brought in Nykesha Sales and the rest is, well, history. While there was never a WNBA title at the end of the rainbow, your regularly competitive rosters gave us a show year after year. From Lindsay Whalen to Katie Douglas, Tina Charles to Jonquel Jones and Alyssa Thomas, there was always a star in Uncasville. MVP’s came through the casino arena and Sun fans, while always left disappointed with a lack of a trophy, never found themselves loving a floundering franchise.

While NBA owners derided their partner league for not being profitable, you showed within three years of operation that such a thing was possible. And while the tribal laws that dictate community good for every dollar spent, handicapping the ability to contend in the new arms race era we find ourselves in, there was a care and stewardship that was always at the forefront.

What happened here wasn’t fair. Instead of being given the opportunity to at least fully cash out, realize the market value of what you built and a chance to keep the franchise at home, the powers that be pushed a financially disadvantageous deal to make one of their peers happy. The Houston Comets are back, and that’s worth being excited about. I just wish it didn’t have to come at the expense of your fanbase and franchise.

Hopefully, there will be a way back into New England at some point, although I have a feeling Connecticut itself will not be the beneficiary of that return. But for all the hassle of the last couple years, I hope the decision makers in Uncasville and those still with the Sun organization understand that those who care understand what you did. You left the WNBA, your franchise, your players and your community in a better place than you found it. And that’s the highest compliment somebody typing words on a page can give.

The Louisville Courier-Journal released an extraordinarily sad and alarming story over the weekend about a Senegalese women’s basketball player who was picked up by ICE back in August and has been detained ever since.

Aminata Seck, a third-team All-SIAC selection and Kentucky State’s leading scorer, was detained at the Louisville airport while traveling with her team to a tournament in New York. Her attorney, Sadiqa Reynolds, says Seck has been moved between multiple facilities and has struggled to get consistent access to medical attention while in custody. The 26 year old center had major ACL surgery and is believed to have missed a visa deadline while dealing with a separate back procedure over the summer.

By now, I think most of our readers understand where we stand on some of the broader issues surrounding women’s basketball. While I’m a firm believer in a light and tactical touch when it comes to advocacy through column writing and on-air appearances, there are certain lines that must be spelled out plainly and drawn clearly. In the same way I, as a columnist and human, believe in the rights and dignity of our transgender neighbors and believe that the general sports discussion is nothing but a fishing lure to bring otherwise rational people into a pipeline of full-on bigotry, I similarly believe that a major overhaul of immigration and customs enforcement is required. In short, ICE needs to abolished. Any talk of ‘reasonable immigration policy’ is, like the trans in sports debate, a red herring to get ambivalent onlookers and take them on an information superhighway into the abhorrent cruelty that lies at the end of the road.

Beyond the ghoulish and heinous nature in which the agency conducts their business, Seck’s detainment should be sending off alarm bells to every university, big and small, across the country. As the Kentucky State student-athlete sits in ICE custody, two members of Congress introduced a bill suggesting an amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965. In essence, S.5392 would cap international student-athlete participation to 20 percent and subject to enforcement by the Department of Education, if passed in both houses. Curiously, the bill completely omits enforcement and what agency would be in charge of such a thing. All this, mind you, is happening as the University of Texas South Asian community was the subject of some of the most openly racist political invective since George Wallace declared ‘segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever’.

It’s been hard today to not think of the parallel to Brittney Griner and her detainment in Russia. Over the last seven weeks, ICE has allegedly moved Seck to four different locations all while, according to AP’s reporting, no longer publicly revealing where they are holding detainees that are subject to final deportation orders. What simply is a misunderstanding of missed paperwork that could be completed in five minutes has become a situation of a collegiate student-athlete being, in essence, black-bagged and abducted by the state’s security services. To KSU’s credit, head coach Amani Williams has been out in her community trying to bring attention to Seck’s case and a means to make it home. With any luck, the amplification of the story will put pressure on the abject cowards that run the agency and they’ll fold as cowards tend to do when met with stiff resistance.

While there are a thousand major stories propagating our social media feeds every day, I’d ask that you pay special attention to the one directly affecting our corner of the women’s basketball world. And believe me, this is not the last time you’ll be reading about this story in NCS either.

Minnesota Lynx (32-10) vs. Indiana Fever (27-15): 8:00 PM ET, ESPN

Obviously this game takes top billing but don’t sleep on Sparks vs. Aces in the late window either. Dearica Hamby is always good for a breakout game against her old club and the Aces are still trying to chase the top two seeds. But come on, you know what you want to watch tonight. Not only is Minnesota clinging to a one game lead on the top seed over Golden State, but there are still votes to be cast for All-WNBA First Team. Plus, the Lynx and Fever both are playing for seeding and to get in playoff mode. I expect a raucous Gainbridge Fieldhouse and a hell of a game on tap.

Jihyun Park's transition from the WKBL to the WNBA by Micaela Begue, Sporting Tribune

Does the law back Enes Kanter Freedom's WNBA draft bid? by Katie Barnes, ESPN

'More than a home team': What the WNBA's CT Sun meant to members of the Mohegan Tribe by Maggie Vanoni, CTInsider