Five Out: Caitlin Clark's Sensational Return, An Angel Reese Experiment That May Be Working and A Front Row Seat to The Dallas Wings Turmoil

Some of the biggest storylines in the league coalesced over the weekend to make for one of the most interesting weeks of WNBA basketball we've seen so far this season.

I promise the title isn’t just SEO bait. We’ve got plenty more to talk about this week in Five Out. It’s just pretty rare that we get a week in which all the major stars and biggest teams all have something worth talking about. This week we should honestly have an honorable mention for the interesting topics that didn’t actually make Five Out this week.

In the spirit of making sure you’re up on game across the league, we’re going down the bench with two additional topics in the column to give you a full 360 degree view of the week that was in women’s basketball. As we’ve always preached here, No Cap Space WBB is about the totality of the game and using the superstar draws as a way to get you in to know more ball about everyone in women’s hoops. So enjoy an extra two pieces that are coming off the bench as well as the big ticket items to touch on this week.

To the column!!

1. Is there some dissonance involved? Yes. But Caitlin Clark is indisputably good for the game and it’s great to have her back.

On some level, I can acknowledge my privilege in watching Caitlin Clark. I’m a 30 year old white dude that grew up in a upper-middle-class suburb of New York City. Most of the ills of society don’t really come my way. To that end, I can acknowledge that it’s easier to put aside some of the less savory stuff around Caitlin Clark (not her fault, to be clear) and just watch her play. I’m not sure how I feel about trying to advocate for similar dissonance in people and if the next couple paragraphs come off that way, I’ll take the critique if you have it.

With that in mind, my position has always been consistent. The sport, and all sports inherently, are political. The system, its fanbases, geography, demography, etc. But the game, the stuff that happens between the lines, is rarely so. There are notable exceptions here but generally, I don’t think Caitlin Clark draining a three over a defender is political or sociological in nature.

If you can exist within that framework, there is no two ways about it: 22 is great for the game and if you can’t watch her for what she is, I’m not sure what to tell you. In her Saturday return against New York, a 102-88 Indiana win with Jonquel Jones out of the Liberty lineup, Clark finished with 32 points, 9 assists and 8 rebounds on 11/20 shooting, 7/14 from 3 point range. Her 38 second barrage in which she unleashed three beyond-NBA-range triples in rapid succession was the ‘wow’ factor in miniature. I don’t know how one can watch that and not go ‘holy shit. Never seen this before'. One of the beautiful things in sports is an athletes ability to defy belief, to make you say ‘there’s no way’ and then be shocked when they actually do it. That’s the beauty of Clark and other transcendent athletes like her. As I’ve said before, it’s the natural progression in women’s basketball. We said ‘there’s no way’ as Lisa Leslie left her feet for the first dunk in WNBA history. We said ‘there’s no way’ when Candace Parker hit the break against Army in the NCAA Tournament before flushing one for the first time in women’s basketball history. And we now say ‘there’s no way’ as Clark pulls up from over 30 feet and snaps the net with a defender picking her up 40 feet from the basket. It’s never been seen before and may never be seen again in the sport. That alone is worth the price of admission.

I can understand the caution around fully falling into the fandom as much as I can understand the frustration of Clark fans who exist in good-faith that don’t understand why people can’t see what they see. But, from my vantage point, this is the show that she’s brought since she first stepped on the floor at Carver-Hawkeye Arena. It doesn’t mean the WNBA doesn’t have amazing players, great teams and incredible storylines. It just means they also have this one singular player who makes the league better when she’s on the floor. And the more people like her we have in the sport, the better the sport is going to be.

2. The Angel Reese point forward experiment might legitimately be working…

One day after Clark’s barrage in a win, we got an extremely intriguing Chicago Sky victory over the Connecticut Sun in which Angel Reese earned her first career triple-double. While the shooting percentage still isn’t great (she finished 2/7 from the field but a very encouraging 7/7 from the line), Reese stuffed the stat sheet with 11 points, 11 assists, 13 rebounds, 3 steals and 2 blocks. Throughout the start of the season, we’ve seen little snippets of Angel Reese point forward experiment. I’d argue that Sunday was the first game where we saw a true glimpse of what that vision could be. As much flack as she’s gotten over the course of the season, the idea that she could be more of an Alyssa Thomas-esque facilitator was always on the table.

Reese is athletic, possesses good court vision when she’s not eyeing the basket and, perhaps most importantly, obtains a next-level work ethic that has transferred beautifully from college to the pros. Watching her manage the flow of the offense was really interesting and feels like a place that, with work on her handle and shooting, could vault her into a very unique tier of player: the elite floor raiser. Alyssa Thomas, the most applicable example, is a triple-double machine with some shooting limitations who impacts the game through an elite work ethic, physicality and mentality. Reese has the advantage of not playing with torn labrums that never were surgically healed and thus, the ceiling of her shooting is much higher than AT’s. If it can all come together, we could be looking at a legit star here. It’s also a lesson in patience. I know that there’s a lot of bad-faith posturing around Reese and animus about her personality that bleeds into critique over her game. That’s not to say there aren’t reasonable criticisms about the shooting percentages, rebounding and tunnel-vision when she gets the ball under the hoop. But I think it’s also worth considering that this is a player that is a month into her second year in the WNBA. Usually we see major jumps in year three and four so if Reese starts to hit her stride by August of this season, she’s well ahead of schedule relative to the rest of the league.

3. I was on press row and next to Curt Miller for Aces vs. Wings. Here’s everything I saw.

I was down in Las Vegas compiling some future features for our Ball-Knowers tier and inadvertently got a front row seat to one of the more interesting emerging storylines in the WNBA. My spot in press row was right in front of the Dallas bench and, as it happens, right next to Dallas Wings GM Curt Miller, who was sitting next to the Wings medical bike watching the game (picture below for proof so this isn’t just a ‘trust me bro’ situation.

I walked over to him during the third quarter and joked if he wanted to run onto the floor and start coaching. In his usual deadpan way, he said he’d be watching a middle school basketball game and go through the same thing. Curt cares and by the fourth quarter, it was pretty clear how much he wanted to jump on the floor and stop the Aces comeback. I can confirm that he did yell ‘review it’ to Chris Koclanes but it wasn’t for the first play that DiJonai Carrington was asking for. It was actually a different 50/50 play a couple possessions later, one that even Arike Ogunbowale was begging Koclanes to take a look. Earlier in the quarter, as Vegas was going on a run, Miller also was yelling for Chris to call a time out and gather the team together. From my vantage point on press row, I don’t think Koclanes is as aloof as he’s portrayed. I stood over a few timeouts throughout the game and he’s pretty solid on the clipboard. He draws up solid plays and got more confident especially in the second half. But his clear shortcoming is what seems to be a desire to let players play through bad spells and not take charge as a coach. What’s creating the problem is it seems that players are actually waiting on him to be proactive and he, for some reason, isn’t willing to.

Which brings me to DiJonai Carrington. What people don’t see and didn’t see against Vegas is some of the issues started in the first quarter. Even as the Aces were getting ahead in the early portions of the game, the body language in timeouts wasn’t great. Carrington was and is very engaged with Nola Henry, the Wings assistant, but rolled eyes, mouthed some dissatisfaction and showed general dissent when Koclanes would sit down and take the reins. It clearly got worse as the game went on, as the broadcast cameras eventually zeroed in on it.

As someone who watched the whole thing evolve, this is my take: I don’t think this dynamic is sustainable. For starters, Henry and Koclanes look like two halves of a whole coach. The former is able to talk to players and has a big enough personality that she is able to garner respect from the egos (which I don’t say negatively) that are inherent to pro basketball players. Koclanes is good with drawing individual ATO’s and specific sets out of timeouts but the scheme does leave a bit to be desired. If you combined the two, you’d probably have a really good coach. The issue is that this is like the old adage in football: when you have two quarterbacks, you have no quarterback. That’s what it feels like when watching the Wings.

I don’t blame Carrington for her frustration but you can’t take yourself out of two critical possessions in the fourth quarter because you’re so focused on your coach. You can’t walk down the court and take yourself out of the first ten seconds of the next offensive possession because you’re complaining about it to your girlfriend on the bench. None of it looks good. Koclanes and Carrington share equal blame. Koclanes, frankly, needs to learn to be the right kind of asshole. Every great head coach has the ego to be able to stand toe-to-toe with their stars. It doesn’t feel like he knows how to do that and the optics of ignoring your players while they’re standing in front of you is not great.

There’s still a chance to right the ship here but it’s going to require a major revamp of Koclanes’ style, a major conversation with Nola Henry, another with DiJonai Carrington and then one with Curt Miller. But time is ticking away and, if they don’t fix it soon, it runs the risk of getting historically bad.

4. Should we be talking about Golden State as a playoff team?

Is there a team with better vibes than the Golden State Valkyries right now? I know there are franchises that are having better starts and having fun on the floor. But the energy around the entirety of the WNBA’s newest expansion franchise is remarkable. Ballhalla is top notch, the Chase Center is full, the Valks play a fun style and now have two wins over known-commodity teams in the W (Seattle and Las Vegas) that are synonymous with success even if they aren’t seeing as much of it this year.

While there isn’t a singular superstar on this team, Natalie Nakase has built a great system in which everyone eats and any player can go off on any given night. What makes the story even better is that this is basically a team of sixth women that haven’t changed their style at all. It’s all effort, fights for 50/50 balls, ‘one more’ passes and rotational players ready to step into a bigger role. It’s pretty remarkable that the team loses pieces for Eurobasket and it’s just the next person up.

I don’t have any delusions about the Valks going to the WNBA Finals but it sure feels like they’re going to be a bonafide playoff team this year. As it currently stands, Golden State is out of the draft lottery and are tied with the Aces for fourth in the western conference. If the season ended today, they’d be a six seed. Granted, there’s a lot of time and a big glut of teams right around that .500 mark. But it sure feels like the Valkyries have the chance to head to the playoffs in their first year of existence which would be absolutely remarkable and a potential sign of things to come. As more ownership groups come in and more franchises are revved up, will there be more Golden State type teams in the future?

5. The WNBA needs to ban Outkick from being credentialed moving forward.

I called this out last season, at the start of this season and am ready to really go feet first into the take now. After another weekend of doing absolutely nothing but abusing a press credential to agitate and instigate, the WNBA needs to issue a blanket ban on Outkick going forward. The outlet made news for being rejected for a credential for the Indiana Fever - Chicago Sky game a week or two ago. Undeterred in their mission to be perpetual shit-stirrers, they simply maneuvered a reporter over to the Atlanta Dream - Washington Mystics game to heckle Brittney Griner with not one but two brain dead set of questions meant to be nothing but red meat to people that see women’s basketball not as a sport but an extension of a culture war.

At this point, the league needs to step in. We’ve been very consistent on this point, on both ends of the spectrum, since Caitlin Clark entered the league. The same way we doled out criticism for Jim Trotter’s choice to come out just to press the Indiana Fever guard on her fanbase, we are going to do the same for Outkick. The fact of the matter is they aren’t here for the game. They’re not coming to arenas to talk about the players, the schemes, the storylines or the actual matchups. They serve to get quotes that they can chop and screw and inflame tensions in places where they don’t need to be. At this point, they’ve shown absolutely no net positive for the league and the discussions around it. It may be a hard thing for the W to do but fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. They’ve fooled you twice. Don’t be a fool again.

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6. We need to talk about the Atlanta Dream as a serious deep playoff contender.

Now to some of our extra bench points on Five Out. The Atlanta Dream are a legit contender and it’s time we start talking about them as maybe a half a tier down from the Liberty and Lynx. Allisha Gray put up another stat stuffing performance to boost an MVP case while Rhyne Howard is liable to go absolutely nuclear at any given moment.

Karl Smesko is probably in a two-horse race with Nate Tibbetts for coach of the year right now and I’m extremely interested in how they matchup against. They have a six game slate at the end of June that includes New York, Minnesota, Indiana, Seattle and Golden State. It’s in that sample where we’ll learn just how high the ceiling is.

7. Kahleah Copper is back in the Phoenix lineup. What’s the Mercury’s ceiling?

It’s good to see Kahleah Copper working back into the lineup as the Mercury beat the Aces on Sunday. She shot 4/13 but I have a feeling the numbers will start to get better as she settles into the lineup. Alyssa Thomas still remains an elite floor raiser while Satou Sabally sits with Allisha Gray, A’ja Wilson and Caitlin Clark in that MVP tier just below frontrunner Napheesa Collier.

The Mercury managed to work well with a group of rotational pieces that shot the leather off the ball and played good, tough defense. Will Copper’s entrance into the lineup change things for them? They managed to hold off an A’ja-less Aces team on Sunday but what happens when they face off against the best teams in the league. Counting stats would tell you that Copper will be a force multiplier offensively but I’m curious what the future looks like and how this new big three coalesces with a bench group that’s been fantastic so far this year.