Happy Monday, Ball-Knowers!

We are officially less than two weeks away from the FIBA World Cup in Germany. Games start September 4th and run through the 13th as nations from around the globe try to knock off Team USA and their Dream Team-esque collection of talent.

No Cap Space will be covering the games every day from end-to-end so if you don’t want the hoop coverage to end, tap in with us here and become a Ball-Knower!

There’s plenty to get to this week as well, with the WNBA playoff field more-or-less set and award races tightening up. We did have an unfortunate incident on the court at the Indiana vs. Chicago game on Sunday so that will be touched on as well in the column. But, as always, it’ll round us out at the end rather than take centerstage over the actual basketball on the floor. That’s the rule and we’re sticking to it.

Now, onto the column!

The video and pod forms of Five Out…

Tyler joined Seerat Sohi on The Ringer WNBA Show…

And check out a fun piece from Tyler on YouTube, showing us how Olivia Miles may be the Marvel Hero that the WNBA is looking for…

Catch his mailbag here as well…

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While the Portland Fire aren’t mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, their loss to the Toronto Tempo coupled with Dallas’ win over Indiana all but spelled doom. Their schedule is too much of an uphill climb and they’d need the Wings to lose to a lot of now-tanking teams. It just won’t work out.

Barring the improbable, the playoff field is set.

So what are we playing for between now and October?

This is the time of the real Ball-Knower. Players are going to be in full-on chases for awards and All-WNBA teams (and the contract incentives that go with them) while coaches may be gaming the schedule to pull a favorable first round playoff matchup. If the regular season ended today, we’d be facing the following sets…

Minnesota (1) vs. Dallas (8)

Golden State (2) vs. Washington (7)

Las Vegas (3) vs. New York (6)

Atlanta (4) vs. Indiana (5)

Make no mistake, any iteration of these eight teams is going to be cinema for any women’s basketball fan. But I’m really curious who really wants who? Is Dallas worried wanting to jump up a seed line to avoid Minnesota? Does Indiana prefer Las Vegas in the opening round? Do coaches smell blood in the water with Golden State?

That combined with the load management after the FIBA World Cup make for some really interesting basketball discussion. If you’ve been wanting a way to get a layer deeper than the common narratives around the game, this is a perfect time to really get tactical.

After the Las Vegas Aces dropped back-to-back games against Minnesota and Atlanta, I started to think about their 2024 season. It was the most dominant year of A’ja Wilson’s career and the guard rotation of Kelsey Plum, Jackie Young and Chelsea Gray kept the overall team feared. They finished the regular season 27-13 but ran into a hungry New York Liberty in the semifinals. By the end of the series it was clear that the combination of a 2023 title run, a 2024 regular season and a 2024 Olympic run had drained the core of a lot of their energy. In short, they ran out of gas.

That’s not to say that same fate awaits the Aces this year. While Wilson, Gray and Young all were selected to the Team USA FIBA World Cup roster, there’s a lot of minutes to go around especially in the backcourt.

But will another team suffer the fate of too many games leading to some tired legs in October? Karl Smesko already seems to be planning ahead, limiting Angel Reese in the fourth quarter of a blowout win against Los Angeles in spite of a triple-double in her crosshairs. How much will we see of Caitlin Clark and Aliyah Boston in their next two games against Connecticut and Toronto (which bookend the World Cup on both ends)? And what of New York and Golden State, who have French players that will no doubt be giving everything to try and dethrone the Americans in Germany?

With the playoff field set, it wouldn’t surprise me if we started to see a little more load management from coaches and players down the stretch. As long as it means we get a postseason where everyone is at their best and healthiest, it’s a trade-off I’m willing to take.

After missing what would have been a game-winning layup against the Indiana Fever, Angel Reese has been on a tear. In the last three games, the Atlanta Dream forward is averaging 24 points, 11.3 rebounds and 4.7 assists per game on 67.4% shooting from the field. That included going a perfect 9/9 against the Los Angeles Sparks, a near-triple-double performance that punctuated Reese’s development in her third year. While there are still some conversations to be had about her shooting mechanics, it’s straight up intellectually disingenuous to argue that she isn’t a premier player in just about every other facet of the game.

With seven games left in the Dream’s regular season, Reese needs just three double-doubles to pass Alyssa Thomas’ WNBA single season record. She already has the single-season offensive rebounding record in hand and is still setting multiple Atlanta franchise records.

Don’t let the shooting fool you: this is the superstar that we were promised.

Along with Jordin Canada, who appears to be the answer to the ‘dawg’ question I posed in last week’s column, the Dream have surged since that overtime loss to the Fever. Their schedule is pretty light heading into the FIBA World Cup and it’s relatively light on the way out. If Reese continues to set more WNBA records, then there isn’t a question of All-WNBA but more of a question of ‘first team or second team’? She’s challenged my belief in a Gabby Williams Defensive Player of the Year case so substantially that if Reese keeps playing at this level the rest of the way, then that award is going to Atlanta instead.

As Caitlin Clark and Indiana continue to surge herself, I think it’s worth finding some enjoyment in the idea that both Reese and her contemporary are living up to the massive expectations that were set forth for them. Take away all the other stuff off the court that has driven their narratives and just focus on the basketball for a second. These were arguably the top two players in women’s college basketball who met with an NCAA title on the line. Now, in their third year in the WNBA, they’re making respective All-WNBA cases while leading their teams to the playoffs and potentially beyond. In a really monkeys-paw-curling sort of way, we may have gotten our Bird vs. Magic (in a biblically basketball sense) after all.

It’s been the case for the last three seasons but in case you didn’t know yet, Leonie Fiebich is the straw that stirs the New York Liberty’s drink. She may not be their most potent scorer or their heliocentric distributor. But the 26 year old German wing is the difference between New York merely being a playoff team and a unit that can win a WNBA championship. The defensive versatility and spacing that she brings to the Liberty solves a whole host of problems and her three point shooting fills an important gap in the offense.

With Satou Sabally still dealing with concussion issues so severe that she won’t even be competing in the FIBA World Cup, New York is in desperate need of a wing that can demand defensive attention while also being comfortable on an island on the other side of the floor. In her return against Indiana, her first back in the lineup since July 3rd, Fiebich finished with 20 points, 5 rebounds and 5 assists on 7/10 shooting and 3/5 from three point range.

Not too shabby for someone who hasn’t suited up in a month.

With that win, New York jumped Washington to get into the sixth seed. If the season were to end today, they’d see Las Vegas in the opening round of the playoffs. Any matchup will be daunting regardless of who it is, but as long as Fiebich is with the team and healthy, their ceiling rises considerably.

If you haven’t seen the video on social media yet, allow me to describe the situation so you don’t have to dignify the grievance-industrial complex with a click. Former NBA-role-player-turned-political-grifter Enes Kanter Freedom took his attention-seeking roadshow to Chicago, where the Fever played the Sky. Towards the end of the game, Sky guard Natasha Cloud yelled Freedom’s way. He then stepped over the photographers line and onto the court, where he was held by a security guard. A man, who appears to be Sky owner Michael Alter, walks over to facilitate Freedom’s removal from the arena.

End scene. Cue the grievance engine.

The persistent question is what, if anything, the league can do to quell this death spiral of discourse. I’d like to believe there is a consensus out there that, regardless of opinion on the broader matter of transgender participation in sports, what Kanter Freedom did was weird and should be worthy of public shaming. There’s some that might argue that Natasha Cloud should’ve not paid the grifter any mind, but her perspective feels somewhat reasonable. In essence, “Who is this asshole intent on disrespecting our game like this?”. I don’t blame her for wanting to buck up at him.

As I wrote last week in Five Out, the transgender participation in sports discussion offers a seductively simple binary (men-in-women’s-sports-is-bad) that then can take an otherwise well-meaning person on a magic carpet ride to bigotry without them really realizing it. After being fed a never-ending algorithm of slop the person is pulled in so deep that, before they know it, they’re cheering on an oaf interrupting a professional sporting event for a transparently shameless election grift.

Unfortunately, this is not solely a social media problem anymore. It’s bled into real life.

And that’s where the league, its teams and its players need to draw a clear line.

Kanter Freedom is a stooge, to be clear. Taking someone like him or Royce White out of the equation via an arenas ban doesn’t stop the larger media apparatus. It may, for a brief period of time, inflame the dialogue but overall it’s much likelier to peter out over time. But if you don’t make an example of him now, then you empower the next dildo thrower, heckler or court trespasser. Within the confines of an arena, the WNBA and its franchises have the ability to be a bit stricter, hire more security or take measures to be more careful about who is sitting courtside. It would’ve been a disaster for Kanter Freedom to be pre-emptively banned from the arena but it isn’t playing the game to ban him now. It’s opting out from the game entirely.

Pivot the discussion and deprive it of the oxygen it needs.

Ignoring people like Kanter Freedom hasn’t necessarily worked to this point. It’s allowed most fans the brief comfort of ignoring that factions presence until they inevitably force their way back into the conversation. The only way to beat them is to prove that your way is better. In the messaging sense, that means presenting an alternative to engage with. It’s not enough to say ignore it. You need to sell something better.

The WNBA can’t control what Bill Simmons puts in his podcast or what First Take says, but they absolutely can control the messaging coming out of their own league. That extends to its players and coaches. I may be completely ignorant of how the corporate communications process works but why can’t there be a blanket answer template to any (truly, ANY) non-basketball related question?

Is a framework — “Anyone trying to disrupt our game isn’t a fan of women’s basketball or a fan of ours. Instead we should be talking about insert player or teammate or performance” — not a script that everyone can borrow from the same way they borrow “every game is a big game” or “we’re just trying to get one percent better everyday”?

It may not feel like much in the abstract, but Caitlin Clark pushing a teammates name any time a non-basketball question comes feels newsworthy? Angel Reese or Paige Bueckers doing the same means easy SEO fodder for content creators and fans to chase. The problem is that having that kind of discipline is hard work, and the WNBA (and NBA, by extension) are constantly looking for an easy, one-size-fits-all answer. What they don’t seem to yet understand is that there isn’t one.

The league doesn’t need to take a specifically partisan or even principled stand. Instead, it just needs to reframe itself as the place of sanity amid a media climate it can’t control. That means banning people like Kanter Freedom and White, rejecting disruption in a nonpartisan fashion, and then reframing the discussion back to basketball. What these guys are doing is weird, and it shouldn’t be a problem to say that and reject their behavior. If you can get folks to at least agree on that as the standard price of admission, then you at least stand a fighting chance at letting cooler heads prevail in a wave of toxicity. The WNBA doesn’t need to win the culture war with a statement, but when their bad-faith opponents stick out their chin and dare the W to punch, Cathy Engelbert and Adam Silver can’t be afraid to take the easy swing.