Happy Monday and a very Happy Labor Day, Ball-Knowers!

The FIBA World Cup kept us busy over the weekend, as our crew is breaking down Team USA’s results as they happen. While we’ll keep you up to date with the knockout rounds this week, expect some NCAA content to start hitting your inbox. The women’s college basketball season is now less than two months away, and the WNBA gets back to its regularly scheduled programming in a little over a week.

It’s a lot of hoops and we’ll always be here to help you parse through it. But, for now, onto the column!

Tyler and Andrew breakdown the USA’s win vs Czechia and if France can beat Team USA…

A live postgame recap from Team USA vs. Italy

Andrew’s flash reaction to Cathy Engelbert’s retirement announcement

Throughout the group stage (and understandably compounded by that dreadful performance against Italy), there has been an emerging perception divide between the Team USA veterans and the newly minted ‘Young and Turnt’ group. But in their blowout win over Czechia, the Americans reminded us of something: they’re the freaking Americans! A bad game is hardly a harbinger of future performance when everyone on your roster is an All-WNBA caliber player.

Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier bounced back nicely as Team USA shared the ball, didn’t turn it over and made all the shots they missed against Italy on Sunday. The concern over two distinct teams can now be chalked up to “they’re playing in the group stage and trying to see what works and what doesn’t.” It’s pretty clear, at least to me, that A’ja Wilson’s late exit from the rotation due to a lingering back injury left the Americans relatively unprepared. In their first two games of the tournament, it looked as though the biggest stars on Team USA deferred to one another and there wasn’t really a clear “give me the ball and get out of the way type”. Tyler and I even discussed the absence of Kelsey Plum and how she is one of those players with a mindset that they’re going to get theirs regardless of level and who else she’s playing with. By the time the final buzzer sounded in Berlin on Monday, it was clear that Stewart and Collier were starting to get into a rhythm of being the number one option again.

That still opens a question of what the best rotation is for the Americans and how you manage the backcourt in the knockout rounds. Chelsea Gray is still a must-play with the game on the line, but Kahleah Copper just hasn’t looked like herself this tournament. Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers have waxed and waned while Jackie Young has done the same. This team is still good enough that they can cruise to a gold medal matchup on the back of their talent. So, in spite of a bad of an identity crisis, you’d be a fool to think Team USA isn’t still the overwhelming favorite to be World Cup champions once again.

Now, with that in mind…

The French look like they’re out for blood after nearly taking the Americans to overtime in the 2024 Olympic gold medal game. Gabby Williams is averaging nearly 19 points per game so far on over 50/40/90 shooting splits while 20 year old forward Dominique Malonga provides an interior threat that she wasn’t ready to do in Paris two years ago. They share the ball, play tight defense and have Marine Johannes as a microwave, shooting a blistering 52% from three-point-range so far in the group stage.

When you really lay it out, the French have eight WNBA players on their roster. Of those eight, you can make a fair argument that four of them (Carla Leite, Gabby Williams, Dominique Malonga, Janelle Salaun) are at least All-Star caliber or better. Since opening the World Cup, Les Bleus have vaporized everyone in their path and look even more dominant than they did in Paris.

Now, do I think that means they’re going to beat the United States? Absolutely not. If you get the best game out of Team USA and the best game out of France, I’d be willing to say that the Americans are at least a ten point favorite.

But that’s the funny thing about basketball. It’s pretty rare you get both teams playing their absolute best. Italy dropped some interesting tape on Team USA that, if you get into a rock fight with them, you have the chance to win. I’m not sure who feels more rock-fight-built than the French.

Man, do I owe Vanja Cernivec an apology.

I admit that I didn’t understand the decision to draft-and-stash a young European guard in your first year as a WNBA franchise. When you have immediate options in front of you, it felt like a decision that had to consider more than just the basketball.

And that’s why my dumb ass isn’t a WNBA General Manager.

After watching the Spanish national team this week, I completely understand why you’d take the chance on 20 year old guard Iyana Martin. She has the goods at this level and I’m really interested in seeing her against Team USA in a potential semifinal matchup on September 12th. While still young and a little raw, there’s a lot of Olivia Miles in Martin’s game. That patience, vision and ability to manipulate the defense through your own movements on the floor, it’s all there. She became the first player under the age of 21 to score 20+ points in back-to-back games in the World Cup in the 21st century earlier this morning.

Not only does that bode well for the Spanish at the international level, as Martin and Awa Fam are still in their early 20’s, but it makes you think about all the possibilities Fire head coach Alex Sarama has at his disposal in the future. One of the things that’s stood out about Martin in this group stage has been how active her hands have been defensively and how good her instincts have been on traps in the half court. That innate talent, combined with a much-improved Carla Leite might end up being one of the WNBA’s most exciting backcourts whenever Martin decides she wants to come to the states.

Remember the name now, folks. And don’t be surprised if she comes to the league and immediately hits the ground running.

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While watching the Italians nearly defeat Team USA over the weekend, I was struck by just how many Azzurri faithful made the trip up to Berlin. Women’s sports have always been more culturally accepted than they have in the United States, but women’s basketball was always an afterthought, or so I believed.

Historically, the LBF (also known as Serie A1) has been one of the most significant women’s basketball leagues in Europe. When there was no WPBL, or ABL, or WNBA, some of the best American-born players would find themselves in place like Parma or Venice. Cynthia Cooper, Teresa Weatherspoon, Yolanda Griffith and Ruthie Bolton, to name a few, all had homes in Italy, providing a critical opportunity for the top NCAA players that had no chance to play professionally at home. They brought a ton of attention to the game and brought out fans who wanted to see them, but it didn’t spark a grassroots revolution in women’s hoops like one might have expected. It’s just different when it’s your own people achieving to that degree, you know?

Which is why, as the Italians put a real-deal scare into the Americans, I thought about how important this game was, win or lose, for those Azzurri faithful. This was their first World Cup appearance since 1994 and here they were, taking the juggernaut Team USA to the very last possession of their group stage game. While a win would’ve been a historically-significant upset of seismic proportions, even competing with the best on the world stage might be enough to ignite the collective imagination of Italian women and girls. It sure looks like Ceci Zandalasini is achieving cult hero status, if she hadn’t already.

Past Italy, you can see how much basketball is starting to find cultural ubiquity. It is, after all, a working class sport in the same way soccer is. I’ve always argued that baseball might be America’s pastime but basketball is America’s sport. Our relationship to hoops is not too dissimilar than the English’s relationship to their football. While the rest of the world hasn’t caught up to us in basketball the way soccer caught up to England, that time may soon be coming.

The competitive floor of this tournament is higher than it was just two years ago at the 2024 Paris Olympics. I can almost guarantee the level of competition two years from now in Los Angeles will be a jump from what we are watching in Germany now. While it’s not the thing you want to read as a fan of Team USA, it is something worth appreciating as a global fan of the game. It’s a worldwide sport now, and even though that concept is still in its relative infancy, you can see the future on display in this World Cup.

Game on.

On Friday morning, shortly after Team USA’s opening FIBA World Cup match wrapped up, news hit the feeds that Cathy Engelbert would be retiring as WNBA commissioner at the end of the year. The news itself wasn’t surprising, as the embattled league leader had been walking around with a target on her back since last fall. But the timing was amusing, as the collective eyes of the sports world were on women’s basketball instead of, say, dumping the news in the late afternoon when all media attention would turn to college football.

Great strategy, bad tactics.

A perfect encapsulation of Engelbert’s stewardship of the WNBA.

Let me be clear when I say this: Cathy Engelbert did the job that she was hired to do. When she arrived from Deloitte in 2019, the newly minted commissioner was given a mandate: overhaul the league from an organizational and economic standpoint. At the time, Breanna Stewart had ruptured her Achilles’ tendon while playing in the Euroleague. More than half of her contemporaries in the W were playing abroad in the offseason. The New York Liberty were playing in the 3,000 seat Westchester County Center. The demographics, strangely enough, were primarily older men.

The goal was to make the WNBA self-sufficient financially and more attractive to corporate sponsors and partners. In that regard, Engelbert accomplished everything she was asked to and then some. If you look at things from a purely utilitarian perspective, where the ends justify the means, she’s an unequivocal success as a commissioner.

But, as I wrote in July in the midst of yet another public relations quagmire, the W just isn’t a league in which you can ignore the human side of the business. And that’s where Engelbert failed, over and over and over since the start of 2024.

When she was first brought on as commissioner, her experience as the first female CEO of a big four accounting firm was evidence that she had the ability to be nimble and proactive. But what defined the second half of her tenure in the WNBA was an inability to react quickly in changing times and a reliance on what once worked versus what will work now.

Does she deserve credit for the growing profile of the W, or should that go to the emerging generation of players who are elevating the game on the floor? On some level, Engelbert should be praised for not crashing the proverbial Ferrari. Yes, the 2020 recruiting class of players — Caitlin Clark, Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese among them — were going to take the sport into a new stratosphere regardless, but Engelbert did lay substantial groundwork so that the infrastructure of the league itself was ready for a tidal wave of interest, specifically surrounding expansion franchises.

What I have a hard time with is reckoning the financial success of the WNBA in her time as commissioner with the absolute mess she’s left from a communications standpoint. The dialogue around the league is almost as caustic as it is in the NBA. Under Engelbert’s stewardship, the W has been a political football not once, but twice and has done nothing to try and stem the tide. Instead, the commissioner has outsourced much of the advocacy and protection of the league’s image to her labor force, creating a dynamic in which many veterans get blamed for a perceived jealousy of the new crop of players. This strategy luckily worked in 2020 when the Atlanta Dream’s players led the ouster of former team owner and then-GOP senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia. As more political attention came to the league in the last three years, Engelbert seemed to take the same approach that the players were either going to ignore it or figure it out for the WNBA.

When Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese were drafted in 2024, it became apparent that the commissioner had no clue how to manage the league’s messaging. Not only did she have an almost-smug-if-not-nonchalant approach to the torrents of online abuse being hurled at the biggest stars in the league from Reese to Clark to A’ja Wilson and more, but she believed that the best business strategy was to lean into it further even if it meant potentially poisoning the well from players to fans new and old. By this summer, everyone was so exhausted by the dialogue that the FIBA World Cup has felt like a breath of fresh air. It was a categorical misreading of the room and a complete lack of understanding of who your labor force is, how they live their lives and how to fix the problem.

Instead of trying to meet everyone where they were at, Engelbert bunkered further into her “just ignore the mess happening outside” mindset and insisted that everyone else was wrong.

In many ways, the enduring legacy of Cathy Engelbert will be that of a really good accountant who was the right person for what the job originally was and maybe the worst person possible for what the job became. As the WNBA has spent the better part of three seasons under the mainstream news microscope, Engelbert hasn’t inspired any confidence in her approach. It’s been slow, reactionary, tepid and uncertain. One might argue that there were only so many things a commissioner could do to handle the deluge of discourse around the league since 2024. But when Engelbert herself is admitting on CNBC that she feels the WNBA should intentionally lean into the racial dynamic of Angel Reese vs. Caitlin Clark, an argument of powerlessness falls apart.

More than anything, what Engelbert never understood is the idea that growth doesn’t have to be so dogmatic. Instead of setting a conciliatory, or even collaborative tone heading into a new era of the WNBA, she allowed factions to form and create a discourse death spiral that still exists to this day. While you can’t argue with the economic leaps forward during Engelbert’s tenure, a growing league has different needs than a more established organization like the NBA. A commissioner of the former has to be a proactive message-disciplined leader than someone who just makes sure the money continues to flow in the right direction. As history flattens her misdeeds (the 2022 capital raise may legitimately kill the WNBA, but that’s a column for another time) and looks upon her financial moves with grace, it’s hard to see her as anything other than an accountant that had no real cultural understanding of the product she presided over. Here’s to hoping her successor does.

Hungary vs. Japan - Knockout Round: 2:45 PM ET, HBO Max

The Hungarians have been a nice surprise in the group stage, beating Nigeria and South Korea to advance to the knockout rounds. Now they see a Japanese team that seems ripe for an upset. Outside of an opening day victory over Mali, the top teams have managed to separate late from Japan late in games. It’s worth noting that those two losses came at the hands of Germany and Spain, so Hungary should be a bit more of a like-for-like matchup. The big question is if Japan can outpace and outshot a Hungarian squad that has leaned on an emerging set of frontcourt options.