Happy Monday, Ball-Knowers!

It was nice for our humble crew to get a little bit of vacation time for ourselves and unplug from ‘The Discourse’. Behind the scenes, our NCS team had our mid-year check, taking stock of our content, what worked and what didn’t, as well as how to best serve our loyal subscribers for the second half of the WNBA season.

In short, we’ve got some great pieces of content lined up and a renewed slate of feature stories and new segments (that we’ve been working on for the last few months) for you to sink your teeth into.

So lock in, pull down your driving goggles or put on your best fit. It’s time for the playoff push. Let’s get to it!

You may see a slight alteration to how the newsletter will be arriving and what it will look like. Our Monday, Wednesday and Friday offerings are still the same. You’ll get Five Out from me, Under Surveillance from Chauny and the Hotline/Weekly Mailbag from Tyler every week. Luxury Tax will be on Tuesdays and Ball Up Top on Thursdays. But there will be less ‘news of the day’ in those newsletters and instead a renewed commitment to elevating feature stories that we feel deserve a little bit more spotlight.

Hope you enjoy it!

If you want to watch Five Out on YouTube…

Or hear it in a podcast, click below!

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If you’re a WNBA fan and your biggest concern in the first half of the year was how little the basketball seemed to be the forefront of the conversation, then rejoice. It is nothing but banger matchup after banger matchup this August before the international break for the FIBA World Cup.

A coverage pattern is emerging in the W where July has become the worst month for dialogue and discourse around the league. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that as the NBA and NHL seasons wrap up, more cynical outlets at the national level are chasing the SEO monster and eventually an agenda is set. From there it becomes all too easy to forget that beating the discourse is by setting a new agenda instead of trying to give better analysis of the agenda. Since we all collectively have shorter memories these days, it’s entirely likely that we suffer through this again next year. But, at the very least, we’ll remember that we don’t need to treat the doldrums of July as a time to let Congress opine on women’s basketball.

There are some things working in the Ball-Knowers favor heading into August. There are real stakes at the end of the stretch run, for starters. Playoff position is vital and fiercely contested, especially from seeds two through eight. Player award races are also heating up, which means a premium will be put on the biggest matchups. Shoot, in the next month alone we get…

Even if we all collectively got a bit sidetracked this summer while teams spent the first half of the year figuring themselves out, now is the time to strap in and put the on-court product out front. After a lengthy month of this all not feeling as fun anymore, consider August an antidote to the toxicity.

It understandably flew under the radar, given the immense focus on all of the other off-court things but the Indiana Fever finished their run to the All-Star break with eight wins in their last ten games. Even with Caitlin Clark on minutes restrictions or dealing with injuries, the Fever managed to win most of the games they needed to. Perhaps most notably, Indiana went to Las Vegas twice in the span of ten days and beat the Aces in convincing fashion both times. While there are still some interesting trends — specifically a strange one where most teams beat the Fever the second time they play — it does feel as though the Fever might be turning a corner into the back half of the year.

While Clark has run hot-and-cold this year, her 45 point, 10 assist performance against Seattle before the break reminded everyone why she is such a captivating performer. Quite simply, there’s maybe three other players in the WNBA that have the capability of single handedly taking over a game while doing so in style like she does. The benefit of the All-Star break seemed to be in allowing Clark a moment to breath and hear from other contemporaries or influential people (a former President of the United States, maybe?) that she’s indeed the good person that she hopes people think she is. Without overanalyzing too much, stardom tends to be lonely for the select few that exist in the rarified air Clark does. Self-belief is a huge part of not breaking under that kind of pressure and scrutiny but it never hurts to have some external validation from people you respect, you know?

What the Fever also have going for them is a little bit more consistency. A big problem with the trio of Clark, Kelsey Mitchell and Aliyah Boston is they just haven’t gotten a lot of proper, fully healthy minutes together this year. In July, they were 3-1 with wins over New York and Las Vegas with all three in the lineup. Couple that with Sophie Cunningham’s career best shooting and the emergence of Ty Harris as a backup point guard and there’s really something here. Does it mean we crown the Fever already? Absolutely not. But would it shock me if they went 5-1 in their next six, a slate which includes New York, Las Vegas and Minnesota? Not at all.

The Golden State Valkyries have quickly become one of the most interesting teams to watch in the WNBA this year. A sum-of-the-parts approach to scoring with one of the most overwhelming and tenacious defenses in the league has allowed the Valks to enter the stretch run with the second best record in the W.

How long can that continue for?

The Washington Mystics broke Golden State’s ten game winning streak just before the All-Star break began and now the Valkyries face a stretch that includes a pair of home games against Toronto before a middle of the month that includes heavy doses of Dallas and league-leading Minnesota.

There isn’t really any doubt about whether or not that defense is going to travel. If not for Cheryl Reeve’s domination of the W up to this point, Natalie Nakase would be cruising to her second straight Coach of the Year honor. What she’s been able to build, especially at the forward spot where Kiah Stokes and Janelle Salaun exist as specialists for each side of the ball, is remarkable. On any given night someone, be it Veronica Burton, Gabby Williams, Salaun, Kaitlyn Chen or insert rotation player here, can beat you. The question is if that’s enough when the playoffs more or less demand a bucket getter.

I think of the New York Knicks, who just won an NBA title with a roster sort of like Golden State’s. Deep, versatile, lengthy, just without (it was argued) a main guy who can get you a bucket. It wasn’t really until the NBA Finals that people realized Jalen Brunson was actually that guy, which put an already well-constructed roster over the top. Will we find out that Golden State is following a similar trajectory in the second half of the year? Gabby Williams seems to fit that mold of a player we all know is good but just don’t seem to accept as that caliber of superstar just yet. It feels, at least to me, that if a run is to be made, it involves the French forward making that Brunsonian leap into bonafide 1A star.

Watch how she plays in September during the FIBA World Cup. While it may tire her legs out ahead of the playoffs, it may also be the push to unlock her final form.

This is where the real good Ball-Knower debates can be had. From the seventh seed to the 12th, there feels like a lot of ground to either be made or lost. New York is 15-12 and, frankly, I don’t feel great about where they’re headed at this point in the year. The variance is substantial, Sabrina Ionescu is still taking you on Arike Ogunbowalian roller coaster, and this team’s ceiling seems to go as Leonie Fiebich’s health does.

Behind them is Washington, who are starting to ride a youth movement into a possible stretch run. The Mystics, it may surprise you to learn, have beaten all but one playoff hopeful at least once this year. And they’ve got two shots this August to take one away from Dallas. In short, the consistency may not be there but the ceiling is. Do they have what it takes to solidify their hold on a playoff seed and then some?

In a group anywhere from 3.5 to 5 games behind the Mystics is the Portland Fire, Toronto Tempo, L.A. Sparks, Phoenix Mercury and Chicago Sky.

I simply can’t quit the idea that the Sky can be good enough to make a run but there’s just too many late game mistakes that keep happening to trust that. Phoenix may just not have the depth to rattle off a winning streak that would get them back in playoff contention. The L.A. Sparks are stuck in limbo until Kelsey Plum returns. Which leaves us with the two expansion teams, who have proven at different points of the year that they can contend.

What’s more, a lot of these teams play each other multiple times this month as the calendar condenses for the World Cup break. So expect playoff, do-or-die level hoops the rest of the way because for the aforementioned four teams toiling six or more games under .500, wins are worth their weight in gold while losses may be the lead weight that drowns some coaches, GM’s or players.

Ah, Cathy Engelbert. Here we are again.

The embattled WNBA commissioner appears to be living on borrowed time as multiple reports circulated around Chicago of growing discontent from league partners, players and major stakeholders. Just about every superstar asked to characterize their relationship with Engelbert tried to be respectful without outright saying that there isn’t any relationship at all. I’ve written multiple times, as recently as early July, that Engelbert’s lack of interpersonal skill would be her undoing and it appears that we’re finally in the endgame.

It can’t be good that her boss, NBA commissioner Adam Silver, is publicly expressing his disappointment of her handling of his partner league. It definitely can’t be good when Jimmy Pitaro, who runs ESPN, is saying something similar. The interpersonal and political handling of the WNBA has been so bad that it even allows you to indulge in a question of Engelbert’s business savvy. Specifically, did she truly do anything special to usher in this new age of investment in the WNBA or was she just the captain of a ship at the exact moment the headwinds blew their hardest?

Parenthetically, there’s the curious case of the WNBA’s foray into the 2020 election that feels like a good explainer for how Engelbert got to this point. I don’t need to tell you what was happening in the summer of 2020 all over the country. COVID on one end, George Floyd on the other and the NBA and WNBA playing in their respective ‘bubbles’. Kelly Loeffler, a newly minted Republican Senator from Georgia who also happened to be an co-owner of the Atlanta Dream, penned a public letter to the WNBA objecting to the players wearing shirts with ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘Say Her Name’ (in reference to the police murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville earlier that year).

That led Loeffler on a speaking tour in which she effectively used the team she co-owned as a cudgel to hammer the larger social movement around police reform and racist policing practices in America. The league responded with statements distancing itself from the Georgia Senator and general platitudes about the WNBA being a place where hate isn’t tolerated. Players demanded that Engelbert force Loeffler to sell, but the commissioner wouldn’t even publicly rebuke the Dream co-owner.

The story ends with the Atlanta Dream players, led by Elizabeth Williams and Renee Montgomery, activating voters for Loeffler’s special election challenger, Democrat Raphael Warnock.

Warnock won in November, Loeffler and her partners sold the franchise and the WNBA got to claim a win for being an ‘activist league’.

But what’s instructive, at least to me, is that it’s largely seen as a win for Engelbert when, one could argue, she was just as slow and ineffective here as she was then. Thanks to the efforts of the players, the zeal of future owner Larry Gottesdiener and the electoral victory of Warnock, everything worked out fine. Which leads me to now wonder if the league saw things turn out right after 2020-2021 and just assumed they could handle the politicization of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese with the same success.

What best defines Cathy Engelbert’s tenure in the WNBA is a slow, reactive, focus group driven culture; one that feels almost similar to how one might run an accounting giant like Deloitte, for instance. But it’s also important to note that the criticism also lays at the feet of Adam Silver, who has spent the last half decades seemingly reading P&L’s of the W and hasn’t done a second of checking under the hood at what’s really going on. Which would be fine in any other instance except for the one in which the NBA still inexplicably owns a major piece of the WNBA. The lack of stewardship in the product begins with the man Chauny refers to as ‘Ozempic Lex Luthor’.

Cathy Engelbert has likely spent her last year overseeing the WNBA. If there’s anything worth following for the rest of the year, it’s who is being considered as a replacement…

WNBPA's Nneka Ogwumike says union, league rebuilding trust by Alexa Philippou, ESPN

Olivia Miles brings ‘The Spectacle’ to the spectacle of WNBA All-Star Weekend by Terry Horstman, The IX Basketball

ESPN's Holly Rowe continues telling WNBA's stories at All-Star Game in Chicago by Jeff Agrest, Chicago Sun-Times

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