Five Out: Five Storylines to Watch Headed Into the WNBA Season...

With the WNBA Season on the way, this week's column takes a look at stories we'll be following all summer long.

After a little bit of time to catch our breath after the NCAA Tournament and WNBA Draft, the No Cap Space WBB crew is back and ready to get rolling as training camp begins in earnest.

For our loyal podcast listeners, we appreciate you hanging with us as we put a bit more emphasis on live YouTube shows and social content during March Madness. Starting Tuesday, Ball Up Top will be back on your podcast feeds as we break down everything you need to know ahead of the WNBA season. If you’ve been missing our short-form video series, ‘Welcome to Women’s Basketball’, give us a follow on TikTok, Instagram, Bluesky, X and Facebook. Each day leading up to the season, we’re giving you a different historical lesson in 90 seconds or less to get you up to speed on 29 years of women’s hoops history.

There were plenty of interesting topics of discussion that happened around the women’s basketball world this week but we’re going to devote this week’s column to the impending WNBA season. What storylines are worth following and which ones do we think will be the most interesting heading into the season? I’m here to break down my top five.

Got a few of your own? Feel free to let us know in the comments and we’ll discuss them on some upcoming Ball Up Top podcasts!

1. A’ja Wilson is still the best player in the WNBA. But did Vegas do enough for her to truly contend?

For three seasons now, I’ve felt A’ja Wilson has been the best player in the WNBA and that it hasn’t been particularly close. In just about every metric, from advanced stats to talk show points, Wilson stands above the rest. She has the efficiency, scoring, defense, championships and so much more on her resume since the league walked out of the Wubble in 2020. But last year, from an outsiders’ perspective, felt a bit different. While Wilson was her usual dominant self — perhaps even more so than ever — it appeared that she carried a weight on a team that now says they didn’t expect to threepeat as champions. It’s pretty easy to understand, when you think about it. Winning three league titles in a row with effectively the same roster is extremely hard. You can get tired, you can lose focus and every team is gunning for you and only you.

Now just because the Aces were bounced out of the playoffs earlier than anticipated doesn’t mean the run is over. It did, however, raise questions about how much flexibility they had to really maximize Wilson’s window and compete for championships now. The starting lineup may not be super different — the notable exception being Jewell Loyd who joined the team after a four team blockbuster trade sent Kelsey Plum to Los Angeles — but the bench may as well be brand new. Out went Alysha Clark, Syd Colson and Tiffany Hayes and in came Cheyenne Parker-Tyus, Dana Evans and Queen Egbo. The Aces followed that up with an intriguing second round draft pick in sharpshooter Aaliyah Nye and get Elizabeth Kitley (their 2024 draft pick) back and fully healthy.

With Wilson as the tip of the spear, the Aces still have a championship core up front. I genuinely think Loyd will fit in nicely, especially considering there is no debate over whose team this is. Chelsea Gray will be back fully healthy while Jackie Young is still in her prime at 27. There’s a lot of moving pieces here but the league was won last season on elite wings and versatile bigs. Is there enough here to augment Kiah Stokes and give Wilson some frontcourt help? Parker-Tyus has shown flashes of being that player (NOTE: Parker-Tyus announced that she is pregnant and expected to deliver some time in June) while Egbo (6’4) and Kitley (6’6) are the wild cards. What makes Vegas arguably the most interesting watch in the league is that I have no clue how all these other pieces behind the starting five mesh together. If Becky Hammon can get them together, Vegas is right back in the title mix.

2. Is a full roster turnover in Dallas actually going to work in year one?

I’ll say this for Curt Miller and the Dallas Wings, they weren’t going to waste a second on their generational superstar. They gutted the whole house and effectively started over, keeping a small handful of players like Arike Ogunbowale and Teaira McCowan, to name a couple. Through trades, free agency and the WNBA Draft, the Dallas Wings look completely different heading into this season.

Will any of it work?

Chris Koclanes is already bringing a good vibe to training camp. The photos that came out Sunday suggest a group that’s willing and ready to have a bit of fun with one another and the franchise looks like it has a life and energy that’s been missing for awhile.

But is all of this going to coalesce into a positive environment for arguably one of the most anticipated rookie seasons in recent memory? We knew what we were getting with Caitlin Clark. The Fever had been building through the WNBA Draft but it felt like the former Iowa superstar was expected to basically drag a middling team to a level it hadn’t been to in awhile. To her, Aliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell’s credit, they did. What makes Dallas different is that they basically rebuilt the entire house in preparation for a new tenant. Will everyone fit into the right roles? Is everyone going to be okay on a personal level with the roles they have? Where it seemed like there was an underlying resentment (and there was, even if it wasn’t to the degree some bad faith actors would have you believe) for Clark’s star power when she entered the league, will Bueckers deal with the same from opponents or teammates?

Generally, I love this roster and how guard-centric it is. DiJonai Carrington, Arike, Paige, Ty Harris as well as rookies like Aziaha James and JJ Quinerly. The rotation is just loaded with defense, scoring and savvy play. The frontcourt is a bit of a different story and may need some time to get fully figured out. Koclanes and Miller both preach defense and have their work cut out for them in instilling a culture almost diametrically opposed to what it’s been in the Metroplex for the last couple of seasons. They did what all the fans asked them to in trying to make sure Bueckers had as many weapons as possible at her disposal. Now we’ll find out if their way or Indiana’s way is right.

3. Will Atlanta and L.A. be the forerunners in the W’s analytics revolution?

I’m really intrigued by both the Sparks and Dream this year. Both took some big swings in free agency and seem to have realized their place in the WNBA ecosystem. To me, Atlanta and L.A. are major cultural centers and spiritual hearts of women’s basketball that deserve franchises that signal a consistent desire to contend. The Dream, for all their faults over the last couple years, deserve credit for trying. They traded up to get Rhyne Howard in 2022 and made a move for Allisha Gray the following season. The following year, they went and got Jordin Canada in another trade. Unfortunately, the moves didn’t result in much more than a couple of first round exits and open ended questions about what the end goal of the process was.

Los Angeles, up until last year, had a completely different problem: their owners just couldn’t be bothered to care at all. Their facilities, gameday experience, roster moves and drafts signaled to the world that the Sparks were not much more than a tax write off to the consortium that runs the team. In spite of getting a mighty haul in the 2024 draft, the season was so lost that Magic Johnson had to stand up and actively proclaim that he was going to take a more active role in his stewardship of the team.

Turns out bullying works, on some level. Atlanta fired Tanisha Wright while Los Angeles did the same with Curt Miller. Their replacements, Karl Smesko and Lynne Roberts, came from the college ranks and found success by adopting an analytically driven approach to the game. Will that work in the W? I’m not actually so sure you can copy what is happening in the men’s game and paste it here. A big reason for that is the absence of dunking.

Consider this…

Per BasketballReference, the WNBA took roughly 21.5% of their shots from 0-3 feet away from the rim, shooting 65.7% as a league. By comparison, the NBA saw a league average 24.1% of their shots from 0-3 feet, shooting 69.9%.

In short, the men not only shoot more within 3 feet of the rim but they make more too. So of course the analytics will tell you to shoot from distance, where the shot is worth more (3>2) or get inside where the highest percentage look is. If the efficiency so close to the rim isn’t as automatic in the W, will the same approach work?

Atlanta is going to be a perfect case study for this, as the signings of Brittney Griner and Brionna Jones signal they’ll be operate a lot inside the circle. Their guards can already shoot from range, albeit maybe not at the most efficient clip. The Sparks have a similarly built roster but also have Rickea Jackson, who feasts in the midrange. Lynne Roberts feels like the type of coach that will tailor a system to her players instead of the other way around. But both franchises, while taking different paths to get here, could be the future of how the league builds their rosters. Watching it unfold is going to be fascinating.

4. Does Syd Colson have a second act as the Fever’s backup point guard?

For a few years now, it feels as though Syd Colson has been relegated to ‘Curator of Vibes’ with the Las Vegas Aces. She’s, for the most part, been a bench player throughout her career in the WNBA and was something of a journeywoman before 2022. Her performances in Athletes Unlimited helped her rediscover her passion for the game and helped her get a roster spot in the W again.

But at 35, does she have something more in the tank than a fun locker room presence and a status as the W’s Jeff Teague? That’s what the Indiana Fever are banking on. With Erica Wheeler gone, Indy went out and made moves of their own to try and build a contender. They signed DeWanna Bonner, traded for Sophie Cunningham, re-signed Kelsey Mitchell and brought in Colson. If the issue last year was that there wasn’t enough veteran leadership in the locker room to help Caitlin Clark late in the season, it’s been addressed now. But the open question is still in who leads the offense when Clark is off the floor? Mitchell has the ability to play the point but clearly seems to have settled into a more two-guard role where Clark’s attention allows Mitchell to flourish as a three level scorer. Sophie Cunningham and Lexie Hull feel more ‘3-And-D’ oriented. So it might fall to Colson to be something of a distributor in the off minutes and facilitate an offense that has no shortage of scoring options, even off the bench.

It’s worth noting that Syd did give the Aces some good minutes last year that even prompted a few fans to ask whether or not she was being used appropriately by Becky Hammon. The stats would tell you that Colson isn’t going to magically pop out of the woodwork this year and become a WNBA All-Star but that’s not what she’s being asked to do. The real question, and the one that feels like it could make or break the Fever’s ceiling as we get into the playoffs, is if she can give you enough good minutes to spell Clark and still keep Indiana humming.

5. Will Phoenix experience the WNBA’s year one superteam learning curve?

Every WNBA superteam — the ones built in free agency or via trades mind you — have had a one year learning curve. You could argue that the Las Vegas Aces didn’t have to deal with this because they built their core through the draft but everyone else? Yeah, it did not coalesce overnight.

It’s important to qualify what I mean when I say this. You can make the playoffs, go deep into the fall and even make it to the WNBA Finals. But the idea that you just put a bunch of pieces together and are now the prohibitive title favorite isn’t quite as cut and dried as we make it out to be. Just ask the Seattle Storm.

Ultimately, it takes players time to understand each other, their playstyles, who they are off the court and make all of that work to create a functioning champion. The New York Liberty may have made the 2023 WNBA Finals but they faced questions that whole season about how cohesive they looked. Some days they were world beaters and some others they looked average. In the 2023 Finals, they hung tough with but lost to a Vegas team that was down several starters by the time Game 4 rolled around. The discussions about that cohesion culminated in a now-infamous quote from Kelsey Plum implying that the Liberty just didn’t really seem to vibe with one another. One year and a book club later, New York are the reigning champions.

Seattle built a super team of their own in the offseason and it was a complete and total disaster. Sometimes, the stars just don’t work well together but it’s not every day or with every team that you end up with reports of a workplace misconduct investigation happening because the vibes were so heinous. Since then, Jewell Loyd was traded to the Aces and while Seattle still has the trappings of a super team, I anticipate them to just look a bit more together than they did last season.

Which brings us to the current iteration: the Phoenix Mercury. Even without Diana Taurasi and Brittney Griner — which is gonna be weird on its own, seeing PHX without those two — owner Mat Ishbia decided he wasn’t gonna do a long rebuild. They went out and found Kahleah Copper some serious help in the form of Satou Sabally, Alyssa Thomas. While it may not be as deep or as touted as the other examples, I’m still giving the Mercury a superteam moniker because that’s clearly the intention by the front office. They want to mash together a few star or superstar caliber players, then build a bench behind them and try to contend immediately.

While there are less mouths to feed than there were in Seattle, for instance, I’m curious by how all three space the floor, vibe with one another and, most importantly, play together. If they can buck the trend and coalesce quickly while getting good contributions out of their young rookies, then Phoenix might be a little more interesting by end of year than previously thought.