Happy Monday, Ball-Knowers!

We are officially entering the last week of the preseason before the WNBA opener this Friday. There’s plenty to discuss and even more to preview so if you haven’t been rolling with us here in the newsletter or on YouTube, I’d highly recommend signing up now. Candidly, we’ve utilized the last week or so to catch our breath after a protracted offseason that came right on the heels of March Madness.

So let’s get back cooking and make this the Summer of the Ball-Knower. WNBA regular season hoop is coming soon!

Ball-Knowers: The day job got a bit ahead of me towards the end of the week and into the weekend so you can expect the Mailbag and Sticky Notes coming. That will also arrive with some Atlanta Dream practice notes, which you should see later this evening or early tomorrow morning at the latest!

Those of you on the free subscription will continue to get the daily newsletter as well as a bevy of WNBA preview videos to come!

Tyler hits a quick ISO on Natasha Cloud’s signing with the Chicago Sky…

Andrew and Chauny debate the ceiling and floor of this year’s New York Liberty (even with Sabrina Ionescu’s recent injury that might take her out for a couple weeks, I’m confident in my GOAT)

I was at Atlanta Dream practice on Saturday (Ball-Knowers will get a little practice report from me later this afternoon) and came away with a lot of interesting thoughts and perspective.

For starters, Karl Smesko is a genuinely fun guy to watch coach. He kind of moves around and carries himself like a 2010’s era NFL position coach but rarely is raising his voice in the media viewing period. Instead, the longtime Florida Gulf Coast mastermind seems to employ the Socratic method quite a bit. There’s plenty of places in which he interjects with his opinion and teaches a player what they need to do. But I found myself surprised at just how often he’s asking questions to try and lead the athlete to get them to really understand why the team is doing what they’re doing.

After talking with the three training camp contract players — Maite Cazorla, Holly Winterburn and Stephanie Jones — we learned that Smesko is regularly quizzing players around the team facility. Whether it’s in film, during practice, or just standing off to the side, apparently it’s pretty well known around the team that their head coach just loves to make sure you are really absorbing the information he’s giving you.

As the WNBA continues to grow, expect to see more from me on the various types of coaching styles and philosophies. In past years, the WNBA had a pretty consistent group of coaches that kind of bounced around the league in various capacities. But now you have scheme-obsessed guys like Smesko, you have Portland head coach Alex Sarama employed a relatively novel ‘constraint-led approach’ in practice and plenty of other new faces trying different things. It’s a cool way to look at the game and I came away not only impressed with how the team is looking (Angel Reese shooting three’s with confidence? Yes please) but in how GM Dan Padover is building a long term vision with Smesko as his instrument.

Jeff Walz, you’ve got some company my friend…

If you’re a longtime reader of the newsletter, you’ve probably become acquainted with the idea of a ‘Basketball Heisenberg’. Inspired by Walter White’s story arc of Breaking Bad, I started to use it as shorthand for coaches who are, in essence, the resilient anti-heroes of the game.

Louisville’s head coach, for instance, has not always been for everyone. Hard-nosed, honest and with a flair for the dramatic, Jeff Walz is just not a guy you can count out. Against all odds and no matter who is in front of him, the guy always manages to be in the mix for a national title every March. After three years of sub-standard — a very lofty standard, it should be noted, but a standard set by Walz himself — regular season play, there was reason to wonder if the world had caught up to the mad scientist. But here he came this year, re-energized and with a new cadre of allies and re-asserted his place at the top of the chain.

It’s ultimately a compliment, as a good-yet-gruff antihero who never really dies as long as they’re wanting to be in the game is what makes the sport compelling.

Cheryl Reeve feels like another emerging candidate for the title, but this time at the WNBA level.

When the Minnesota Lynx head coach arrived on the scene, she very quickly established herself as an all-time great leader of an all-time great roster. But, outside of one semifinals trip in 2020, it appeared that other factions had come-for-and-taken the crown. Then came the last two seasons and another burst of juice from the Hall-of-Fame-bound Reeve. Followed, once more, by a roster exodus that again leads us to question how she can get out of this jam.

If Emma Cechova is what we think she might be, then it appears there’s a bomb strapped to the wheelchair after all. While you can only put so much stock in preseason performance, the Lynx look like they’ve got some new energy, nothing to lose and a bunch of international players eager to prove themselves in the W. Maybe it could all prove to be smoke-and-mirrors, and Minnesota is just destined to live on the playoff bubble this year. But I’d like to live in a world where Reeve once again pulls a rabbit out of a hat and gives us another team that’s a force to be reckoned with.

It was interesting to hear Dallas Wings rookie Azzi Fudd discuss the physicality, or lack therof, so far in her WNBA career…

Last season saw plenty of discussion about officiating and physicality in the WNBA. Already, a multitude of players have gotten into early foul trouble in these games as referees are starting to call games a little more tightly.

That’s not to say that’s a bad thing but I am curious about whether or not it will lead to an overcorrection this season. It is worth noting that things absolutely reached a head in the playoffs last year. The basketball quality was just not that great, players were getting injured and the matchups just felt jumpy and incohesive. In even less words, it just wasn’t a good product in the midst of a rapid change of perception about the quality of the sport.

The WNBA, to their credit, clearly seems to have taken it seriously and dropped in some new standards that force players that could overcome a lack of true innate defensive ability with speed and physicality to readjust. But the long term concern is if this starts to alter how we watch the game throughout the year. As much as people don’t want to see games devolve into matchups where hacks are going uncalled, I also am a bit skeptical of a world where everyone is going to the line one too many times.

It’s a moving target, and one that pretty much every professional sports league wrestles with. As long as it means some of the unnecessary physicality is diminished, then it’s a win. But if you aren’t going to let players play defense at all, and not give them a chance to adjust over the course of a season, then we end up with a different problem entirely. Just something to monitor…

Congratulations to Jeff Pagliocca, who has no doubt gotten sick of everyone, from larger outlets to nobody journalists like myself, being on his ass for the better part of the last 18 months.

Take a breather, my friend.

The eye of No Cap Space is now fixed on Golden State. Because what on earth is going on in that front office?

Valkyries General Manager Ohemaa Nyanin has earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to roster construction and team building. We thought this roster was going to be all-in on a tank for the 2026 WNBA Draft and instead the franchise made $78 million in revenue last season, unleashed #Ballhalla on unsuspecting opponents and made the playoffs all in their first year of operation. That isn’t the work of a GM, or President, or Head Coach, that don’t know what they’re doing.

But at the end of the day, Nyanin still needs to understand two things.

It goes beyond the strange WNBA Draft night sequence that saw the Valks select, then trade LSU guard Flau’jae Johnson. It also includes the odd ways and statements afterward that players have been cut in the past, even those like Laeticia Amihere and Kaitlyn Chen who rejoined the roster later. It’s how they treated Julie Vanloo, pulling her away from celebrating a title with her Belgian team only to inform that she was waived within minutes of arriving back in Golden State.

There’s just a strange pattern of callousness here that has to be questioned, if not answered for.

Not to mention, the whole situation with Johnson and the Valks eventual pick, Marta Suarez, is just objectively bad GM’ing. You’re telling me you traded out of a mid-first round pick, to trade down for an early second, waive that player, and then all you have to show for it is a 2028 second round selection? Even if you’re going to waive Suarez to bring her back as a developmental player (which WNBA teams have to do in order for them to clear before re-signing), what is the harm in explaining that? Why do you need to have Natalie Nakase inferring that the former TCU forward didn’t gel well with the team?

What makes the whole thing even stranger is that if all of this was really about you liking the roster that you currently have, it would’ve cost nothing to just…explain that? The Streisand Effect tells us that you can inadvertently bring more attention to something by trying to cover it up some other way. It feels like that’s what’s happening with the Valkyries right now. You don’t always need to be perfect and people critiquing you isn’t wrong. It’s just part of the whole enterprise. Seems strange that we’re just learning that in 2026.

The WNBA found itself in a Weekend Update sketch this past weekend. Saturday Night Live was making light of the breakup between NBA star Klay Thompson and hip-hop superstar Megan Thee Stallion, tossing to Kam Patterson who decided to have some fun with it.

The joke is rooted in the prevalent online discourse about who the more famous person is in this relationship.

I would hope that if you are reading this newsletter then you know enough ball to understand how much bigger of a star Megan Thee Stallion is than Klay Thompson. It isn’t particularly close. Patterson choosing to invoke the WNBA here provides an interesting window about the league’s place in broader popular culture. At the worst, you can read it as a backhanded compliment but I think it’s actually a tacit show of respect that the W can produce bigger stars than the NBA and be realistic within the context of the joke.

It didn’t mean much relative to the sketch but I do think it’s another small data point into how people generally perceive women’s basketball as something popular. But, if you would indulge me for a second, walk that concept out a bit further. Women’s basketball players do have the chance to achieve a crossover star status that genuinely may not be available to men’s athletes.

Our long national nightmare is over. Natasha Cloud signed with the Chicago Sky for, per Annie Costabile at The Athletic, a one year deal worth well above the vet minimum ($555,000). While I’m glad to see Cloud get another opportunity, and for Sky GM Jeff Pagliocca who continues to feed the streets with content, I’m happiest that this whole saga is over.