Five Out: Injured Indiana, Waning Wings and a Two Horse Race Atop the WNBA Standings

The cream of the crop is starting to rise to the top in the WNBA but what other storylines dominated the last week in women's basketball? Plenty, as it turns out.

Happy June, everyone! And a very happy Pride Month to everyone as well! We at No Cap Space WBB are and will always be fierce advocates of everyone’s right to exist, express themselves how they choose, love who they love and be able to do so with a support network that will always fight for them.

We have officially turned the corner on the first month of the WNBA season and are in the thick of things. With several data points and a good idea of what the good and bad of each team are, we can start pushing out some more definitive observations. We’ve got some fun free and paid content on the way for you this week as our team settles into the routine of the regular season and be sure to keep an eye on our social media (particularly TikTok or Instagram if you’re so inclined) where we are expanding our short-form content offerings as well.

Rest assured, it won’t get in the way of our typical pods and longform work here on Substack. Although, admittedly, the column may be a little shorter this Monday. Typically, I try to get them put together on Sunday mornings but was called up to Boulder for my full-time job (CBS News Colorado) to cover the horrific Molotov cocktail attacks on a group of walkers advocating for the release of hostages held by Hamas. The event itself was an unbelievable tragedy and covering a mass casualty event as a reporter always takes a bit out of you. All that to say your friendly neighborhood columnist is running on fumes a bit (so forgive me if there are more grammar errors than usual) but I’ll try to touch on as much as we can to get you armed with some ball-knowledge ahead of the week.

Now, on to the column!

1. There’s New York, Minnesota and then everyone else…

I wanted to wait on putting Minnesota in the Liberty tier because I wanted to see a bit more of a sample size against top half teams in the WNBA. Well, we’ve got our data set now and it’s clear the Lynx are right back where they were at the end of last year: overwhelming opponents and presenting as championship contenders.

If Stanford football had ‘intellectual brutality’, Minnesota has ‘malicious competence’. They’re balanced, deep and rarely make mistakes. The midweek win against Phoenix with Napheesa Collier out of the lineup was one of the best examples we’ve seen that they are consistently greater than the sum of their parts. Any time a team has to play without an MVP candidate, a drop off is expected (just ask Indiana). But to be able to claw out of a deficit on the road against a plucky Mercury team is mighty impressive. Kayla McBride’s return to the lineup has been an immediate jolt of energy and, perhaps more importantly, is shooting at basically the same three point clip she did last year. The question for me after last season was whether or not Minnesota’s team shooting percentages were sustainable. Through seven games, they’ve shown they can. That’s a recipe for a revenge tour.

On the other side, I’m really curious about the New York Liberty and how the league tries to position them going forward. Cathy Engelbert has obviously followed Adam Silver’s lead in assuming that the WNBA is a league of individual stars instead of teams like the NFL does. But what do you do when the top team in the W is a collection of stars that are located in the biggest media market in the country? They’re 7-0, beating the absolute hell out of everyone and just made history in a blowout over Connecticut that made you repeatedly yell at the television “Stop, stop, they’re already dead!”. With Caitlin Clark still injured and Angel Reese still struggling on a new look Sky, does the WNBA pivot back to its old guard of Stewie, A’ja and Phee? It would be worthwhile.

My only hope is that the time is spent elevating Jonquel Jones, who has been spectacular to open the year and deserves as much praise as humanly possible. She’s a huge piece of why the Liberty has been so effective in the early going and is likely to be the x-factor that decides if New York can hold a trophy again at the end of the year.

2. But in the second tier of top teams are two fun surprises.

While it looks like we may be headed for a heavyweight title rematch between the Lynx and Liberty, that doesn’t mean the rest of the league isn’t worth watching. Quite the opposite, in fact. Las Vegas and Seattle have given us two compelling matchups and we get two more this year. The A’ja Wilson vs. Nneka Ogwumike battle is now squarely tied and watching two MVP’s go head-to-head is always a treat. Beyond those two established franchises, I’m enjoying the upstarts this season.

Atlanta hit a home run with Karl Smesko. I’ll admit that when he was first hired, I was skeptical of the system’s transferability to the WNBA as well as the roster construction itself. He typically discusses his scheme as a “best available look” offense. Sometimes, that’s shorthand for 3’s and layups without a lot of the game’s traditional hallmarks like midrange shots or a back-to-basket game. But what he’s brought to Atlanta is a hybrid offense that still prioritizes three point shooting but employs two bigs that do get traditional post touches. Allisha Gray has looked like a first team All-WNBA point guard, Rhyne Howard is starting to settle in as an elite scorer while Naz Hillmon has been a revelation off the bench. The win over Seattle is a huge signal to the league that the Dream have the ability to punch on a level with the top teams in the league. They may be one to watch as even a potential party spoiler to the Lynx-Liberty party.

It’s also worth highlighting Phoenix and the job Nate Tibbetts is doing. After last season, it would’ve been easy to frame him as an NBA guy without a lot of understanding about the league, how it worked and what would be schematically successful. Shoot, even early on this season there was still reason to question whether the early wins were a result of him and the roster or Alyssa Thomas being a generational floor-raiser as a player (more on that in a second). Despite a pretty epic sell job in the fourth quarter against a Phee-less Lynx, it still showed that the Mercury has the goods to compete with top teams even without their best player on the floor. Keep in mind, we still haven’t yet seen Phoenix at full strength as Kahleah Copper hasn’t even entered the lineup yet. I’m curious about how sustainable the run of success is but I’m much more confident than I was last week.

Despite Caitlin Clark’s injury and the bad-faith discussion that ‘no one will care about the league anymore’ while she’s out, there’s still a lot of good to watch in the WNBA. While the business side takes a hit without one of their best and most bankable stars, the league is far from dying on the vine. Far from it, in fact. It’s got two heavyweights building their own rivalry and two exciting franchises ready to make a mark of their own. Tune in.

3. Indiana has an injury (and a point guard) problem.

On Monday morning, Indiana signed Aari McDonald to help shore up their thinning guard position as Syd Colson and Sophie Cunningham went down with injuries. She’s on the shorter side but is a fast, twitchy, well-credentialed point guard who can at least provide some offensive spark and get the ball inside to Aliyah Boston where it belongs. Hopefully, she’s up to the task because the Fever have major issues on their hands that go beyond Caitlin Clark not being in the lineup.

Maybe we were all a little presumptuous in anointing Indiana after the Stephanie White hire and the offseason moves that they made. In fairness, I don’t think they can be blamed. You have a big three in Clark, Kelsey Mitchell in Boston. You bring on another effective ‘3-And-D’ guard in Cunningham and add Natasha Howard and DeWanna Bonner who were double-digit per game scorers with championship pedigrees. The only real question mark in that equation was White, who had a successful tenure in Connecticut but maybe warrants a little further inspection when stacked against what we now know about AT’s floor-raising and Curt Millers’ success in Uncasville.

The big issue, as always, is that the WNBA needs more roster spots. With every injury — and there’s been a lot of them this week — it becomes more and more clear that this needs to be a major point of emphasis at the CBA negotiating table. If you have another player to sign in the offseason, does the Fever make a decision to add another point guard *in addition* to Syd Colson? There’s a fair argument that they should have done that anyway, given what we’re seeing now.

I wrote in my early season Fever preview that the backup point guard position was a question and some of the responses I got boiled down to “Well Caitlin is going to play 35+ minutes a game so the position might be superfluous”. Unfortunately, this is pro sports and injuries do happen. It was probably a mistake to try and gamble that Clark would be healthy all season long. I truly believe they have enough stars to right the ship and then get rolling when she returns to the lineup. But the onus right now is on Stephanie White to prove her clipboard bonafides and get things settled as soon as possible.

4. Dallas may have traded themselves into a corner this year, but the future is still bright.

I know there’s been a lot of ink spilled on social media about the Dallas Wings and all the moves they made to try and put talent around Paige Bueckers. So far, the experiment has failed. Chris Koclanes doesn’t look ready for the moment and it’s becoming increasingly clear that I’m not sure he was the right person for a roster with this many big personalities. There is a clear hole in the frontcourt the backcourt pieces don’t seem to be working well and, with Paige Bueckers and Ty Harris out of the lineup, the Wings seem to have hit an early rock bottom in their weekend loss to the Chicago Sky.

But they aren’t in as bad a situation as many might think they are. According to Spotrac, almost everyone is on an expiring contract aside from Bueckers, Maddy Siegrist and the other two 2025 rookies. NaLyssa Smith is a restricted free agent this winter with a team option that I’d be stunned if they exercised. Every other player, from Arike Ogunbowale to Teaira McCowan, is an unrestricted free agent going into 2026. Realistically speaking, they could punt on this experiment and completely rebuild the team around Bueckers with Koclanes still in the lead. Whether or not he warrants that by the end of the year is up for discussion but I can’t imagine Curt Miller is going to toss aside his protégé after one season.

It’s worth noting that Dallas didn’t deal away any of their 2026 draft picks and will likely land in the lottery yet again. So, to that end, there’s still plenty of hope that this might end up being more of a Las Vegas Aces-type rebuild with A’ja Wilson, Kelsey Plum and Jackie Young. It’s worth noting that outside of New York, a lot of teams haven’t immediately turned their fortunes around with a singular number one pick. Indiana had a second pick (NaLyssa Smith) and a first pick (Aliyah Boston) before they landed Clark. The Storm drafted Jewell Loyd and Breanna Stewart in back-to-back years. Creating sustainable franchises in this league is not as easy as people might think and, as solid as Bueckers has been so far, it might take another top pick to really get the Wings into a place where they feel confident about the future.

5. Something’s not right in Los Angeles…

I’ve always been a Lynne Roberts fan dating back to her days at Pacific. When she arrived in Utah, it took a while to get the ship moving but eventually, she did. Had Jenna Johnson not missed those critical free throws against LSU in 2023, we might be looking at the entirety of the sport in a very different way. There’s a parallel universe in which the Utes may have been the ones to meet Caitlin Clark and Iowa in the NCAA title game that year. While I was surprised to see her get a WNBA gig, I expected that she’d be a good long term hire.

Unfortunately, the early returns have been a bit concerning.

Roberts’ system really requires a dominant inside big to be able to be a rim protector and an offensive threat. I’m reserving my full judgment of her until I see Cameron Brink and Azura Stevens anchoring that frontcourt. But some of the roster rotations have been confusing and the decisions are starting to bleed into the public discourse. I’m not quite sure why you would draft Sania Feagin if you aren’t going to utilize her. I’m even less sure of why you would draft Feagin in the second round and Notre Dame’s Liatu King in the third, waive King, re-sign her and then give her more minutes than the player you didn’t waive at all.

Then you factor in the Rickea Jackson of it all. One of the most exciting and high-ceiling players of the 2024 rookie class, Jackson was a DNP this weekend for personal reasons. There were a ton of weird and conflicting messages coming on social media from people purporting to be in her inner circle (Jackson later denied this). She also took the L.A. Sparks out of her bio and unfollowed the team on social media. If you’re in the business of reading pro athlete tea leaves, that’s a pretty big red flag. I’m hopeful that there’s a way to figure out how to properly utilize Jackson in Roberts’ system but it looks right now that the skeptics of her ‘3’s and layups’ approach may be proven right.

Sometimes what dooms coaches that make the jump from college to pro is a misunderstanding of what players respond to. We see it in a variety of sports. The coaches that figure out what they need to change typically succeed. The ones who don’t usually are given a pink slip. It’s early but the vibes coming out of L.A. do not look good and Roberts is going to have to figure things out and quickly. Otherwise, a much heralded young core may be wasted in a market that can’t afford to let elite talent walk away.