Happy Monday, everyone!

Now that the WNBA season is starting to return to a semi-normal calendar, you can expect a bit more consistency in the content and feature flow. We’ve already got some great preview pieces, individual player spotlights and historical discussions coming this week so this is the time to finally take the plunge and be a Ball-Knower.

Onto the column!

Late last night Audi Crooks announced that she would be transferring to Oklahoma State. Tyler gives some insight into what he has heard behind the scenes plus his reaction to the fit.

Jordan Lee transfers from Texas to South Carolina and Tyler is distressed on behalf of his Oklahoma Sooners…

And why Raven Johnson was the right pick for the Indiana Fever…

Tyler, Greer and I jumped on Ball Up Top this week to grade out the WNBA Draft team-by-team. Leave us a review if you like what you hear

The WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement was hailed as transformational when it was formally ratified earlier this month.

That’s starting to feel a bit like an understatement.

It felt like a pretty remarkable achievement just to see the first one or two million-dollar contracts doled out. But now we’re looking at a veritable arms race with two South Carolina Gamecocks in A’ja Wilson and Aliyah Boston leading the way. Young superstars like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers are on the fast track to be recipients of the new EPIC provision, while Boston’s 4 year/$6.3 million contract is the largest total value in league history.

While the National Women’s Soccer League isn’t constrained by a salary cap, allowing megastars like Catarina Macario and Trinity Rodman to make up to $2 million per year, the wealth distribution across the WNBA has truly been something to watch. Good unions negotiate deals that allow the top earners to feel taken care of while protecting their most vulnerable. As far as equity is concerned, this CBA has established one heck of a starting framework for future deals even in a protracted free agency and draft period.

Amid the flurry of activity, I took a look back at some old Legendarium installments to put it all the new spending into context. In just about any era, there’s been at least a few people crazy enough to believe in women’s basketball and a few others willing to invest in its growth. There were those early AAU legends like Kaye Garms and Cookie Barron at Wayland Baptist, but there was also the Hutcherson family, who helped fly the team around the country as they won over and over and over again. Title IX wasn’t anywhere close to becoming legislation and Wayland proved that women’s basketball could (and maybe should) be a fully funded intercollegiate sport.

When it became law in 1972, the floodgates opened.

All over the country communities of women’s basketball either reawakened or sprouted up for the first time. Philadelphia was one epicenter. Iowa was another. The sport swept through the deep south from Appalachian Tennessee to Delta Mississippi and Louisiana. In each case, there was a figure that spurred on that change through sheer force of will or God-given charisma. Pat Summitt and Sonja Hogg, Carol Eckman and Lucille Kyvallos, Cathy Rush and Margaret Wade. There’s truly too many to name. Standing with all those women were small armies of players, support staffers, sports information directors, athletic directors, singular donors and others who saw past the novelty of early sellout crowds and believed that the broader sports world had room for this.

These million dollar contracts are built on the backs of decades of really hard, occasionally thankless and borderline Sisyphean work. There’s some people that unfortunately aren’t here to see the end result of what they spent a portion, if not their whole, life on in some way, shape or form.

So as the arms race inevitably begins and we eventually become somewhat inoculated to the shock of seeing a lot of contracts with “M” next to them, take the time now to go back and read up on some of the greats that built this game. It’s the 30th season of the WNBA, the labor that produces a great product is finally being compensated semi-reasonably and the table is set for everyone involved to step into a new era for the league. One whose greats will inevitably be the shoulders for the next group to stand on.

…So who won?

There’s certainly a few tiers I have in mind so far…

Title contenders: New York, Las Vegas

Good…but how good?: Phoenix, Minnesota, Golden State

Interesting teams that could make the leap: Indiana, Atlanta

Super fun youth movement: Seattle, Washington, Connecticut

Could be a 4 seed or not make the playoffs: Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles

Expansion team variance: Portland, Toronto

To me, New York did the most to load up for another championship campaign and got the steal of free agency by signing Satou Sabally to a multiyear deal at a massive pay cut. Las Vegas, quite simply, has A’ja Wilson and nobody else does. But more than that, if she and the core of Chelsea Gray, Jackie Young and head coach Becky Hammon can get the most out of high-risk/high-reward signings like Janiah Barker and Chennedy Carter, this team could be something we’ve never seen before.

Phoenix, Minnesota and Golden State will have high floors but what exactly will be their ceiling? Is Gabby Williams able to step into a different stratosphere of star? Can Napheesa Collier and Alyssa Thomas be their respective teams engines with even less help?

Indiana and Atlanta is going to be absolute cinema this year as both teams have the firepower but need to master the mental game of the playoffs. Meanwhile, Seattle, Washington and Connecticut are what the fine folks at The Ringer would call ‘League Pass Teams’.

The largest variance group is Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles who can similarly be in the ‘Good, but how good?’ tier. The expansion teams will be big unknowns but generally it doesn’t look like there’s a team or set of teams that is orders of magnitude worse than the others. That’s going to make for a fun season.

To their credit, pretty much every WNBA ownership group rose to the occasion in this free agency period. There were some outliers (Minnesota, Golden State and Phoenix are having a less-than-stellar April so far) but generally, the money was pretty evenly distributed and a lot of rosters got better. The Tsai’s, Joe and Clara Wu, have thrown down the gauntlet in New York, leveraging the cities commercial might to make pay cuts more palatable for players. On top of that, there’s a brand new practice facility coming online in Greenpoint, Brooklyn ahead of the 2027 season along with a top billing treatment within the Barclays Center.

Meanwhile, in Las Vegas, Marc Davis has not only retained the best player in the WNBA but the cornerstone backcourt that’s won multiple championships. On both ends, those deals are the result of trust. Instead of waiting for the moment to arrive to invest, as other owners in the league have, Tsai and Davis were so proactive in their approach that they each had their own run-ins with the league office. Was it a great look at the time? Not at all, and I don’t blame owners for potentially bristling at the idea that these two guys are the ones who should be held up as paragons of proper WNBA stewardship. But just as Louisiana Tech’s F. Jay Taylor and Old Dominion’s Jim Jarrett committed to a vision of a future defined by women’s basketball, Tsai and Davis did as well.

Overall, the last half decade of new owners have been net positives for the league in a variety of ways. Larry Gottesdiener has been quietly rebuilding the foundation of an Atlanta Dream franchise that looks primed to explode this season. Force 10 Hoops in Seattle has managed to turn an all-in-to-win roster into one of the brightest futures in the league. Connecticut may be seeing their Sun set, but their roster is going to be astoundingly fun to watch, win or lose. The new wave of NBA owners, for whatever one may think about their ability to cut the line over other cities, have made good on their promises to invest prudently.

Over time, we’ll start to see strata emerge and the wheat get separated from the chaff, so to speak. But for now, it feels like everyone is starting from relatively even footing. Game on.

It’s been four years since we’ve had a team from a non-power-six conference make it to the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament. It was March of 2022, and Name, Image and Likeness legislation had just been implemented in college sports about eight months earlier.

Since that season, there hasn’t been a mid-major Sweet Sixteen team in the tournament. I fear something has to change or we may not get many, even any, of them again.

Consider this your early alarm bell.

While NIL and revenue sharing have allowed for quick upward mobility in the power conferences, there is an increasingly widening gap between mid-major women’s basketball programs and their more moneyed peers. In the men’s game, certain schools carry a more substantial hoop tradition and thus have a bit more of a robust operation (Gonzaga, for instance). But women’s basketball was just starting to find their true stride right as NIL and the transfer portal started to arrive. There’s a handful of schools (South Dakota State, for one) that do have a culture and fanbase strong enough to ward off some power conference overtures for their top players. Unfortunately, there’s simply too many that don’t and can’t even capitalize on a good year to build that goodwill up.

There’s understandable if you’re getting a huge bag or making a genuine jump to a higher level. But I think about a player like Hannah Wickstrom, who was a top five scorer in the nation this past year at UC Riverside. The Highlanders had a bad season, finishing 11-21, so a transfer is understandable. But she’ll be heading to a vastly underachieving Purdue team. Kinsea Grymes, the Sun Belt Freshman of the Year, will be leaving Coastal Carolina for an SMU team with money to spend but not a lot of proof of concept.

Look, I know these aren’t my choices and all of these players are people with the ability to express their own agency however they see fit. It’s just a bummer that it feels like it comes at the expense of allowing true mid-major factory type teams that can be real dangerous Cinderella contenders in March.

I don’t have all that much to add to the Azzi Fudd discourse that hasn’t been said already. It was a weird day of dialogue that led to a slew of columns, some good and some bad, about where reporting ends and voyeurism begins. What’s weirder still is the fact that it really got started because of a Jeff Pearlman TikTok, which led to an online discussion that happened at the exact same time as the Wings introductory press conference, in which Dallas Morning News columnist Kevin Sherrington broached the subject of Azzi Fudd and Paige Bueckers’ alleged relationship. I say alleged because I don’t think it’s fair for us to assume anything given it’s been some time since their relationship has been in the public eye, and much of the belief about reporting on how it could affect team dynamics hinges on whether or not that answer is a ‘yes’.

Which is why I don’t think you can even broach the question of dynamics or draft process at all quite yet. For starters, in order to do it you have to probe a subject that, at best, you have to earn a lot of trust to even feel comfortable asking that to, or, at worst, has no idea who you are and what you’re about. It just, to me, is a genuinely heavy question to ask someone right off the bat.

I think about last season, when Connecticut Sun guard Saniya Rivers tragically lost her mother just weeks after the WNBA Draft. She took the step to vulnerable in public, processing her grief in press rooms and on social media as it helped her heal. Contrast that to the Golden State Warriors, who put in a lot of effort to make sure that Andrew Wiggins’ privacy was respected as he took time away to tend to his ailing father. The counter argument I’ve heard for the utility of asking the Wings duo questions about their private life is that they had, in the past, allowed the public into their life in that way. It does raise some interesting questions about that veil major figures allow us to see behind and how much power they actually have in closing it whenever they see fit. And what does it say about us and our entitlement to people’s lives at any given moment?

I’ve heard a lot this week that “This is the price of being a big time sports league” and, in some ways, it’s true. The WNBA, from its own media to its players to its agents, coaches and even commissioner, need to grow a bit of a thicker skin. But as we all play a role in building the infrastructure of women’s basketball media from scratch, it should be okay to want to create something different. If the dynamics here are different, then what is the obligation to make our media ecosystem look and feel like men’s sports?

Put another way, to my friends in sports media, do we really like the current ecosystem? And if we have the chance to make it look different, shouldn’t we strive for that?

Food for thought as we head into the week.

Grant Afseth of the Dallas Hoops Journal wrote a fantastic column on the Azzi Fudd discourse. Incisive, direct and rooted in the perspective of a guy who is on the ground every day, doing the work.

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