Happy Monday, Ball-Knowers!

After a couple of weeks figuring out the new flow of a day-job and how to fit all of that into a passion project of the best women’s basketball coverage you’ll find anywhere, I’d like to believe we’ve figured some things out. This week, we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming. The newsletter is back, free and daily. Luxury Tax and Ball Up Top will be populating your podcast feeds and we’ve got some exciting new content as well.

Strap in and get ready to hit the hyperdrive!

All the usual coverage is back in the rotation but we’ve got some cool new segments coming on Wednesdays and Fridays. Chauny will be taking over the newsletter at the midpoint of each week from now on. It’s titled Under Surveillance and it will include all the wit and wonder you’ve come to expect from our resident Hater-in-Chief.

On Fridays, Tyler will be officially opening the hotline for all of our Ball-Knowers. Got a take you want to get off your chest? Want to vent about something that grinds your gears? What about just letting Tyler know how his facial hair growth is coming along? It’s all going to be open for discussion and sent straight to the NCS answering machine. More details to come!

Chauny was at Mystics vs. Dream over the weekend and asked Sydney Johnson about his epic midgame crashout…

We also had Boots on the Ground at Overtime Select this weekend as well…

A special for the Ball-Knowers, in which we discuss the Indiana Fever’s organizational missteps with regard to Caitlin Clark (If you’re a newsletter subscriber only, scroll to the bottom of the page for your access to this video)

And Ball Up Top dropped a little late last week. We went through my early first weekend overreactions and revisited how well the takes have aged…

Now, onto the column!

I really wanted to believe in Jeff Pagliocca this year. I truly did. Call it a kinship for a fellow paisan, or maybe I just felt that I had sufficiently buried the franchise over their mismanagement of Angel Reese. But sometimes, being willing to give the benefit of the doubt blows up in your face when there are literal decades of mediocrity staring you back in the face. There’s still time to right the ship but it appears that the many gambles of the Chicago Sky’s general manager are coming home to roost.

This new look Sky are 4-7 after suffering another beatdown loss, this time to the Toronto Tempo. Not only did Chicago look categorically lost defensively but their offense, the one thing that was supposed to be their saving grace this year, somehow looked worse. I can understand that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. Once Rickea Jackson went down with a season-ending injury the entire calculus and trajectory of this Sky season changed. But the whole purpose of Pagliocca going in on older talent was that they could potentially absorb a body blow like this.

Instead, Courtney Vandersloot and DiJonai Carrington are still not back from their own injuries yet. Skylar Diggins already seems frustrated with the way things are going on the floor. Natasha Cloud has devolved into a total black hole offensively while Kamilla Cardoso continues to have problems with maintaining a consistent energy and aggressiveness in games. The only player that seems to be finding their way is Azura Stevens, but even now she still has the same defensive problems that existed a year ago in Los Angeles.

There’s time to fix things but that’s ultimately up to head coach Tyler Marsh, whose margin of error is slowly getting smaller and smaller. As his old Las Vegas running mate Natalie Nakase continues to flourish in Golden State, Marsh is now facing questions about whether or not he has the juice to be a head coach at this level. The alarming thing, at least to me, is that his bonafides as a player development guru haven’t really borne out any results yet. He’s only had this new unit for a couple of months but the vibes already feel a bit off. Chicago made a huge bet after trading Angel Reese that they would still be capable of being competitive. After shipping off nearly every future draft asset in the form of outright trades or pick swaps, this was supposed to be a roster meant to be in the playoff picture. If this investment continues to sour, team President Adam Fox will have a decision to make about not just his GM but his head coach and a few of the stars the franchise has hitched their wagon to. Which inevitably sets us up for another messy rebuild in the Windy City, courtesy of an ownership group that remains one of the bigger failures in the modern WNBA.

While pessimism is the primary feeling in Chicago, maybe I’m crazy for thinking the Los Angeles Sparks have a reason to believe sunnier days are coming. After vowing to shore up the defensive side of the ball, Lynne Roberts got her group right and they stalled out the Portland Fire on Sunday in Commissioner’s Cup play. Cam Brink has managed over the last handful of games to play some good defense without getting into the foul trouble that plagued her rookie year. There are still some things that she needs to work on and a few pure basketball IQ plays that make you scratch your head but, on the whole, there’s tangible improvement.

The same can be said of much of the Sparks, even with their recent string of losses. You don’t need to have a PhD in Ball-Knowledge to see that Kelsey Plum’s availability, more or less, makes or breaks this team. While the KP-Point-Guard experience still occasionally makes me want to break out in hives, I have been impressed in how Plum has developed as less of a gunner and more of a willing distributor. Nneka Ogwumike still needs more regular fourth quarter touches but it’s been good to watch her improved three point efficiency along with the same statistical consistency that’s defined her career.

So where does that leave L.A. in the WNBA pecking order? I wouldn’t say they’re a top four unit by any means but they are above .500 when Plum plays. There’s still a lot of work to do defensively, from missed assignments to not helping the helper and allowing too many interior offensive rebounds (Meg Gustafson got seven on her own for Portland on Sunday). There’s also the question of how a slimmer rotation can work come the playoffs, especially given how many minutes the trio of Plum, Ogwumike and Dearica Hamby are already playing. The next two matchups, against Seattle and Phoenix, should be wins if L.A. wants us to take them seriously because the three after that — Golden State, Minnesota and New York — will be a good sample to show us whether or not the Sparks are worth believing as a team that is finally putting it together.

I’m having a bit of trouble understanding some of Sabrina Ionescu’s persistent injury issues. ‘Back soreness’ is a pretty vague term for something that has sideline the New York Liberty’s All-WNBA guard for nearly the entire season to date. Generally, I think WNBA teams have been awful with their injury reports and descriptors this year and there’s a larger discussion to be had there. But, for now, let’s discuss her team because it appears that new head coach Chris Demarco has started to figure some things out. Of course, part of it was just getting healthy. With Leonie Fiebich back in the lineup, Breanna Stewart has gotten some help in the form of another defensive stalwart whose versatility is legitimately a force multiplier on that side of the ball.

Since their eyebrow raising loss to Portland which capped off a nasty three-losses-in-four-games stretch, the Liberty have rattled off four straight wins with a chance to make it five straight before heading to Atlanta on Thursday (where we are aiming to have some NCS Boots on the Ground!). A huge part of that turnaround has been a herculean effort on the boards by Jonquel Jones, who is averaging 10 a game since that 81-74 loss to the Fire. And while she’s still finding her shooting stroke, the energy on the glass is leading to points the other way.

Meanwhile, Breanna Stewart has taken a subpar shooting stretch and focused her energy on stringing together several First Team All-Defense level performances. As of right now, the team goes as Stewie goes and while there will be a time for us to discuss her nearly-completely-extinct three point shot, it’s hard to knock her when the 31 year old superstar is doing everything in her power to will the franchise to victories with a patchwork backcourt.

Much like Los Angeles, New York has a lot of new faces that are still generally trying to figure it out. Satou Sabally’s return has been slow played and she put up her best performance with the Liberty to date over the weekend. With that said, 13 points and 5 rebounds is merely a work in progress for a forward that has an All-WNBA ceiling. Ionescu still has only played one game this season and while the French tandem of Marine Johannes and Pauline Astier can be fun, they’re not the type of backcourt pieces that can get you a championship. And yet, New York is 7-4 and making their way up the WNBA standings. If they get all their pieces together and clicking with this level of defensive effort, the Liberty will be a pretty spooky team come October.

Maybe it’s the fact that the Gateway Center is a relatively small venue by WNBA standards. Maybe it’s that the Atlanta Dream are, by most accounts, a pretty competent organization that created a space where Angel Reese doesn’t need to make headlines to get her point across. Maybe it’s the winning or the fact that Karl Smesko’s crew are winning by group effort.

Whatever it is, I’ve been kind of stunned at how much Atlanta has been left out of the mainstream WNBA discussion given their success, their market and the fact that one of the biggest faces of the game is on their team now. As it stands, the Dream are 7-3 and lead the eastern conference standings. They’ve beaten the Dallas Wings twice, split games with the Minnesota Lynx and lost in the final seconds to the Las Vegas Aces. Their only other loss was on the road to an Indiana Fever team with a lot to prove after a brutal week in the press. Generally, it feels like the vibes are pretty good in ATL and most of the news you’re reading about Reese is pretty positive.

From a media coverage side, I am curious if Reese not being the team’s leading scorer (that distinction belongs to Allisha Gray at 19.7 points per game) has something to do with her not being centered in the way I anticipated at the start of the year. Her rebounding is as dominant as ever in the W and, notably, she’s cleaning up the offensive boards without them being the ‘mebounds’ that she was derided for earlier in her career. There’s a train of thought out there that Reese is more of a Dennis Rodman-type — a.k.a an excellent rebounder and rim protector who is maybe more of a number three on a championship team than the fulcrum — but that really shouldn’t matter in the context of how good Atlanta has been this year generally.

While I can see why that might chafe some fans who believe that people have feasted on negative headlines around Reese and thus are beholden to highlight the positives now, I do wonder if maybe being under-the-radar is good for the young star. She gets the ability to be out from under the microscope while Smesko helps her fix parts of her game, specifically her ballhandling and the positioning of it when she’s in the post. She gets to enjoy a city that clearly embraces her and a fanbase that wants her there. All while Gray and Rhyne Howard get to handle the biggest scoring loads.

Maybe that changes once we get to the back half of the regular season and the playoffs but it’s just something I’ve been noticing lately. Sometimes, the best teams do get a little less buzz for just being consistent. In Reese’s case, it might be that sense of quiet that finally allows her to be the player her most ardent fans want her to be.

I hesitate to say the Mystics issues start and stop with Georgia Amoore but eventually we have to call it like we see it…

Jamila Wideman, by all accounts and through my sources around the league, was let go from Washington for a few reasons. Partially, there were divergent opinions on wanting to accelerate a rebuild vs. continuing to build up for the long term (sources tell me Mystics President Michael Winger’s side was in the latter camp). Additionally, there were also stories about a genuine lack of communication from Wideman’s end on essential things like trade deadlines and talking with other teams that wanted to get deals done. I bring that reporting up because I don’t want there to be some speculation of “This point guard problem doesn’t happen if that front office schism doesn’t occur”. It could or could not have, but nothing I’ve heard suggests it came down to specific players.

Why do I say all that? Because I don’t want someone to get the wrong idea and read criticism of Georgia Amoore as “this front office hitched their wagon to this player and maybe Jamila Wideman didn’t”. I don’t know that for sure. What I do know is this: Amoore has either not fully come back from the knee injury that cost her her rookie season or she just straight up might not be cut out to be a starting point guard at this juncture.

Through nine games, Amoore is averaging just 5.2 points and 3.4 assists per game with 2.2 turnovers. The Mystics signed Spanish guard Alicia Florez to try and help lighten the load but even she’s been relatively inconsistent. To be clear, Washington doesn’t need a volume shooter in this role. With Sonia Citron leading the way in the backcourt, a pure distributor who can play good defense is the exact complementary piece that can unlock what Sydney Johnson wants to do. There’s a part of me that does wonder how much different things look if Raven Johnson had slid just one more pick instead of being selected by the Indiana Fever. At the same time, Washington did have a chance to select the South Carolina floor general and opted to bring in Angela Dugalic.

When you look up and down this Mystics roster there’s a lot to like. The issue is that it feels as though you can’t watch them without wondering “why do they not have a competent point guard” and “where are all of the vets on this team?”. It was a calculated risk by Winger and Johnson to build this way, but it may be a hard pill to swallow if your trajectory is stifled for a year because you didn’t address a clear position of need when everyone was telling you it needed to be addressed.

How the Lynx have survived -- and thrived -- without Napheesa Collier by Kareem Copeland, ESPN

Frieda Bühner’s career in the WNBA was inevitable by Stephanie Kaloi, The IX

Valkyries Insider: Valkyries sign a center, will she solve their front court issues? by Marisa Ingemi, Valkyries Beat

Harrison brings immediate impact in Tempo debut after preseason injury by Chelsea Leite, TSN

Jessica Shepard Reaching Full Potential as Wings Post Historic Start by Landon Thomas, Wings Bulletin