Happy Monday, Ball-Knowers!

We hope you enjoyed the FIBA Women’s World Cup as much as we did, or at the very least you got a nice break from the discourse and were able to touch some grass before the WNBA season restarts.

If you missed any of our near-daily coverage of the tournament, you can get caught up here or on our YouTube channel. And hey, if you want to jump back in to daily WNBA content with a healthy dose of storytelling, now has never been a better time to sign up and know ball!

Now, onto the column!

Tyler and Greer broke down the USA’s gold medal victory over France yesterday…

Tyler gives his WAY TOO EARLY 2028 Team USA Roster Prediction…

For the past four years, there’s been a strange flattening of Breanna Stewart’s legacy as a women’s basketball superstar. Some of that can be attributed to the all-time run A’ja Wilson is currently on. Some can also be the New York Liberty’s relative lack of success since the big three of Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu and Jonquel Jones joined forces in 2023. Yes, they won a title in 2024 but the feeling many in the league had at the time of the signing of Stewie and the trade of Jones was that this was going to be a dynasty akin to the Houston Comets of the late 1990’s.

Instead, the Las Vegas Aces have won two of the last three championships while the Minnesota Lynx have been the most dominant regular season team in the WNBA. So Stewart, who was once the undisputed number one option in Seattle, feels like something of an afterthought.

Which, to me, is insane.

Stewart’s performances in the last five days, in which she’s carried the Americans through the knockout rounds and to another gold medal, re-affirm what is known but maybe not publicized with vigor: that she’s one of the greatest players we’ve ever seen in women’s basketball.

Even at age 32, and with a noticeable drop off in her three point shooting efficiency, Stewart is still an elite scorer everywhere else on the court. Her defensive prowess has never been in question, as she played a major role in stymying a French attack that barraged the United States in the first half of Sunday’s game. But, with Wilson out of the World Cup picture, we got to see the side of Stewie that we only seem to see in moments these days, like last year’s playoff elimination game in which she was, quite literally, the only Liberty player to score in the entire fourth quarter.

It’s easy to forget now but up until about 2024, Stewart was seen as the 1A to Wilson’s 1B in the ‘best player in the W’ conversation. It’s fair to say that A’ja has taken the mantle of undisputed top dog and cleared Stewart out for the time being. But there’s an almost Jordan (A’ja) vs. Lebron (Stewie) quality to the debate. You have, on one end, pure and unfettered dominance of an era, while on the other you have the longevity of a superstar who has won at every stage of their career.

This isn’t meant to draw a dichotomy between the two, but it was nice to see Stewart receive some degree of praise for reminding the world of who she’s always been. Now, the question is whether or not that translates back to the WNBA, where the Liberty have run hot-and-cold and are facing a bit of a put-up-or-shut-up moment with this roster. As long as Stewie is around, New York has a chance. But even if she never wins another ring, I would hope that this World Cup run reminded everyone that an all-time great still hoops in our midst.

Hi there, it’s me: the concern troll.

Allow me to wipe this egg off my face because Kara Lawson unequivocally knows more ball than me, even when Team USA looks less than stellar. Was it the prettiest tournament the Americans have had? No. In fact, there’s a fair statistical argument that it’s the closest the United States has come to disaster since 2006, when Russia upset Team USA in the semifinal. Even factoring in the 2024 Olympics, there simply hasn’t been a tournament in recent memory in which the Americans felt in trouble as many times as they were in Germany this September.

But ultimately, it’s about winning the games at the end of the day. To that end, Kara Lawson won the tactical battles that mattered, when they mattered. Her trust in her veterans, while largely derided throughout the World Cup, was the difference between punching the French back before halftime and allowing Les Bleues to run away with the final. Is there a critique to be had about how she employed her lineups and the rotations that she used between the opening tip and late fourth quarter crunch time? Sure. Does it matter all that much now that this thing is done and dusted? Not particularly.

This was a bit of a transitionary period in women’s basketball as the top coaches in the game — Dawn Staley, Geno Auriemma and Cheryl Reeve — had already had their turn as Olympic cycle coaches. The next group, which includes Lawson, Natalie Nakase, Cori Close, Lindsey Gottlieb and a couple others, were going to have to have a baptism by fire at some point. And while she doesn’t play the most aesthetically pleasing style at times, Lawson got this team to adjust, trust themselves and win the minutes that were the most important.

The next step is the 2028 Olympics and while the French will be bringing back a lot of talent and the rest of the world will be bringing their A-Game (more on that in a second), the Americans will have a dearth of elite talent coming up the pipeline as well. Is Lawson the right coach to handle and employ all that talent? Maybe. Maybe not. But after this World Cup, I’ll be taking a break on assessing it during the Tournament from now on. The dominant wins of old and style points may be a thing of the past. That’s a net good for the broader interest in women’s basketball. But until someone actually beats Team USA, I’m not going to make the mistake of thinking they’re beatable until there’s zeroes on the game clock.

The French gave the Americans their best shot for one half of the FIBA World Cup Final. They played great defense, hit three pointer after three pointer and put the United States on their heels in a way nobody has since the Soviet Union was still intact.

It didn’t matter once the Americans remembered that they’re the best composition of players in the world. As Kevin Durant once put it, that chemistry going to help you guard Team USA’s best? In his world, that was Steph Curry. In our case this September, it was Stewie.

Yes, the world is catching up. It’s worth taking note of that. A threat to Team USA’s completely unchecked dominance is a net good for the sports. The way women’s basketball continues to find widespread validation is by more grassroots acceptance around the globe. As more countries develop their national team programs, the better the global talent pool gets. That makes the WNBA better, the games more competitive and allows the league to expand without a concern of diluting said pool.

The French are building a juggernaut and eventually those continued gut check gold medal games will yield an enhanced toughness. The Spanish and Italians have a youth movement in their respective countries while multiple African countries have excellent talent that just needs a bit more development and refinement.

None of that matters when you see the crop of talent that is coming around the corner for Team USA. There’s a guard revolution in our country, that much is true. You not only have Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers but you also have JuJu Watkins, Olivia Miles, Hannah Hidalgo and countless others that have the ability to pick up the slack that will be left when certified killers like Chelsea Gray and Jackie Young are ready to hang it up. While we may lose some all-time greats in a few cycles, from A’ja Wilson to Breanna Stewart. And yet, if you’re projecting out eight years from now, the Americans will still have Angel Reese, Sarah Strong, Aliyah Boston, to name a few, that will round out the lineup.

That’s not to say we shouldn’t hype up these matchups. I know there were some Team USA fans wondering why the media kept considering the French as real deal challengers. That’s because all the results up to that point indicated that they might be. For one half of basketball, they were the better program. But Team USA is still Team USA and is always going to be Team USA.

After two weeks off, the WNBA picks up play again. There’s about four games left per team until the playoffs start, and while the eight team postseason field is set there are several high profile matchups to whet your appetite in the meantime.

The World Cup may have taken some of the juice away from the W as the college football/NFL season gets underway, but it also allowed for the bad-faith and politically driven media to move on to a new culture war du jour (thanks, Hasan!). Sophie Cunningham has publicly distanced herself from Royce White and Enes Kanter and while she doesn’t deserve any praise from walking away from the mess she created, the backlash being so severe that the Fever guard is divorcing herself from it completely is a net good for the league. I don’t know if that happens if the season doesn’t get a period of time out of the limelight.

Now, I’m not pollyannaish to assume that we’re going to be sunshine and rainbows the rest of the way. Bad faith click merchants from Linda Cohn to Skip Bayless are still out in the ecosystem and Bill Simmons, whose brain seems to have completely been melted by AI and gambling slop in the last two months, will no doubt try to keep their house of cards up by grifting their way through the W. But, at the very least, the palette cleanser allowed for the sport to be out of the public eye long enough that it’s no longer an A-Block discussion on cable news networks. With the midterm elections less than two months away, I doubt it makes it back there again.

Which gives us a chance to really just dive squarely into the basketball part of this. And there’s a ton of great storylines that you can sink your teeth into.

Are the Golden State Valkyries still going to keep up the momentum they had through August? A’ja Wilson may be fully rested for the stretch run but will Jackie Young and Chelsea Gray have enough gas in the tank? What about the Atlanta Dream and Indiana Fever, who will be looking to push into the Finals conversation for the first time in the Angel/Caitlin era? Can Stewie take a World Cup MVP honor and bring that energy to a Liberty team that was limping into the break?

This is the good stuff, folks. And with four games of good matchups — Indiana and Minnesota see each other twice, New York and Atlanta do the same, etc — before we even hit the postseason, we get to ramp up our excitement before those questions get answered on the court.

Today, the Oregon State women’s basketball team is in court for a case that could pave the way for unionization in collegiate athletics. While Texas Senator Ted Cruz was on ESPN’s College Gameday promoting the proposed Protect College Sports Act, the other side of that coin is Beaver women’s hoops heading to court to argue for their own advocacy.

While the Senate is expected to vote on this bill as the August recess ends in the national legislature, 60 votes are still needed as well as a signature from President Trump to go into law. For those that need a refresh on what the bill would do if signed into law, here’s the skinny…

To be clear, there’s a few things I do think are net goods. Agency fee caps have to become standard. There are stories I’ve been told from around college sports, including women’s basketball, where “agents” (many of whom aren’t professionally licensed) taking major NIL cuts of 20 or more percent. While it can be seen on the surface as players leveraging the schools to be paid what they’re worth, there is a kernel of truth in the notion that a lot of these kids are getting the advice to play the open market because of the private-equity-coded leeches that are taking a massive cut off potentially screwing up a good thing for their clients.

At the same time, this conversation can’t happen without players. There can’t be an antitrust exemption without some kind of worker protections. And while Ted Cruz is categorically unpopular and ESPN’s heel-turn into peak chud level programming is a problem all its own, the bigger issue with the Senator’s appearance on Gameday was the one-sided nature in which the PCSA is being presented.

In an Oregon court today, Oregon State women’s basketball is trying to fight back on behalf of the labor that risks being squeezed out. While a completely open market favors the players with leverage, it destroys those that don’t. Even if you’re the most free-market of pro-capitalists out there, I’m sure you can understand how the watchability of the games you love suffers if power becomes too concentrated up at the top. While NIL has taken some of the juice out of the consistency of college sports, there’s no doubt that it’s evened out the playing field to a degree and widened the championship contender field from a small handful to a bigger one. That, it should be noted, has also come at the expense of mid-major programs who are now relegated to near-feeder-league status.

The Beavers hearing in Salem is a landmark in many ways. Past unionization efforts have centered men’s sports — specifically football and basketball — while this new group, dubbed the United College Athletes Association, is being led by women’s athletes specifically. And what they’re arguing, notably, is that unionization is a state law issue, instead of a federal law as prior efforts have argued.

It won’t be settled today, but the actual battle here is fascinating. The players are arguing that their NIL — by virtue of the taxes they pay on their compensation — qualifies them as employees while the school contends that NIL agreements are not wages or salary in return for playing basketball. So while you’re watching ESPN, and Nick Saban, and Deion Sanders push the PCSA under the guise of protecting athletes, make sure to direct your eyes to a player-led effort to actually accomplish it.

Oregon hearing could decide if women’s college basketball players can unionize by Mitch Northam, USA Today

US women show some vulnerability ahead of LA Games capturing 5th straight World Cup basketball title by Doug Feinberg, AP

‘The Evergreen’: How Portland’s WNBA team won our hearts by Kyra Buckley, Rev Shines and Julie Sabatier, OPB

Maddy Brown is one of the best data and analytics minds in women’s basketball and I’ve found myself watching her TikTok’s time and time again. Give her a follow if you love weird stats, fun visuals and some things you’ve never known before.