Before we get rolling with the column, a big thank you to Chauny for holding things down for the last couple of weeks. Since there isn’t much of a break between the NCAA and WNBA seasons, our team tries to find some time away wherever we can. With the 2026 calendar year around the corner, it was nice to step back from the writing for a second and build out the next phase of No Cap Space.

Needless to say, we’ve got some cool things planned for the new year and if there were ever a time to subscribe, to upgrade your subscription or gift one ahead of the holiday, this would be a great time to do so!

Now, onto the column!

South Carolina narrowly avoided an upset on the road at Louisville, relying on a couple of late baskets to keep the Cardinals from upsetting an AP top five team for the first time since 2022. After watching the Gamecocks lose to UCLA in December last season, I’ve learned my lesson about concern-trolling Dawn Staley’s team. If history is any indicator, South Carolina will use a close call as fuel to completely dismantle everyone in their path en route to another Final Four.

But while there are questions about the impact of season-ending injuries, bench depth and more, this early season has revealed one of the best emerging stories of the year: Raven Johnson is ready to step into the spotlight.

The Gamecocks senior point guard has gone through the wringer online over the last few years. First, it was Caitlin Clark effectively waving Johnson off in the 2023 Final Four, which was Johnson paid pack the following year as SC won another national championship. Last season, Raven’s draft stock was a topic of contentious debate as her fans argued that her impact went far beyond her counting stats. While those numbers still aren’t necessarily gaudy (8.8 PPG, 4.3 APG, 6.6 RPG), the eye-test is showing me something that goes beyond quantifying.

The Gamecocks have had two games so far this year go down to the wire. In their loss against Texas, which came via a Rori Harmon buzzer beater with one second to play, Johnson had a pivotal steal and drew a foul with about 45 seconds left to play that put South Carolina in position to win or tie. With less than a minute on the clock against Louisville, the Gamecock point guard grabbed a defensive rebound, went coast to coast and finished tough at the rim to put SC up three.

WNBA Draftniks can pour over all sorts of stats and analytics but I, the stat-agnostic who prefers to let vibes guide my judgments (for better or worse), value those little vignettes as evidence that Johnson’s confidence is manifesting in her being willing to take control as much as facilitate. In a lot of ways, she breaks the mold because she’s an anachronism; one of the last pure point guards in an era of triple threats. Her assist numbers have skyrocketed this year with Ta’Niya Latson anchoring the Gamecocks starting backcourt and Raven’s desire to have the ball in her hands when the going gets tough is exactly what SC fans have been waiting for. Whether that means it will be enough when UConn, Texas or UCLA come calling is another story. But for those that have stood tall and planted their flag in defense of a much maligned veteran guard, good faith is being rewarded at last.

I know, a bit of a clickbait-y title but the truth is the truth. Vic Schaefer is one of the best coaches in women’s college basketball, extraordinarily decorated and the man who engineered one of the great upsets in the history of the game. But the facts are the facts, and the facts are that Schaefer is still chasing his first national title and Texas is looking to hold an NCAA trophy for the first time since 1986. So when I ask, ‘Is Texas ready to be a real contender?’, I’m wondering if this is finally the year that this move, one that took Schaefer from Starkville, Mississippi to Austin, pays off at last.

In the last couple of weeks, the Longhorns have defeated UCLA, South Carolina and North Carolina. Madison Booker, who told us on a preseason edition of Luxury Tax that she was ready to be more of a take-charge player in big moments and demanded her teammates do the same, is making a push to repeat as SEC Player of the Year. Rori Harmon has broken the program assist record while youngsters Jordan Lee and Aaliyah Crump have been spectacular in the early going.

2026 will mark 40 years since the Longhorns made NCAA history, becoming the first women’s basketball program to go undefeated and win a national title. I’m not saying that time is a flat circle and we should discount UConn, UCLA or even South Carolina as major contenders. But these early wins display a certain single-mindedness that typically is embedded in the minds of champions. There’s a lot of ball left to be played, but if you’ve been a doubter of Vic Schaefer and this Longhorn team in the past, this may be the year to recalibrate your expectations.

It makes sense that our crew at No Cap Space found the little back-and-forth between LSU guard Flau’jae Johnson and Duke head coach Kara Lawson fun and endearing. After all, part of our mission statement is ethical hating. For those just reading the column for the first time, ethical hating, as defined by our Hater-in-Chief Chauny Powell, is the idea of showing your bias upfront and keeping it within the lines of acceptable banter. People then know where you stand upfront and can choose to engage with your take or not based on the fact that they know that you’re not arguing in bad faith, you’re just hating.

Ethical hating is what sports is all about.

A’ja Wilson, the Hot Ones Petty Queen, is an ethical hater. She hears your slights, uses it as fuel, then smiles in your face when she holds up another trophy. There are different ways to ethically hate, from Wilson’s way to Angel Reese’s more upfront style, trademarking a phrase meant to mock her and making it into a brand all its own.

It’s that little bit of mess that we love in the sport which is why it was surprising to see so much handwringing over Johnson’s decision to take a moment in the middle of a blowout to remind a perceived doubter of her skill and work ethic.

For those unaware of the background, the LSU guard was selected by Team USA, coached by Lawson, to compete in the FIBA Americup this summer. Despite being one of the better, more active and more defensively intense players in camp (NCS was on hand for the final day in Colorado Springs and talked to Flau’jae while there), Johnson had a hard time finding the floor in Chile and, when she did, struggled as Team USA took home gold in the competition. As LSU dismantled Duke last week, Flau’jae took a moment to chirp her former Team USA coach as her college coach, Kim Mulkey, mentioned in the postgame press conference that her star guard lost some confidence playing internationally.

I can understand some people, many of whom that already take issue with Kim Mulkey for a variety of reasons, having a problem with airing out Lawson to such a degree and expressing concern for what it could mean for Johnson’s future with the national team. Reasonable people can disagree but I empathize with those that feel Mulkey, an older white woman whose career in this sport is already stamped and thus gives her latitude to comment on what she wants, is potentially opening up her player, a young, dark-skinned Black woman, to harsh criticism and invective without suffering it herself. That’s part of the LSU head coach’s complexity because while that’s a reasonable concern to have, there are other players like Angel Reese and Flau’jae herself that appreciate Mulkey’s ability to let them be themselves while vociferously defending them in the way that she did after the Duke game.

For her part, Flau’jae took to Twitter the following day to say the talking happened in the heat of competition and that she has the utmost respect for Lawson and Team USA. But beyond that, I have trouble understanding why many are taking such a paternalistic (and potentially patronizing) stance on a hyper-competitive, top-end player in their early 20’s who believes in herself and her abilities. This is the kind of thing that we are losing in sports and I don’t love the idea of asking athletes to be more buttoned-up and corporate to protect their brand. If we are going to utilize the term ‘unapologetic’ as often as we do in this sport, then we shouldn’t be asking people to apologize when they behave outside of what we feel is supposed ‘normal’ behavior.

Flau’jae is a competitor and I feel as though you’d have a hard time finding a high-level athlete who was asked to play a different type of game in order to receive minutes being frustrated when they do that and the minutes don’t follow. Instead of making it a meta commentary on Kim Mulkey or Kara Lawson or Flau’jae Johnson, we should just be appreciating it for what it is: a passionate chirp in the heat-of-the-moment in a game between power conference teams. What pushes the game forward is harmless banter like this and, while there are reasonable times to dissect some of the deeper components of the game, sometimes we can just enjoy the mess for the mess that it is.

I’ve always joked that one of the unspoken lessons you receive in journalism school is that cynicism is akin to survival. It doesn’t matter if you juice ratings, make money or win awards, when you walk into your general manager’s office to renegotiate a contract, you’re more-than-likely to be met with fierce resistance. Unless you’re one of the few in the business that commands a market wherever you go, the negotiating position of your boss will usually be the same: We can lowball you because there are others that can do the job and this industry is dying anyway so there’s no money in the banana stand as it is.

Now, I’m not bringing that up as sour grapes from a former longtime TV reporter. After all, News Directors and GM’s have a hard enough job with ever-thinning margins, shrinking audiences and eroding public trust. It’s genuinely a thankless job to have to sit across the table from a reporter and have to sometimes lie and undercut the contributions of your worker bees.

But even I, the bruised and battered veteran of local television news, have been stunned at the complete and utter contempt the WNBA, NBA and its executive class have for their labor.

In the last week, a new offer came from the league to the union that included a somewhat negligible increase in base salaries, the elimination of player housing, a proposed change to the calendar and, most mindbogglingly, a proposed draft combine that would penalize players for not attending. The last one is particularly fascinating because it contradicts a calendar shift and thus, to me at least, represents a poison pill that couldn’t be agreed upon anyway. If the calendar is pushed back, with training camp supposed to start during women’s March Madness, a combine would then conflict with the college season. So do players whose teams succeed in the tournament get penalized or will they be asked to decide between winning a title and being drafted in the WNBA?

A proposed revenue share, the white whale of the player’s association, was also included without specific stipulations to trigger it. But, like the contradiction of the calendar, the devil is in the details. The PA alleges that the revenue share, which stands at a paltry 15% of basketball related income, would actually devalue over the life of the collective bargaining agreement and put the players in position to actually make less as the league continues to grow.

Eliminating player housing, it can be argued, is collateral damage if base level contracts start at $200,000 or more. While many, myself included, feel like that amount is perfectly reasonable to find safe and secure housing in any city in the United States and Canada, the bigger issue is what happens to players on hardship contracts or those that don’t have guaranteed deals. Anyone who has rented month-to-month or broken a lease will tell you that the premiums you pay are outrageous and getting higher every day.

Without anything close to a middle ground, the league and players agreed to another extension but I’m becoming increasingly concerned about a true work stoppage in 2026. But, unlike those that believe the players get hurt the most, I’m most concerned for the non-NBA affiliated WNBA ownership groups that are being left to twist in the wind. Many of these owners, from Force 10 (Seattle Storm) to the Mohegan Tribe (Connecticut Sun) to Larry Gottesdiener (Atlanta Dream), yes, even Michael Alter (Chicago Sky) invested in the game before the boom and deserve better than to get hosed by NBA aligned owners who seem to be taking the players solidarity more personally than professionally.

I’ve always said that the logical endgame, the proper way forward for women’s basketball, is to give earnest thanks to the NBA but to walk away and start a league that isn’t tainted by a league that sees the W as more of a supplement to their product than a tentpole property. What is alarming is the utter hubris in how little the league is willing to budge. Every concession has come with a poison pill and with each passing week, the goodwill continues to evaporate. Eventually, we’ll reach a tipping point and while I always will stand on the side of labor reflexively, I genuinely am curious when the NBA/WNBA aligned owners will feel that their hand has been overplayed. When you do the math between Unrivaled, Project B, Athletes Unlimited, Upshot, Exalt and the WPBA, there are more than enough slots to take in the 156 players that would be out of work should there be a work stoppage.

As much as the players have been accused of making this labor fight personal, the owners and league have been just as guilty, if not more so. And while there are plenty of people always willing to shill for billionaires, public opinion still feels firmly on the side of the player’s association. For now, we’ll sit and wait and see where it goes but the thing to watch is whether or not a schism will form on the league’s end as pure-WNBA owners face the possibility of being left out to dry by their NBA aligned colleagues.

When Jim Plunkett won the Heisman Trophy in 1970, he beat out a field that included Archie Manning and Joe Theismann. I was thinking of the Stanford great on Saturday as I watched Fernando Mendoza, the grandson of Cuban-Americans, have his crowning moment, lofting a long third down pass that all but sealed Indiana’s win over Ohio State in the Big Ten Championship. When he goes to New York, his field will likely include Notre Dame running back Jeremiyah Love and Vanderbilt quarterback Diego Pavia.

Pavia, whose father is Mexican-American and mother is Spanish-American, is a contender alongside Mendoza. For two Hispanic-American players to likely be finalists for the highest honor in college football is a historic moment for the fastest growing minority fan base in the country.

But this is a women’s basketball column. Why am I talking about Fernando Mendoza and Diego Pavia?

Because as I watched those two players, I couldn’t help but think about Oklahoma’s Aaliyah Chavez and UCLA’s Gabriela Jaquez.

In the last two weeks, we’ve seen both players enjoy something of a national coming out party. Jaquez scored 29 points on 10/14 shooting in the No. 4 Bruins win over No. 14 Tennessee while Chavez dropped 33 as the No. 9 Sooners held off NC State in overtime. There are examples of stars in women’s basketball that have roots in Latin America — Brazil’s 1994 team famously upset Team USA to win the FIBA World Cup while superstars including Diana Taurasi can trace their lineage — but it’s only just been in the last five years that we’ve started to see a true first generation of pioneers entering the game.

Remarkably, according to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES), just 2.9% of Division I college basketball athletes identify as Hispanic or Latine. That players like Jaquez, Chavez, Hannah Hidalgo and Kamilla Cardoso are winning national championships and rising to the top of the sport in just the last five years signals we may be on the precipice of a growing demographic shift within the sport.

As fan support from the Latine community skyrockets — according to DirecTV, Hispanic viewership for the NCAA women’s basketball championship rose 354% from 2021 to 2024 — so too does the interest in their superstars.

After all, we’ve seen it before.

The sports’ major support from South Carolina can be directly attributed to A’ja Wilson, while there is no doubt the Caitlin Clark effect has resulted in meteoric growth for women’s hoops as a whole. Players like Chavez, Jaquez, Cardoso and Hidalgo can do the same for a group of sports fans that are typically stereotyped as myopically interested in soccer and nothing else.

So, as you watch them get buckets, pick pockets and dime up teammates, know that you’re watching something bigger happening at work. If the trend continues, five years from now we may see more young girls see themselves in those superstars. And, we the humble ball-knowers and fans of women’s basketball, will be better for it.