Happy Monday, Ball-Knowers!

What a weekend in the world of basketball. Of course, the New York Knicks broke a 53 year championship drought in the NBA. But as Game 5 unfolded in San Antonio, we got what may eventually be a preview of the WNBA Finals in Las Vegas. The Aces and Lynx matched up, Olivia Miles and Chelsea Gray went toe to toe while A’ja Wilson once again proved why she’s the best player in this league until further notice.

It was the kind of June matchup that makes you excited for what is to come later this fall. Meanwhile, Indiana is starting to roll, New York continues to steamroll nearly everyone in their path while Atlanta and Toronto took headlines for a little after the whistle action between Izzy Harrison and Angel Reese.

While No Cap Wife and I prepare to take a day trip to New York on Thursday to witness some history on the Canyon of Heroes, get ready for a packed week of content ahead here on NCS. So tap in and enjoy!

The NCS Hotline made its debut this past Friday and Tyler has more to come every week on our YouTube channel!

Chauny spent time at Overtime Select in Atlanta and tapped in with former Tennessee Lady Vols Mia and Mya Pauldo, who transferred to Rutgers and look to rebuild the historic Scarlet Knights program…

While their partner league has gone through a decade or so of unprecedented parity, the WNBA appears to be living through an era of one of their greatest ever dynasties. After an utterly bizarre-in-hindsight blowout loss to the Phoenix Mercury, the Las Vegas Aces have won 10 of their last 12 games, including a weekend victory over a surging Minnesota Lynx.

A’ja Wilson finished that game with 24 points and 10 rebounds while Chelsea Gray once again turned back the clock via another blisteringly hot three point shooting night. In the last two games, the 33 year old point guard has shot 15/23 from three-point-range while helping facilitate an offense centered around the presumptive MVP in Wilson.

Beyond that dynamic duo, NaLyssa Smith has emerged as the type of glue player that can help solidify the Aces stranglehold on the WNBA. It’s been an up-and-down run for the former Baylor superstar over the last four years, but this offseason it seems pretty clear that there’s been a lot of work done. Whether it be sheerly in her body composition, stamina and work rate or the willingness to be whatever Vegas needs her to be on a given night, Smith deserves a mountain of credit for helping to take some of the pressure off Wilson, a demand Aces fans have been making for years. 11.4 points and 7.1 rebounds per game might not turn a casual’s head, but the Ball-Knower understands what their seeing and how important Smith is becoming to this group.

Which leaves us with Wilson, and a legitimate question to pose:

Is she truly the first undisputed GOAT emerging in this fragmented media era?

I was thinking about it today and couldn’t come up with one. All the players with arguments to be Greatest of All-Time dominated in a bygone era of social media, those early 2010’s when things felt less fragmented and elements of monoculture still existed. Lebron James, Serena Williams, Tiger Woods, Tom Brady, they all either came up or stayed up during a time when there were still central pillars that American culture could almost universally center around. In the post-COVID era, it feels like every sport has been ready to crown the next nascent superstar only to be furious when their greatness hit a roadblock. Sometimes, like in the case of a player like Patrick Mahomes or Nikola Jokic, there are gaps in dominance that force us to grade them on a different curve than those who like, say, a Michael Jordan.

But Wilson’s current run is immutable, unshakeable. There are next best things that have come into this league but they haven’t been able to match the level of the Aces superstar. It even feels like Breanna Stewart’s legacy, one that Wilson herself was chasing when she got into the WNBA from South Carolina, isn’t remembered the same way. That dominance feels almost washed away in the tsunami of A’ja’s near half decade of achievements. All the 29 year old has to do is simply maintain her current level of play and she’ll likely walk away with her fourth MVP in five years and her fifth in seven.

While there’s still a lot of basketball to play this season, I don’t want folks to take this for granted. You are watching a player without a current contemporary. Napheesa Collier and Stewie are greats. Stewie, specifically, is an all-time great. Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers represent the new Golden Generation of American women’s basketball players.

None of them currently exist at the level A’ja has played at consistently since 2023.

Parity is great for a sports league when things run cyclically. You need periods of everyone having a chance so when the dynasty comes along, led by a Great of Greats, it means that much more. And as we root for the next great one to come along, as we should, there’s also an understanding there that Vegas is the dynasty of the moment, and Wilson the best player in the world.

Yes, I know the Fever’s recent wins are over Connecticut, Chicago and Washington. Yes, I know they were all close games in nature. But when you’ve been getting hammered in the press, when your fanbase has lit up social media to the degree that even the YouTube grifters have to step in and say ‘enough is enough, every win matters. The question not three weeks ago, fresh off a blowout loss to the Portland Fire, was how good Indiana really is. Did we overindex on this team? Are they really the contenders we think they are?

The answers to both are still out there. But I’ll tell you this: had Indiana lost any of the last three games, those questions would come secondary to a mountain of scrutiny about what on earth the Fever are doing losing to any of the bottom five teams in the WNBA. Quite simply, when you have a team with Caitlin Clark, Aliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell, there should always be an established floor. It’s why, following the loss to the Fire, there was a near meltdown about what was really going on.

Wins can cover up a lot of warts. They can occasionally be a way to paper over some major problems, either on the court or in the locker room, that might doom a franchise come the fall. But they can also be a catalyst. Sometimes all a team needs is a few games to get right, remember what it’s like to win and get their swagger back a bit. When you’re under the microscope the way Indiana is and always will be, those small victories become even more important.

One would hope that builds confidence for Clark, Boston and the rest of the crew as they host Toronto and Atlanta this week before heading down to State Farm Arena for the second leg of their mini-series with the Dream. If they walk out of this week 2-1, or even 3-0, then it’s fair to say that Indiana is stabilizing back into the team we had such high expectations for. For now, they appear to have stabilized from a bad couple weeks of media scrutiny and bad basketball. And that’s good enough for me.

I said in the first week of the season that I was already over the Kelsey Plum point guard experiment in Los Angeles. A little over a month into the year, the ‘Dawg’ has made a believer out of me. There’s still a lot of things to work on in L.A., from the Sparks’ team defense to figuring out just how high their ceiling is. But at the very least, I find myself pretty captivated by the 31 year old guard and the season she’s having so far.

While A’ja Wilson is the undisputed top of the MVP ladder right now, I do think players at least deserve to be in the discussion. It doesn’t mean that they deserve to be voted MVP over the Aces superstar, but there’s at least got to be space to say ‘Hey, this player is crushing it and their value is fully on display so far this season’. Olivia Miles is making that case in Minnesota while Plum is doing the same in the City of Angels.

She’s shooting her best from distance since her First Team All-WNBA season in 2022 (41.4% from 3PT this year, 42% that year), she’s setting a career high in assists per game, getting to the free throw line more than she ever has and is looking at her best true shooting percentage as a WNBA player. Once regarded as purely a volume shooter and not the 1A that can handle the load of a franchise, Plum is proving with Lynne Roberts that she has some degree of capability. They’re 0-2 with her out of the lineup and 7-4 with her playing. Does that mean Los Angeles is good enough to play with the best teams in the WNBA and contend? That’s something we’re likely to find out in the next month when the Sparks see Golden State, Minnesota, New York, Toronto and Indiana. If Plum can continue to put together performances like her 43 point, 7 assist masterpiece against Phoenix, it might be time to talk about her as having the best season so far out of any guard in the WNBA.

I’d make the argument that the glut of teams in the middle of the WNBA standings aren’t in danger of missing the playoffs. The Dallas Wings, Indiana Fever and Golden State Valkyries all feel like they’re going to be some combination of fifth, sixth and seventh seeds. Which leaves the eight seed for four teams to fight for in the coming months. L.A. is one, Portland and Toronto are two others while Washington is slightly on the outside looking in but with plenty of time to play their way back into the picture.

It’s pretty impressive to see potentially two or even three expansion franchises (Golden State being the other) all contending for playoff spots in their first two years of operation. That speaks to not just the individual ownership groups but also the alignment of front offices, coaches, staffs and players. It’s very clearly a new era in the WNBA. But who has the most to gain and lose this June? Well, let’s take a look at the schedules…

Toronto: Indiana, Connecticut, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Phoenix

Los Angeles: Golden State, Minnesota, New York, Toronto, Indiana

Portland: Minnesota, Seattle, Chicago, Chicago, Washington

Washington: Connecticut, New York, Minnesota, Minnesota, Connecticut, Portland

As of now, it looks like Los Angeles and Washington will have the toughest sledding ahead while Portland can either put distance between themselves and others for that eighth spot. Tyler, as you’ll hear on Five Out’s video offering on YouTube, considers Toronto a team of two-faces. Will you get a Tempo team on a good Brittney Sykes/Marina Mabrey night or a bad one? In any case, we’re at the point in the season where the playoffs and seeding are going to be a slowly approaching freight train. Every game will matter, even if it doesn’t seem like it. So buckle up for June because the aforementioned four teams will be going to war.

Saturday was a release for New York and Knicks fans in particular. 53 years, nearly a dozen close calls, a handful of Finals disappointments and endless bad draft picks and lost seasons culminated in one of the most spontaneous moments of collective joy the city has ever seen. It’s spawned some of the best sports writing I’ve seen in the last decade, proving that a good pen can make a scene come alive.

Sequestered away in southern Appalachia, I had the pleasure of sitting back and watching it all unfold. I texted friends I hadn’t spoken to in over ten years, danced through a Chattanooga apartment parking lot with my wife and stayed up into the wee hours watching the utter jubilation of every soul from the Verrazano Bridge to the Whitestone and everywhere in between. It made me think of a couple things, from the nature of the Knicks resonance in New York to why this means so much to everyone there.

Allow me the time, if you would…

We all know why this feels so important to New Yorkers. Spontaneous moments of connection in the city are usually a product of unimaginable tragedy or a response to it. In an increasingly polarized world dominated by algorithms intent on cynically proclaiming that joyful things actually are cringe and lame, communities bloomed like roses out of cracked Brooklyn sidewalks.

It had to be the Knicks, the one team that has arguably stood the test of time in a city punctuated by periods of constant death and rebirth. They’ve always been there, operating on the corner of 33rd Street through every cycle New York has experienced. But here’s what people tend to miss.

It’s not about New York’s love affair with the Knicks.

It’s about basketball.

Before Ned Irish was inspired by Max Kase to create the team that would eventually become the 2026 NBA champions, the sport had already taken full hold in the city. In the Renaissance Casino in Harlem almost two decades earlier, Robert Douglas convinced owner William Roach to allow a basketball team to play in the newly built Ballroom. The team was named the New York Rens, an homage not just to the casino but to the explosion of creative energy that defined Harlem at that time.

Around that time, the New York Police Department took a longstanding partnership with community leaders and founded the Police Athletic League, which provided opportunities for young kids to play team sports with real stakes on the line. A young girl named Lucille Kyvallos began her career in the PAL during the 1940’s, eventually playing for several barnstorming women’s teams from the Bronx Angels to the Queens Rustics.

While other states from Ohio to Kentucky were outlawing girls competitive basketball at the high school and college level, New York persisted and the sport remained a uniquely egalitarian concept even as segregated urban planning principles took root. In parks all over the city through the 1950’s and 60’s, the blacktop basketball court was a place where anyone could come and play, provided they could ball.

It’s how Donna Orender, the longtime former WNBA Commissioner and current Upshot Commissioner, found herself taking the train in from Long Island to West 4th Ave to play at ‘The Cage’. It’s how Debbie Mason managed to make a name for herself at the Woodside Projects in Queens and how Nancy Lieberman became a nationwide phenomenon in the 1970’s.

As women’s basketball fought for it’s own recognition, particular players found validation through the New York Knicks, one of the dominant NBA teams of the 1970’s and a cultural phenomenon all their own. At Rucker Park, Mason earned the nickname ‘Pearl’, an homage to Earl ‘The Pearl’ Monroe, who gave his blessing to her directly during a streetball run in Harlem. It paved the way for Lieberman, who paved the way for Chamique Holdsclaw, who did the same for Sue Bird and then Tina Charles.

While private high schools and the commercialization of youth basketball have defanged much of the grassroots element that punctuated New York City’s status as the ‘Mecca’ of hoops, Saturday’s win brought all those feelings back. That jubilation didn’t come at the expense of the Liberty’s 2024 WNBA championship, but instead enhances it. While many poured out into the streets of Manhattan, or Brooklyn, or Queens or the Bronx or Staten Island were celebrating a drought that mercifully ended at last, the emotion of the moment was rooted in nearly every New Yorkers childhood nostalgia, our collective language that isn’t defined by any arbitrary stratifications.

It was, and always will be, about a ball, a blacktop, and a hoop. No matter what.

The sun is here and we're back outside!

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