To say it has been a week in the world of women’s basketball would be an understatement. We had conference tournaments in all the high-major conferences, WNBA labor discussions and some budding rivalries that feel like they’re really hitting their stride. There’s a ton to get to but before we do I just want to share everything we have coming on No Cap Space WBB in the coming weeks and urge you to subscribe to our Ball-Knowers tier to get all the women’s hoops information you need during the NCAA Tournament and into the WNBA preseason.
For starters, our daily conference tournament watch guides will continue to roll out on our site until Selection Sunday. They’re basically the one biggest thing I’m intrigued by in each round in each conference. Those stay free to all as a service to growing the game and giving you a chance to learn about and tune into some games you might not otherwise be aware of. In case you missed our YouTube live postgame show breaking down all Sunday’s Tournament Final games, we have it available here in podcast form too!
Once we hit the NCAA Tournament, those paying into our Ball-Knowers tier will get the full WBB nerd experience. You’ll get full access to game by game previews of every matchup in the March Madness bracket as well as daily wraps that will dovetail with our content that is available on YouTube. We also have multiple features as well to give you inside stories on those that are trying to make legacy runs to the national championship. As we’ve mentioned before, your subscriptions helps make our work better for you. In fact, our first wave of subscribers are helping Greer, Tyler and Chauny be on the ground at the 2025 Final Four in Tampa for the first time ever. We know the times are what they are right now and so our goal isn’t to passive income grindset boss our way to success. Instead, we want to earn your subscription and give it back to you in the form of content that you won’t be able to find anywhere else. So pop in with us, do a free trial, pay for the month (or the year, which is a cheaper option in the long run) and be a part of one of the fastest growing and most fun (in my opinion!) women’s hoops communities on the internet. Now, let’s get to the column…
1. The WNBA’s college series seems like the best idea they’ve had in years.
The biggest Monday morning news was that the New York Liberty would be playing a preseason exhibition at Matthew Knight Arena on the University of Oregon’s campus, continuing a trend we’ve seen by WNBA teams heading to the alma maters of their top players. Last year, the Las Vegas Aces famously headed to Colonial Life Arena in Columbia, South Carolina where we got the first real announcement of the A’One signature shoe. This season, the Chicago Sky will be playing a preseason exhibition at LSU while the Indiana Fever will be returning to Carver-Hawkeye Arena as well. It’s a long overdue marketing push to bridge the gap between the stars of the WNBA and the college fanbases that helped bring them into national prominence.
There’s been a longstanding discussion in the league about player marketing and how certain stars are elevated at the expense of others. But that sometimes gets in the way of another misguided strategy I’ve heard from those that have been in WNBA circles for a long time: that the league’s object permanence with its’ own players is lacking. It’s a talking point that isn’t usually front and center but you can actually see it play out when you go back and look at the league and how it positions people. Typically, they latch on to a major college star for a few years and then pivot to the next star, almost in pursuit of the one transcendent player at the expense of the people they already have in the WNBA. I’m not sure if Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese’s transcendence means that the league can now go back and focus on who it already has but it’s interesting to see how often it plays out.
The move to bridging the college gaps tells me that there is an understanding by the WNBA office that they’ve left meat on the bone by not connecting back to past fanbases and continuing the line that started in college for many of these athletes. It’s something they should be doing every year to remind those NCAA only (or even player specific) fans that the league is here and worth celebrating in a variety of ways. Sure, it’s brought on by the stars but it also helps elevate the role players and give an Oregon fan, for instance, a reason to root for Betnijah Laney-Hamilton in addition to Sabrina Ionescu and Nyara Sabally. That’s how you build generational fandoms. It took awhile but it feels like the WNBA is finally starting to understand how to make the train go.
2. Angel Reese said absolutely nothing wrong in her podcast discussing the impending WNBA labor negotiations…
There is no greater clarion call to misogynists worldwide than saying something about WNBA labor rights. It’s legitimately wild how the minute you say, ‘huh, maybe we should treat these elite athletes like elite athletes’, every chud who would rather post online than go to therapy comes out of the woodwork to tell you why women deserve less. This isn’t even a virtue signaling thing from me. Just the capitalism of it all tells you that the value added by these players in this current environment warrants a larger slice of the pie.
Like these guys have ME out here defending capitalism.
The reaction to Angel Reese and DiJonai Carrington’s comments regarding a possible WNBA player lockout has less to do with what was said and the fact that they said it. There is a standom here that has made those two individuals the enemy and thus deserving of extreme scrutiny in every situation. But absolutely nothing they said was wrong. This is a standard, run-of-the-mill labor tactic and the bad faith reaction to it makes me wonder if people have ever actually negotiated anything for themselves professionally before. You come to the table and ask for as much as you can. Your employer comes to the table with an offer typically far under market value. You come to the middle and shake hands and move on. The idea that women’s basketball players need to just be okay with what they have is ridiculous when you look at the valuations of the franchises and the TV that’s about to come in. On top of that, I’m really tired of this stupid talking point about franchise profitability.
Want to know how bullshit and bad faith it is?
Here’s an NBA report obtained by ESPN in 2017 alleging that half the franchises in the league lost money. The reason teams were able to claim their own individual profitability was because of revenue sharing from the more moneyed teams which was able to help balance the books of teams like the Brooklyn Nets and Washington Wizards (hardly small markets, by the way). And that’s the NBA, in 2017, just off a massive TV deal that netted the players a bunch of gains in labor rights. So scratch of the profitability argument because it’s always been ridiculous. More than anything, league profitability is an argument used by owners to stifle labor when we get to these very discussions. I’ve never heard the profitability discussion happen in the private sector when any Elon Musk company or Uber or AirBnB was losing money left and right but being propped up by gobs of venture capital and overstated valuations.
But beyond that, this is a very normal negotiating move. You don’t ever actually start from the place you want to end up. That’s leaving money on the table. And you certainly don’t potentially spike that possibility before you get to the negotiating table at all. The concern I have is that A’ja Wilson’s comment at the Sloan Conference indicated a reticence to want to even entertain the possibility of a lockout. That, to me, is alarming on a couple fronts. First of all, you’ve just given owners an in. Now they can lean on one of the faces of the league to try and spike labor movement from within. On top of that, you now have a question about how united the front actually is. We’ve gone from stand on business, to potential lockout, to the reigning MVP saying "‘I hope it doesn’t come to that”.
Yikes.
But if we do get to that scenario, you’re talking about a sport that has a good relationship with European basketball and a lot of players used to going abroad to play. If any set of athletes have opportunities to make money playing outside the states, it’s WNBA players. So stop the nonsense. It’s a stupid take to back owners in a labor dispute, there’s absolutely a racism and misogynoir at play because Reese and Carrington were the messengers and it makes people look like rubes to not understand the basics of negotiation.
3. …And maybe it’s time to really discuss the league exiting Twitter en masse.
Which brings me to this point: is it time for the league and its players to finally get off Twitter? Angel’s comments had already been picked up across social media due to her massive following but it kicked into overdrive when an overtly right wing account falsely claimed that Reese was asking WNBA players to be paid as much as NBA players. To quote Mark Twain, that lie went around the world before the truth got its pants on. And therein lies the problem with that app these days. Social media already is rife with bot activity and AI slop. As someone trying to get a Facebook page up and running for No Cap Space, you wouldn’t believe the amount of blatantly false stuff is just being openly shared around there. Twitter is no different but because of its’ place in popular culture, and its’ continually mystifying importance to media members, the falsehoods are amplified further.
If you know that most of the app is a place that is openly hostile to women’s basketball and the concept of the WNBA at all, what is the upshot of staying there? I’d love to see the analytics for some of these bigger brands and shows and if it still has the cultural staying power it did a handful of years ago. I’m sure, on some level, it does but for the mental health of these players I am curious what the positives are. We already saw what a mess the app became last season and, given how this stuff with Angel has taken on a life of its own on the basis of a lie, is the juice still worth the squeeze? I don’t want to take the moral stance on Twitter because Substack has its’ own issues and it would be hypocritical of me to say “app has bad morals, you need to leave it!” while not practicing what I preach. But I do think some of these athletes need to take a good hard look at what they’re getting out of Twitter and if it’s still something worth doing. Bluesky, while decidedly less funny, is a good alternative and their moderation policies are far better than what exists on the remains of the Bird App. The fact that the WNBA, as noted by The Athletic’s Richard Deitsch, doesn’t have an official presence there is interesting. It feels like the place where it would thrive and discourse could be a little better for the athletes. But brand loyalty is a hard thing to break. I just hope it doesn’t break the players first.
4. South Carolina appears to be back to being Destroyer of Worlds and now I have a question…
So, let’s get one thing out of the way first. There’s a bit of a cult of personality around Dawn Staley. And I get it! When you hear her talk or see the love and support she pours into her players it’s extremely hard to not be like ‘yeah, I would go to war for this woman and what she stands for’. For the most part, Staley is an ideal ambassador of the game and deserves to have a legion of people behind her that are willing to defend her at every turn. There are downsides to that level of standom (see, any major university athletic scandal involving a high profile coach in the last 50+ years) but it’s easy to feel like women’s basketball has a truly good one here and she needs to be protected at all costs.
But when it comes to the basketball, I bristle at the notion that she’s above critique. Yeah, I know less basketball than Dawn Staley has forgotten, but it’s okay to occasionally point out that ‘hey, maybe this wasn’t a whole 4D chess move and maybe it’s just a coach realizing they might have been wrong and adjusted’. That seems to feel like the case with Milaysia Fulwiley. It was clear early in the season that Staley wanted her superstar guard to be a little better defensively and manage her turnovers a bit better. One of the impressive things about Dawn is the ability to hold players to strict accountability while caring about them enough that they don’t fold under that standard and feel picked on. That’s a hard thing in today’s era of the transfer portal.
As I watched South Carolina go back to the Galactus that we expected them to be at the beginning of the year, I couldn’t help but notice how the crowd in Greenville — primarily SC fans, mind you — reacted any time Fulwiley did something. A check in to the game, a made bucket, a behind the back pass or acrobatic block, she just has the effect Caitlin Clark does in terms of making you go ‘WOW!’ And on some level, I do feel that we were a little deprived of that all year in favor of a system that allows everyone to eat and doesn’t leave the margin for error that a player like Fulwiley can sometimes have. I get it, to be clear. Dawn Staley is paid to win titles at South Carolina and adherence to her system is a big reason for her success. No one is bigger than the machine and it’s paid dividends over and over. But it felt like in this tournament we started to see some of that grip loosen and us get a little more doses of Milaysia and fabulous freshman Joyce Edwards. The lineup that includes the aforementioned two and Tessa Johnson feels like the winning formula for SC. Which begs the question: was it really the plan to unleash this now? Or did Staley finally figure out that their best chance to roll was maybe not holding on to certain seniors as much and letting the young kids go to work?
Maybe the question doesn’t matter because of the success we’re seeing now. But I think when we enter these conversations of ‘why isn’t Milaysia Fulwiley getting more mainstream press attention when she’s clearly one of the best players in America?’ we have to ask some questions of the head coach. And that’s okay to do! Staley wins, wins a lot and clearly has the loyalty of her players in a way few, if any, other coaches do these days. But to ask a question isn’t to impugn her character. It’s just to talk ball. At the end of the day, however we got there, I’m glad we’re getting more Milaysia Fulwiley. Because women’s basketball is a lot better when we get to see her doing the things that make her great.
5. There is a basketball rivalry in Los Angeles and it’s time national media cultivated it.
Shout out to Lauren Betts, who channeled her sister Sienna with one of the greatest displays of haterdom since JuJu Watkins hit the 4’s Down on UCLA just a couple weeks ago. After the final buzzer sounded, Betts ran to her bench, put two fingers up in the style of USC’s ‘Fight On’ gesture and dropped them down herself. Then, almost out of nowhere, she turned to the USC bench and did the same with both hands. It was in that moment I knew that the enmity between these two teams is real. They don’t need to dislike each other off the floor but they absolutely hate one another on it.
That’s what these rivalries need and that’s why it’s high time L.A. media get on the train.
When I worked in Oregon, the rivalry between the Ducks and the Beavers was arguably the best in women’s college basketball. We got two annual matchups between two top ten teams at schools located 45 minutes away from one another. The players didn’t like each other, the coaches certainly didn’t mess with each other and the fanbases…well, it’s should be clear by now. Gill Coliseum and Matthew Knight Arena were packed in those years, to the point that the tickets were some of the most expensive for a sporting event anywhere in the Pacific Northwest. That’s what is happening in Los Angeles right now. There’s no excuse, in the second largest media market in America, to not treat this with the seriousness it deserves.
L.A., for the most part, has been trying to make inter-city sports rivalries happen for some time now. UCLA vs. USC had some good matchups in football but it’s not the same type of elite matchup regularity that, say, the Iron Bowl has had. Bruins men’s hoops has dominated USC historically and the opposite has been true in women’s basketball. The Clippers have tried to manufacture some hate but it’s been greeted with the same energy that a Knicks - Nets rivalry did in New York. The Angels and the Dodgers don’t really have much to speak of either.
But unlike many of those teams, which were transplant teams that cater to more casual audiences, UCLA and USC are authentically Los Angeles products. It’s still deeply felt within the communities even as the city has become a little less local- oriented over the years. There is an opportunity here, with Lauren Betts on one end and JuJu Watkins on the other, to make this into the biggest rivalry the city has had in a long, long time. Not to mention, they’ll be right back here next year doing the same thing. Then, you hand the baton off to two of the top players in the high school ranks as Jazzy Davidson heads to USC and Sienna Betts goes to UCLA.
It felt a little hollow to have this conference tournament title game in Indianapolis where the crowd just didn’t seem to have the same affinity for California based teams. That’s not their fault, as blame lies at the feet of Larry Scott and the network executives that killed the Pac-12. But it feels like we should want them to meet one more time in the NCAA Tournament when the lights are brightest, really showcase these players wanting to beat one another and carry that into next season. ESPN doesn’t have the Big Ten rights but they have a studio in Los Angeles. That has to count for something and if you don’t take advantage of this now, I don’t know if you’ll get a better opportunity in the city of Angels.
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