Happy Tuesday, Ball-Knowers!

There’s some time to kill before the Aces and Liberty play in the lone WNBA matchup of the night. So allow the newsletter to function as something of a night (and day) in review before we get to some action in the desert…

Tyler and Andrew do a pure recap of last night’s games on YouTube…

Deyscha ‘Sway’ Smith, Connecticut Sun beat writer for The IX and features writer for WSLAM, drops by to discuss the WNBA MVP race, the finer points of sports writing and what the Sun have to do to improve this season…

And if you haven’t already, drop a five star rating on Apple or Spotify and if you add a fun rant/rave/review, we’ll be featuring it on Friday’s NCS Hotline on YouTube.

It wasn’t DeWanna Bonner’s first time facing the Indiana Fever since the highly publicized signing-gone-awry last WNBA season. But it was the first time it happened with Caitlin Clark on the floor. Maybe that’s why this game felt a little more pointed, or maybe a bit heated. It eventually culminated in Clark and Bonner getting tied up, leading to Indiana enforcers Myisha Hines-Allen and Sophie Cunningham to step in. Cunningham pointed her finger at Bonner, face scrunched with a smarminess only rivaled by a Coach K era Duke Blue Devil or a tech billionaire sitting in a congressional hearing. Bonner, of course, took issue with this, and by the end of the quarter multiple technical fouls had been issued with Hines-Allen being ejected.

For a team that seems to have spent much of this year in bunker mentality, it felt like a galvanizing moment.

Clark riled up the crowd while Cunningham took the attention and placed it squarely on herself. While I admit to being an ethical hater of Cunningham, I actually believe she did exactly what Indiana brought her in to do: get in between a bench player and your superstar, take the attention off your superstar, and channel your inner Bill Laimbeer by smirking someone into wanting to swing on you. To that end, she did her job.

But it made me think about how this Fever team seem to want to be the heel while they are positioned as a face. In wrestling parlance, the face is the hero and the heel is the villain. Sometimes it almost appears as though Clark has that same tendency as Isiah Thomas did, where she isn’t fully comfortable being a heel but definitely would like to be. Cunningham, like Laimbeer, is an absolutely unashamed villain, the devil on everyone’s shoulder telling them to embrace their inner messiness.

I’ve been waiting for the inflection point in which Indiana finally puts it all together, and maybe that’s still coming. There’s always going to be some degree of depth in that behavior, to be clear. While Clark has become something of an avatar for culture war grievance, Cunningham’s failing is that she seems okay welcoming and profiting off of it. But if it’s possible to put that to the side and be heels between the lines, there’s a shot that it might finally let Indiana be the team they’ve wanted to be all year.

I feel like I glimpsed into the future late Monday night, like Noah being told of a great flood that would wipe the sinners from the earth. It told me to build an ark, made of Douglas Fir and setting out from Anacortes. For when Dominique Malonga and Awa Fam come of age they will usher in a new golden age and the meek shall inherit the earth.

It was that fun to watch.

The duo, both not yet of legal drinking age in Seattle, combined for 55 points and 16 rebounds in last night’s loss to the Dallas Wings. It dropped the Storm to 3-15 on the season as they continue to figure out how to play with an exceedingly young crop of players and set themselves up for future success.

I mean, this is just insanely good stuff. We saw a vision of what the WNBA is going to be. Fam’s perimeter shooting is so devastating while Malonga’s length and strides make her so hard to defend in the open court. And keep in mind, Malonga specifically is just 20 years old. The last young player to be this dominant this early was Lauren Jackson. If you can even be within striking distance of one of the greatest WNBA players of all time, you’re doing something right.

I’m not quite sure what the future holds for Seattle and how this all works when Ezi Magbegor comes back, or what moves the front office wants to make this offseason or if the franchise decides to keep building slow or push their chips in while Malonga and Fam are on rookie scale contracts. But I do know that if the year-to-year trajectory is linear for both players, it may be a tandem so devastating it redefines the WNBA. Here’s hoping. I love a good story.

If I have column smoke for the Indiana Fever because they’re sitting in the middle of the WNBA standings when I expected them to be sitting towards the top, I have to do the same for the Chicago Sky, whom I expected to be in the middle and are circling the drain. I understand that Rickea Jackson was important to what this team was trying to do. But one player, in a cadre of veterans who presumably still have plenty of miles left, and her injury shouldn’t derail an entire season like this.

The Sky looked utterly lifeless and their backcourt — bench and starters — combined for 7/41 shooting from the field all but ended the game prematurely. The Connecticut Sun, the worst team in the league up to this point, cruised to a 29 point victory over a Chicago team that was supposed to be contending for a playoff spot. They’re now 4-12 approximately a third of the way through the regular season.

Look, it’s not that the Sky have always been bad. It’s that the years following the 2021 WNBA title seem to have broken something in how this franchise looks at itself, its players, the media and anyone who would dare critique them. The cacophony of ill-conceived personnel decisions, from firing Theresa Weatherspoon too early to trading almost three seasons worth of draft picks to having an environment so bad you had to engineer a divorce from one of the brightest young stars in the league, all starts at the top.

I’m not quite sure what you do at this point but the Sky have backed themselves into a corner that is going to take years to undo. Naturally, the major stakeholders from principal owner Michael Alter to general manager Jeff Pagliocca, should be under fire for a third straight year of pretty epic mismanagement. But it’s far more likely that Marsh will unfortunately be the scapegoat who hasn’t done enough to help his case either.

More than anything, it’s just a shame. This isn’t the worst roster in the world, but something here is just wrong and felt wrong for a few years now. There’s a couple common denominators, but I’m just not sure if Michael Alter has the clarity to realize what is happening to the franchise he is invested so much time and money in.

New York Liberty (12-6) vs. Las Vegas Aces (11-4): 10:00 PM ET, USA Network

How can you not tune in for this one? Before Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese’s arrival, Stewie vs. A’ja was supposed to be Cathy Engelbert’s ‘Magic vs. Bird’ rivalry for the WNBA. A lot has happened in the last four seasons, but there was a time in which Wilson and her fanbase felt largely ignored and overlooked in the face of a yearslong push to make Stewart (who, it should be noted, earned the attention) the greatest player the sport had ever seen. Even with a championship in hand, there are still skeptics of New York, given the way that clinching game vs. Minnesota in 2024 played out. It feels at times that in order for this franchise to earn the league’s respect, they’ll have to win it again. That’s why a game like this matters so much for them. Perception and narrative matters, whether players like it or not. And if I’m Stewie, having the season I’m having, I want to re-announce myself to the broader WNBA world.

On the other end, the Aces really have earned the right to turn on the jets whenever they want. But in a game like this? I expect them to be on tilt from the opening whistle, especially knowing that next week you’re going to see the Liberty again in the Commissioner’s Cup title game.

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