The WNBA is BACK!!!!!

d2o · June 6

Aja got hit in the face 3 different times last night. Only one was called a foul.

ztejas · June 6

On 6/5/2024 at 11:55 AM, d2o said:

CC's former teammate is having the time of her life in Vegas with the best organization in the league.

That girl is a fucking baller. Anytime anyone was trying to act like CC was just dragging a bunch of bums to the FF every year I'd check out her teammate's stats and Martin always jumped out.

d2o · June 6

9 minutes ago, ztejas said:

That girl is a fucking baller. Anytime anyone was trying to act like CC was just dragging a bunch of bums to the FF every year I'd check out her teammate's stats and Martin always jumped out.

Yep, interesting that she didnt even think she was going to be drafted and was just there to support CC. Messed around and got put in the best situation/organization in the league.

d2o · June 6

This Kysre rebrand is hitting like crack!!

ztejas · June 6

She looks like Amber Stevens West.

UpperWestside · June 6

5 hours ago, Pancho said:

So in order for White people to be invested in women’s basketball, you must have a White woman who is straight and middle class?

So far, that description fits the following:

- Sabrina Ionescu (who Kobe loooooveed)

- Kelsey Plum

- Cameron Brink

- Lindsay Whalen

- Lauren Jackson (Aussie mate)

And this is just without googling. So why didn’t the above White players get the treatment Clark is getting?

*Breanna Stewart, she’s White and a baller but she’s gay so I guess supporting gays is illegal now?

Anytime Chrispy, or one of his numerous accounts since then. inserts his hetero argument on players just ignore it. A baller is a baller. End of story. Clark just came along at the precise right time to capture the attention she has. It’s good for the WNBA and that’s awesome in my book. Hopefully it leads to other players and teams gaining in popularity.

Deej · June 7

The only thing saving the WNBA is NBA dollars.

DixonHur · June 8

Watched the New York vs Connecticut game today.

Not a bad game and it came down to the end which helped keep my interest. The biggest negative, for me, was that there are just too many missed lay ups / point blank shots.

But based on what I saw, I think the league is headed in the right direction.

markstanco · June 8

Caitlyn Clark left off the Olympic team.

USA Women’s basketball needs some people fired. How DUMB is that? They probably just lowered their ratings by 75% if not more.

LTtxfan · June 9

https://www.si.com/nba/knicks/new-york-liberty/new-york-liberty-win-clinches-commissioners-cup-final-berth

UpperWestside · June 9

On 6/6/2024 at 8:51 PM, Deej said:

The only thing saving the WNBA is NBA dollars.

Per NBA team it comes out to 400k per year right now. They should be on the cusp of break even if they can use the momentum Clark has brought.

Another way to look at that money is the Sixers spend 36 million a year on Tobias Harris. 12 million comes across as a rounding error in NBA money terms.

Deej · June 9

Sure, but if you can't pay for yourself completely, no matter the amount, maybe you should just shut it down.

LTtxfan · June 9

4 minutes ago, UpperWestside said:

Per NBA team it comes out to 400k per year right now. They should be on the cusp of break even if they can use the momentum Clark has brought.

At this point, it seems like part of the NBA's marketing budget to promote basketball worldwide. Longterm, it might be adding a lot more fans to the NBA too.I

UpperWestside · June 9

1 minute ago, LTtxfan said:

At this point, it seems like part of the NBA's marketing budget to promote basketball worldwide. Longterm, it might be adding a lot more fans to the NBA too.I

I have never objected to the NBA putting money into the WNBA. I agree with the rationale you presented and I think Silver has said something similar. The money they put into the league is well spent.

closetohumping · June 9

6 minutes ago, Deej said:

Sure, but if you can't pay for yourself completely, no matter the amount, maybe you should just shut it down.

Why would i shut it down if you’re subsidizing me? What’s my alternative?

Deej · June 9

9 minutes ago, UpperWestside said:

The money they put into the league is well spent

Deej · June 9

When women don't come out in numbers for your games...

UpperWestside · June 9

30 minutes ago, Deej said:

It is. Silver has said it has taken longer than they originally envisioned, but yes when the commissioner of the NBA feels the money is well spent then I believe that says the money is being put to good use. A year of whatever it is that Westbrook currently is could fund four years worth of the money required from the NBA.

I would rather see money spent on things that are positive instead of 200 million handed to a guy who cannot stay out of trouble like Ja Morant. Again this is all chump change to the NBA.

Deej · June 9

8 minutes ago, UpperWestside said:

but yes when the commissioner of the NBA feels the money is well spent

What else is he gonna say without being vilified?

UpperWestside · June 9

If the league is meaningless to so many people then a negative comment shouldn’t mean that much, even coming from Silver.

Zeus · June 9

I don’t understand the WNBA because of the smaller ball and same size rim.

I honestly think people like Clark because she plays like Steph Curry it’s just different from everything else the girls have brought and it’s fun to watch.

Skill is more fun to watch then toughness, especially when the game is below the rim.

cool to know the wnba still exists I guess, haven’t heard anything about it since Sherryl Swoops and the Comets kicked ass then left town or dissolved or whatever.

LTtxfan · June 9

Nice to see questions on why Taurasi is on Team USA instead of Arike Ogunbowale...

Caitlin Clark's Olympics snub depends on what Team USA is supposed to represent

Opinion by Mitchell Northam 23h ago

Quote

It’s another Saturday in the WNBA season, and once again the collective discourse has been swallowed up by Caitlin Clark and things that mostly have nothing to do with actual basketball being played.

News broke early Saturday morning that Clark was left off Team USA’s women’s basketball squad for the Olympics this summer in Paris. Debate ensued on social media and the commentary will surely carry into Monday when the talking heads at ESPN get back in their chairs to embrace debate. All we can hope for is that the rhetoric isn’t as exhausting as it was a week ago, when highly-paid men with big platforms lost their collective minds over Clark being fouled hard.

This is far from the most outrageous snub in the history of USA women’s basketball. Look up what happened to Candace Parker in 2016.

There are arguments good and bad to be made for whether Clark should or shouldn’t be on the Olympic team. Ultimately, all of them come down to what you believe is the purpose of Team USA.

Is it for the Americans to show off their dominance in an arena of competition and win every game by as many points possible?

Or is it to grow the game of women’s basketball?

If the goal of Team USA is to bulldoze their way to an eighth consecutive gold medal and obliterate every opponent in their path, then no, Clark should not be on this roster for the Paris Olympics.

With all due respect to the Indiana Fever rookie phenom, she is not currently one of the 12 best Americans playing in the WNBA.

Is it close? Sure. If Team USA carried a roster of 20 players, if this was all just based on skill, stats and merit, Clark would be going to the Olympics. She’s 13th in the league in scoring, fourth in assists and fourth in 3-pointers made per game.

Alas, Olympic rosters for women’s basketball are limited to 12 players. And so, Clark is out.

However, if Team USA set out to assemble the best basketball-playing roster to take to France, there’s a bigger snub that fans should be upset about.

Somehow, Arike Ogunbowale isn’t on this roster. The Notre Dame product is now in her sixth season in the WNBA. In all five of those previous seasons, she’s finished the year ranked in the top five of scoring average. This year is no different, as Ogunbowale is scoring a career-high 26.6 points per game, second in the WNBA to only MVP-frontrunner A’ja Wilson. The Dallas Wings guard is also first in the league in free throws made per game (6.6), third in free throw percentage (95.2), first in steals (3.1), and 10th in assists with five dimes per game. It’s easy to make the case that Ogunbowale is playing her best basketball right now at this very moment.

Ogunbowale is certainly – right now, in the year of 2024 – a better player than Diana Taurasi, who turns 42 years old on Tuesday. And yet, Taurasi is on the Olympics team for the sixth straight time. And, objectively, Taurasi is simply no longer one of the 12 best Americans playing in the WNBA.

This is the conundrum that Team USA finds itself in. Because clearly, the selection committee was not thinking about just pure basketball when assembling this team. If they were, they would have thanked Taurasi for her time served and given one of those coveted guard spots to a player at the top of their game like Ogunbowale.

What is Taurasi on this team for? Surely not her passing as she’s averaging a career-low 1.1 assists per game this season. There are certainly better shooters in the WNBA than her – Ogunbowale chief among them. So, is she there for leadership? For chemistry? For camaraderie? Is she the team ambassador? It’s unclear.

Either the Team USA selection committee didn’t have the Jurgen Klinsmann-like guts required to cut a beloved, yet aging face of the game like Taurasi, or they are admitting that this about much more than the scoring margin as they try to capture another gold medal.

Which brings us to the second viewpoint: If you believe the purpose of Team USA is to be evangelical for the sport of women’s basketball on the world stage, then shouldn’t Caitlin Clark be on this roster?

There’s no denying that women’s basketball has experienced, and is experiencing, a tremendous amount of growth over the past year and Clark is a big reason why. The past two Final Fours and national championship games, as well as the 2024 WNBA Draft, all shattered previous viewership records. The commonality between all of them? Clark was there. Just Friday night, when Clark’s Fever played in Washington, D.C., a record-setting crowd of 20,333 fans showed up, making it the highest-attended WNBA regular-season game since 2007.

Does Clark deserve all of the credit for all of the new fans and attention that women’s basketball has garnered? No, of course not. She – along with Angel Reese, Juju Watkins, Paige Bueckers and Kamilla Cardoso – stands on the shoulders of A’Ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, who came through doors broken down by Maya Moore and Candace Parker, who had a path paved for them by the likes of Sheryl Swoopes and Cheryl Miller, and on and on and on.

But there’s no denying the impact that Clark has had on women’s basketball. More people tuned in for her pro debut than an NHL playoff game on the same night. By mid-May, the sales of Clark’s Fever jersey trailed only three NBA players. Simply put, Clark continues to reset the expectations for the audience that women’s basketball can draw.

That the decision-makers with Team USA don’t see that is a real shame. And that they aren’t going to put this generational talent on a world stage because they are reportedly concerned about the reaction Clark’s fans might have when they see her sitting on the bench is cowardice.

Team USA should be wanting to garner new fans – not coddling the ones they already have. Leaving Clark in Indiana while this squad goes to Paris accomplishes neither.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/nba/caitlin-clarks-olympics-snub-depends-on-what-team-usa-is-supposed-to-represent/ar-BB1nSDHs

d2o · June 10

This was a great game going to double OT. Some huge shots by Arika and Kahleah Copper in crunch time. Griner and Tarausi both went over 20 pts too.

Deej · June 10

Simple. Taurasi isn't threat to the other women.

d2o · June 10

LTtxfan · June 10

HaHaHaHa😂😂😂😂

d2o · June 10

d2o · June 11

ChickenSandwich · June 11

Indiana Fever have drawn 82,857 fans for their first five home games of the 2024 WNBA season at Gainbridge Fieldhouse
Attendance for 20 Fever games last season delivered a total attendance of 81,336
Seven of the nine games the Fever have played this year have been sellouts, according to The Indianapolis Star

The Fever’s average attendance this season at the 18,000-seater Gainbridge Fieldhouse is 15,564, which is the most in the league and up significantly on their average of 4,067 for the whole of 2023. Their first four home games saw a total of 65,583 fans attend and the game against the Chicago Sky, which featured another star of the 2024 WNBA draft class in Angel Reese, was another sellout of 17,274, pushing the Fever’s cumulative attendance for this season past last year’s total.

What percentage of that increase is solely due to the Fever?

Edited June 11 by ChickenSandwich

LTtxfan · June 11

SIAP...

Brink, Burdick, Howard, Van Lith make U.S. Olympic women’s 3x3 basketball team for Paris

By. Nick Zaccardi

Published June 5, 2024

Quote

Cameron Brink, Cierra Burdick, Rhyne Howard and Hailey Van Lith made the U.S. Olympic women’s 3x3 basketball team for the Paris Games.

A USA Basketball committee selected the team. The quartet will bid to give the U.S. repeat gold in the event, which made its Olympic debut in Tokyo.

Brink, Burdick and Van Lith were on the team that won the FIBA World Cup last June. Howard played with Burdick and Van Lith at a FIBA World Series event in April, placing second to a Canadian team.

Brink, the World Cup MVP, was the second pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft to the Los Angeles Sparks. The 22-year-old was an All-American at Stanford.

Burdick, 30, is the only woman with multiple 3x3 World Cup titles as part of U.S. teams in 2014 and 2023.

She played at the University of Tennessee from 2011-15, then spent parts of five seasons in the WNBA, the most recent in 2021. She spent part of the winter with a French club.

Burdick could be the last Pat Summitt-coached player to play at an Olympics. She was a freshman at Tennessee in Summitt’s last season in 2011-12.

Summitt, who died in 2016, played in the first Olympic women’s basketball tournament in 1976, taking silver with the U.S.

After that, at least one player who was coached by Summitt made all 10 Olympic women’s teams from 1980 (boycotted Moscow Games) through 2016. Then at the Tokyo Games, another Summitt pupil, Kara Lawson, was the U.S. women’s 3x3 head coach.

Howard, 24, was the 2022 WNBA Rookie of the Year and an All-Star the last two seasons for the Atlanta Dream. She was one of 14 players invited to an early April national team training camp for the 5x5 team.

Van Lith, 22, is set to become the first American man or woman to play in the Olympics during their NCAA career since 1988.

Earlier this spring, she transferred after one season at LSU to Texas Christian for her final year of college basketball. She was an All-ACC player at Louisville before that.

At the Tokyo Games, the U.S. women took gold in the 3x3 event’s Olympic debut with WNBA standouts Stefanie Dolson, Allisha Gray, Kelsey Plum and Jackie Young.

In 3x3, teams play outdoors on a half-court with a 10-minute game clock and 12-second shot clock. The first team to 21 points via one-point and two-point field goals wins, or whichever team is leading when time expires.

The U.S. head coach is Jennifer Rizzotti, though coaches are not allowed on the court during 3x3 games.

Edited June 11 by LTtxfan
messed up

Poester · June 11

On 6/6/2024 at 12:05 PM, BeardIP said:

I guess you guys aren't understanding that the hypothesis here is that what has captured mainstream attention, energy, eyeballs, dollars, interest, etc. is that Caitlin Clark is a WNBA unicorn.

I disagree with you @closetohumping in that this isn't a "color blind, I don't see color" issue. She's absolutely benefiting from being white, which I think @Panchowas insinuating as well.

I go a step further to say I think being white is only a part of the reason and there are these other reasons as well. Just being white wouldn't cut it. She's doing for WNBA what Tiger Woods did for golf when he helped to open it up to minorities and lower middle class and "democratizing it" and bringing it to mainstream America from the country clubs. She's bringing mainstream/white people (and men) to the WNBA in a similiar way.

So let's break it down:

The first step is she's fantastic at basketball. This is the foundation. She has the new exciting play that closetojumping is talking about and is excellent. She broke NCAA records and is poised to one day be a force in the WNBA and is making waves as a rookie. Of course there have been other white players who are great at basketball.

But the question becomes, why is Caitlin Clark's case different? As Pancho mentions there have been numerous other white women who were great at WNBA basketball yet didn't command the mainstream interest (and the benefits of that mainstream interest) as CC has been able to. So what is different about CC?

She's good at basketball-- table stakes and we've covered that

She's white-- appeals to a broader demographic who might not be the core demographic for the WNBA

She's not only white, but midwestern American-- she's not Italian or Argentinian or Hungarian, but corn-fed, fly-over, good U.S. of A. white girl. That appeals to folks who probably are generally not historical WNBA fans and opens up a whole new demographic (both men and women)

She's heterosexual-- Alongside the midwestern angle, this is also traditional values, family friendliness. Outside of the core demo for WNBA, this opens up a lot more eyeballs in America that are bigoted or behind in their thinking (read: aforementioned flyover midwest country).

All the above seems to be a recipe for widespread, commercial appeal which translates to brand relevancy and money.

I know you’re not Chrispy, but I laugh every time you just go along with it. Too funny.

d2o · June 14

My All-Star picks. I didnt pick anyone that made the Olympic roster since they are going to play against the all-star team.

closetohumping · June 14

Still losing money

d2o · June 16

Covri · June 16

d2o · June 16

Arike requested her name be removed from Olympic team consideration. Clears the way for CC to be next up for guard injury replacements.

Longboard Horn · June 17

What sucks about the WNBA is that they don't dunk. If they lowered the rim a little and the ladies could dunk I'd probably watch. And I am not the only person who thinks that.

DixonHur · June 18

14 hours ago, Longboard Horn said:

What sucks about the WNBA is that they don't dunk. If they lowered the rim a little and the ladies could dunk I'd probably watch. And I am not the only person who thinks that.

Or if they had a modicum of athletic ability.

I swear it's like watching the 1950's NBA.

BurntOrange&White · June 18

nm

Longboard Horn · June 18

DixonHur · June 18

3 minutes ago, Longboard Horn said:

According to his X profile, he's an ex-con, and a Trump supporter (no CR), so not sure he's the best guy to be giving out advice on character.

d2o · June 19

She should be able to get the Aces going again.

TommysTinyTowels · June 19

49 minutes ago, d2o said:

She should be able to get the Aces going again.

Becky's crew has really been struggling without her. Quite a drop-off from last year, will be interesting to see if they vastly improve with her back.

Need to get Gray in game shape before the Olympics as well.

VirginiaLonghorn · June 19

Vince McMahon is the only logical choice for WNBA commissioner.

d2o · June 19

Great game last night with the Mercury and Liberty. Teams combined for 33 3ps

Tarausi with 19/9/5

BurntOrange&White · June 19

Any update on the beautiful Cameron Brink's knee?

Pam Cummings · June 19

Mommy Brink was walking and will be fine.

Blotto · June 19

On 6/17/2024 at 5:37 AM, Longboard Horn said:

What sucks about the WNBA is that they don't dunk. If they lowered the rim a little and the ladies could dunk I'd probably watch. And I am not the only person who thinks that.

How far would they have to lower the rims so that at least 75% of the WNBA could all throw down rim rattlers. Would they be playing on 8 foot goals? 7.5 Feet?

Edited June 19 by Blotto

TommysTinyTowels · June 19

2 hours ago, BurntOrange&White said:

Any update on the beautiful Cameron Brink's knee?

"Sources tell me Cameron Brink walked out of Mohegan Sun arena with no assistance, no ice, and no visible brace (but she was wearing long pants). Hopefully that’s good news, but Curt Miller did say post game she’d be evaluated tomorrow. "

Still some concern of a possible ACL injury.

Hopefully not, she has been playing well and significantly adds to this rookie class.

TommysTinyTowels · June 19

On 6/17/2024 at 5:37 AM, Longboard Horn said:

What sucks about the WNBA is that they don't dunk. If they lowered the rim a little and the ladies could dunk I'd probably watch. And I am not the only person who thinks that.

On 6/17/2024 at 8:00 PM, DixonHur said:

Or if they had a modicum of athletic ability.

I swear it's like watching the 1950's NBA.

The women's game is played below the rim and is similar to the NBA prior to all the dunking and hyper athleticism.

Certainly not everyone's cup of tea.

I suggest you just don't watch it, but if you want to try and get into it watch Rori or Maddie on the UT women's team. You can get excited cause it's UT vs Aggie or whatever, and can watch some great players

showing off a lot of heart and some remarkable skills.

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