For reference, since this notebook comes out over the weekend, I define “this week” as the prior Sunday through Friday night, and it reflects games through Friday night.
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Tankathon check-in
We’re about a fifth of the way into the season, and the standings are starting to stabilize. That means it’s time for everyone’s favorite breakdown (chart vaguely organized by rightmost column):
| Team | Games back in lottery | Games back of No. 8 seed | Strength of schedule remaining (out of 13) | Likely finish |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dallas Wings | — | 2.5 | 7 | Top lottery odds |
| Golden State Valkyries | 1.5 | 0.5 | 10th-strongest (fourth-easiest) | No. 2 or No. 3 lottery odds |
| Chicago Sky | 6.5 | — | 6 | No. 2 or No. 3 lottery odds |
| Connecticut Sun | 20.5 | 1 | 11 | Worst lottery odds |
| Los Angeles Sparks | 1 | 0.5 | 3 | No. 8 seed or No. 4 lottery odds |
| Washington Mystics | 7 | 0.5 | 13 | No. 8 seed or No. 4 lottery odds |
Atlanta Dream
Sometimes players get away with travels that were close calls. And then there’s what Brittney Griner got free throws out of last night.
That’s three extremely distinct steps after the gather, and they occur before the illegal contact. I really do not know how the referee missed that.
The Next’s Lincoln Shafer raised the question of whether Griner actually dribbled at the free-throw line but the sightline was blocked by her body. But the very audible sound of the ball hitting the hardwood on her two dribbles is absent on her last three or four steps.
On another note, Naz Hillmon has now hit a 3-pointer in four straight games, including two of them on Friday. It’s something to monitor.
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Dallas Wings
There’s a lot going wrong in Dallas — not that you need me to tell you that. You can’t go 1-8 solely on bad luck. The coaching has been terrible, the stars have been wildly inconsistent, and the role players have all gotten benched at one point or another.
I’ll get through all that eventually, bit by bit. Let’s start with the most glaring issue: Teaira McCowan has sort of given up on trying.
McCowan was never the most skilled big in the league, but in her good years in Dallas (namely, 2022-23), she at least gave consistent effort. That was enough to be a positive contributor to complement stars Satou Sabally and Arike Ogunbowale. McCowan was a key part of what was the third-best offense in the WNBA in 2023, per WNBA Advanced Stats.
Since then, things … have regressed. McCowan isn’t making contact on almost any of her screens, is taking shots outside of her wheelhouse and isn’t putting the same level into her play in the post. She has basically spent all of this season flat-footed and ball-watching, getting blown-by in drop, and letting her assignment slip by her in the paint. She’s failing to rotate or help on ball screens, and she’s not communicating her intentions or calling out those screens to her teammates.
At best, she often seems to be going through the motions.
McCowan’s on-off numbers don’t look particularly bad yet, but that’s mostly because the Wings’ frontcourt outside of Luisa Geiselsöder has been a disappointment. Both McCowan and NaLyssa Smith have gotten benched for games at a time, and Myisha Hines-Allen received that dishonor on Friday.
Indiana Fever
The Fever lost two games because Kelly Krauskopf, their president of basketball and business, didn’t think deeply enough about what she needed in a backup point guard.
Barring a trade, Indiana didn’t have many good options this past winter for backup point guards. But it handed Sydney Colson an above-minimum contract to be the backup point guard and did not bring in any competition in camp. The team then entered the regular season with Colson and Lexie Hull as the only backups who were true guards, despite having three backup centers.
The issue there, besides carrying an unnecessary amount of borderline-WNBA-caliber veterans at the five, is locking in Colson as the lone backup ball-handler. Not that Colson isn’t still a decent WNBA player, but Krauskopf decided that Colson was the best fit and never tested out that theory before locking the Fever into it.
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Compare that approach to Phoenix, where general manager Nick U’Ren brought in eight guards on training camp contracts to figure out which two or three were the best fits with Sabally and Alyssa Thomas.
Indiana signed Aari McDonald to a hardship contract this week to function as Colson’s backup. As Tuesday’s game against the Washington Mystics showed, the stylistic difference between the two makes a notable impact on how the team plays with them. Colson is a solid ball-mover but is much slower and methodical, whereas McDonald is fast as hell and gets into spaces and downhill.
This is a Fever team built to put defenses in rotation and find the open player to attack a close-out or a switch. For as solidly as Colson played on Tuesday, she does not create the quick pressure that McDonald does, which slows down the offense. This is something Krauskopf could have tested out in the preseason with different ball-handlers assuming those backup minutes, which probably would have saved the team losses to Washington and Connecticut earlier this season.
Las Vegas Aces
Jewell Loyd should consider not touching the ball inside the arc. And I don’t mean that in an exaggerated “she should mostly take 3-pointers” way. Loyd is shooting 15.4% from 2-point range this year, and the misses haven’t been particularly close. Her hang time and stability have clearly taken a step back from what they had been, and she’s bricking takes that should be her money shots.
Before this season, per Sports Reference, Loyd’s worst 2-point accuracy over a six-game span was 19.0%, back in 2022 when she was with the Seattle Storm. Four of her five such spans below 30% came from a prolonged cold streak in 2022. Her struggles over that stretch were endemic to Seattle’s struggle to find an offensive rhythm.
But the Las Vegas Aces aren’t exactly struggling to score around Loyd, their marquee offseason acquisition. They’ve got a perfectly average offensive rating, per PBP Stats, including 106.0 points per possession when Loyd is on the court. Her 41.7% shooting from three, the highest of her career, is part of that.
All of this was to be expected to a certain extent, since Loyd’s scoring ability was slowing down even before Seattle asked her to be one of the highest-usage players in the league. But moving someone off the ball almost always improves their 3-point shooting.
If Loyd is willing to be a three-and-D player at this point in her career, the Aces may have an elite role player (notwithstanding the signs of defensive regression this season). But they certainly miss the rim pressure of Kelsey Plum, who went to Los Angeles as part of the same trade that brought Loyd to Las Vegas.
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