With the season well underway and the trade deadline having just passed, they look ahead at what is to come for teams across the league by breaking them down into three specific tiers.
The first group, as Cruse and Shafer discuss, are the teams with the “brightest future” and a “defined direction.” From star power to the building blocks set in place, they look at the No. 1 ranked Minnesota Lynx, No. 5 Indiana Fever, No. 7 Seattle Storm, No. 10 Washington Mystics and the No. 2 ranked New York Liberty, specifically, as well as the team at the top of their tier – Phoenix – who is ranked at No. 4 in the league standings.
“The front office showed that they can win on the margins in this last off season, picking up Monique Akoa Makani, Lexi Held, getting Kitija Laksa to show up and just getting players that have been on the fringes of WNBA conversation and turning them into real, solid WNBA role players, is a huge win,” says Shafer. “And if they can consistently do that and find ways to turn assets into star players. I see no reason that Phoenix shouldn’t be one of the top franchises for the next half a decade or so.”
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In the middle tier, they evaluate teams such as Atlanta, Golden State and LA and Vegas, as well as how teams, like Chicago, might be in a tier entirely of their own.
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