Five Out: Curt Miller's new career path, Stanford back? And Ashlyn Watkins return to South Carolina...
The carousel continues to turn in the WNBA while the NCAA women's basketball season is officially in full swing. Andrew's thoughts on the world of women's hoops for November 10, 2024.
It feels nice to be back in the swing of women’s college basketball. There’s always at least one or two good/interesting games on each night and it helps drown out some of the outside noise in the world right now. Does it mean sports lets you avoid the crazy things happening in our world? Not entirely. But, at the very least, it gives you a couple hours to unwind and see folks focused on something else for a change. We got some good content for you this week so here’s what you can expect on NCS.
Monday: In addition to Five Out,
has a great piece coming about how Charlotte is ready for a WNBA franchise and the spotlight as a big time women’s basketball market.Tuesday: We’ll have our weekly watch guide for all the midweek games on Tuesday morning.
Wednesday: The Legendarium installment on Queens College will finally be dropping. I know it’s coming a week later than planned but we had to wait to make sure some very important alums got to contribute to the story.
Thursday: We got a couple feature ideas cooking so you can expect one in your inbox. The specifics are still TBD so stay tuned!
Friday: The weekend watch guide drops to give you an idea of what to tune in for amid the great matchups between Friday and Monday.
Weekend: Your boy is turning 30 and heading into the mountains of Colorado. Keep an eye on Tyler’s socials and the No Cap Space WBB accounts for any postgames or added content.
Now…onto the column!
Curt Miller is now a General Manager for the Dallas Wings. What can we expect?
It’s never too late for a career change, eh? Curt Miller was announced as the new Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Dallas Wings, effectively moving him from the sidelines to the front office permanently. Could he ever coach again? Sure. But I have a feeling this is going to be a Mike Thibault situation where he just stays on that side of the operation. I, for one, am extremely curious in how much of his tendencies as a coach bleed into his executive leadership. Miller has been known as a good tactician but one that relies and prioritizes established players to the detriment of rookies.
He has an expansion draft to contend with, a potential number one overall pick, plus possible roster upheaval in free agency. It’s important to note that Miller was the General Manager of the Connecticut Sun for six of his seven seasons there. He orchestrated the 2020 trade that brought DeWanna Bonner to Uncasville, managed to re-sign Jonquel Jones and drafted Brionna Jones. He also engineered the trades of Chiney Ogwumike to the Sparks, Jonquel Jones to the Liberty and Jasmine Thomas to the Sparks. That netted picks, Ty Harris, Olivia Nelson-Ododa and Rebecca Allen among other things. His drafting his been suspect in the past, with Jones and DiJonai Carrington aging the best. But that seems to point to the fact that he’s a good GM to try and build a team into one that has a playoff floor and is veteran heavy. The Wings, who need to maximize a window with Arike Ogunbowale on a max contract, are going to need to reload and not rebuild. Miller feels like a good fit for that. The first test will be if he can ace a coaching hire.
Stanford might be really…really good.
Turning to college basketball, Tara Vanderveer was honored with her name on the Maples Pavilion court. It was a fitting reward for one of the most illustrious careers in the sports’ history. The Cardinal then went out and beat the hell out of Gonzaga. Count me among the many that were skeptical that Stanford would be a turnkey operation. No Cam Brink? No Kiki Iriafen? No real juice at the guard spots? No problem.
The Cardinal are 3-0 and shooting at one of the most ridiculous three point clips I’ve ever seen. Through their first few games, they’re shooting 45-78 which comes out to an absolutely absurd 57% percent as a team from beyond the arc. Jzaniya Harriel looks like a completely different player after a couple years buried on the bench under Tara Vanderveer. Nunu Agara is living up to her first star billing. Chloe Clardy is playing our of her mind off the bench and that’s before you get to Santa Clara transfer Tess Heal, who can score on all three levels for when they start to cool down. Defensively, there’s still some work to do. But to absolutely stomp Washington State and Gonzaga like this out of the gate feels noteworthy. We’ll get another early data point against Indiana but it looks like Kate Paye has something cooking in Maples for the first time since the post-title 2021 season. Stay tuned!
The first coaching carousel move might be at Missouri…
Robin Pingeton might not make it to the end of the season. The Tigers lost to Vermont on the road to open the year and on Sunday fell to Norfolk State. It was the MEAC teams’ first win over an SEC opponent ever. That’s huge for the Spartans, who now head to No. 24 Alabama in a few days to really test themselves against a legit NCAA Tournament caliber team. But it’s a damning indictment on a Missouri program that is in the process of the bottom falling out. Pingeton has been at Missouri since 2012-2013 and, for the most part, has consistently been a middle of the road Tournament bubble type unit. But they had two 9-win seasons between 2019 and 2021 and are coming off an 11-19 year in which they went 2-14 in SEC play. These early results don’t bode well for an improvement as the conference is deeper and better than last season.
So who do you keep an eye on? Watch the developments at Grand Canyon. The Lopes lost to Mid Tenn State 57-47 over the weekend but Molly Miller is building a heck of a program down in the southwest. She’s a Drury University alum and native of Springfield, Missouri. While she wasn’t a UM kid growing up (she was a ball girl for Missouri State during the Jackie Stiles years, as a matter of fact), the call of home is always strong. That, and the money and competition the SEC promises. But GCU is heading to the Mountain West, which actually looks to be trending up as a mid-major even with their losses to the Pac-12. She can recruit well to Arizona and has an administration she likes working with. It doesn’t seem that she’s in a rush to leave but I’d imagine if the bottom falls out in Columbia, then they might give her a call to see if she’d have interest. Worth keeping an eye on, along with a bunch of other candidates we can get into at a later time.
Oregon might have found something again…
The unlikely duo of Kelly and Kelly looks like it might be the key to a resurgence in Eugene. I’ll admit, I thought Oregon was in some pretty dire straights after last year. There just didn’t seem to be a ton of energy around the program that trended towards getting things back on track. But credit to Kelly Graves for finding his kind of player in the portal and utilizing it to its full extent this year. I’ll always tell you when there’s egg on my face and through three games this year, KG has silenced this doubter for the time being.
Peyton Scott’s influence as a floor general can’t be overstated and it does make you wonder the extent to which her injury was a root of things going so sideways last year. Deja Kelly has been a total revelation and even seems to have expanded her game over the summer. If you haven’t heard the name Alexis Whitfield, now is a good time to get educated. A Big West transfer, she was one of the underrated best finds in the portal. Does it mean the Ducks are back to what they were pre-COVID? That remains to be seen. But at the very least the line is no longer trending down and the win over No. 12 Baylor late Sunday night was a huge proof of concept.
On Ashlyn Watkins, Dawn Staley, healthy skepticism and greater empathy…
I’ll start by saying this. If you want a place to relitigate Ashlyn Watkins charges or what you think happened that night, this isn’t the place for it. I’ve seen absolutely everything across a variety of social media channels from the moment the news broke that the South Carolina forward was in legal trouble. The reality is, there’s a small handful of people who actually know what happened that night and exactly how it went down. The list of those people do not include the Columbia Police Department, Dawn Staley, your friend on the message boards or someone with “sources” on Twitter. What’s been frustrating, as a neutral observer, is watching everyone on each side pretend to know the facts to push an agenda towards the conclusion they want. What is indisputable is this: there is the side of Watkins, the side of the other party, and the truth that likely rests somewhere in the middle. This isn’t the Truman Show. We don’t have access to it in full. To even get bogged down in that type of discourse is stupid and futile in the first place.
There were accusations made (that Watkins had hit the other party) that were recanted. There are laws within the state of South Carolina that appear to be intentionally vague and leave a lot of room for interpretation. Within relationships there are patterns of behavior within domestic disputes. In sports, there are coaches that believe in second chances. There are also coaches that believe in the cost-benefit of what is palatable in the name of winning. What makes this case so difficult and messy to adjudicate in the public forum is that each of these components are already complex. Together? It’s almost impossible to untangle properly.
So why even write about it? Because I did feel a sense of unease from the South Carolina faithful, from the moment it was announced the charges were dropped to her returning to the floor to uproarious applause. On the one hand, it’s an understandable impulse to have. This is a person that, regardless of the version of events you believe, made a mistake. The degree and forgivability of that mistake is dependent on each person and what they think transpired. In some ways, showing support to someone who took accountability (or was forced to face it, at the very least) and hoping that they make better choices in life is a completely valid perspective to have. I’d like to believe a lot of people were cheering because of that.
But the unease I feel is because of how quickly fans defaulted to a very sports-minded and amoral position: it’s good she’s back because now we’re better on the floor and have a better chance to win. For a fanbase that rightfully should get a lot of credit in driving positive discourse about coverage equity, gaps in marketability and where women’s basketball can (and should) do better, it showed one unfortunate truth: for all of those things, they’re still fans and are subject to the same moral compromises every other person is liable to make. That’s not to pick on ‘FAMS’ here, by any means. It’s more to point out that moral flexibility exists within all of us when it comes to our own backyard and either you maintain your consistency in spite of it maybe harming your teams prospects or you level with the fact that no fanbase truly occupies a moral high ground. Imagine if this was, say, a Kim Mulkey coached LSU team dealing with this. Would there still be a call for cooler heads and a happiness when the player returned to the floor after the charges were found non-violent and subsequently dropped? I doubt it. Conversely, would we be getting this moral consternation from other fanbases if it was their own team? We wouldn’t. What makes it all unique in Columbia is that the Gamecocks have a coach that has built a credible cachet because of her humanity and moral/ethical positions. So naturally, the idea is that if Coach Staley sees it a certain way, then we all have a duty to do so as well.
I want to note that I think Coach Staley has handled this perfectly. I wrote, way back in 2015 for my college newspaper, that the default for teams in the midst of DV or sexual assault allegations should be a suspension until a resolution of the matter, regardless of how real or false the charge was. The argument is that to play professional sports is a privilege, not a right, and is contingent on upholding a standard of play, morals and ethics. If you fall short in any of those things, that privilege is liable to be pulled. The worst that happens is you lose time. False charges that don’t go to court don’t typically hang over people in the public sphere anymore. Coach Staley seems to exist within that same train of thought and I commend her for that. I also commend her for her belief in defending her player given the facts she’s been presented surrounding the case. If she believes this is truly a fixable mistake to which her player has been accountable, remorseful and motivated to be better who am I to judge?
Here’s my only word of caution to fans and maybe to Coach Staley herself (though I doubt she reads this column, of all things): the road to hell is paved with good intentions. This particular case seemed so convoluted and messy in a bunch of different ways that it’s hard to know where the belief in second chances ends and the moral compromise in the pursuit of championships begins. The latter, in this case, may not exist at all. But that doesn’t mean other situations might not pop up in the future where the lines start off blurry but become more defined as time goes on. Second chances within sports sometimes create cultures of looking the other way, as we’ve seen time and time again in college football, for instance. Fans defend their players virtue and their coaches, even as the castle walls come crumbling down around them all. While Coach Staley has largely managed to lead with humanity and handle things the right way, healthy skepticism of these types of situations isn’t inherently a bad thing. At the end of the day, we’re still talking about an immensely powerful figure in Columbia who isn’t infallible despite people’s belief that she always takes the right step. She did here. But I don’t think that means everyone who questioned this case has to apologize or be admonished for feeling uneasy about how quickly some fans rushed to defend their player and program.
At the end of the day, I believe in having empathy for both people involved. It sounds like a case and scenario where there were no winners but you hope everyone learns, heals and becomes a better person. Sometimes, not every situation is made equal and it feels like we’ve settled into a culture of moral absolutism within women’s basketball which, when you separate all the layers, really boils down to basic fandom that your program is on a pedestal above everyone else’s. That’s where my unease comes from. To question these things is to be a true advocate for potential victims. It doesn’t mean circumstances can’t change. But the minute we start to ascribe infallibility to our favorites is the day they become liable to let us down.