Five Out: The A'ja Wilson coverage problem, Sabrina Ionescu's star turn and what is happening in Phoenix?

The double-double streak is done, why W fans have to expand their definition of "media coverage" and more. Andrew's thoughts on women's hoops for the week of July 15th, 2024.

It’s summer break in the WNBA. After Wednesday, we hit the All-Star break and then a chunk of the league heads to Paris for the 2024 Olympics. Wednesday will be the last slate of games until August 15th. So if you want to take a vacation, now is the time to do so. Luckily for you basketball fans, Five Out is here through it all. It’s a column about the whole of women’s hoops, after all.

What you can expect (or what we’re at least going to try) is to get into the features game a little bit. With ASG and the Olympics allowing for about two and a half weeks off for players and teams, it’s a good opportunity to try and grab some interviews for new pieces of content for you to enjoy. This week, we’ve got some solid pieces on deck. Here’s a preview of what’s ahead.

• West Virginia star and reigning Big 12 Defensive Player of the Year JJ Quinerly joins us for Luxury Tax. She discusses the multiple coaching changes in Morgantown, the one NIL deal she’d want above all others and the infamous Mark Kellogg pre-NCAA Tournament speech about Caitlin Clark. You’ll be able to find that on Youtube, here on Substack and in podcast form.

• We’ve also got an Olympic preview dropping on Wednesday, highlighting some of the teams that can give Team USA a run and rating their threat level to the red, white and blue’s chase for a gold medal on a 10 point scale.

• In a couple weeks, the next edition of The Legendarium comes out. If you missed our first installment, examining the governance change from the AIAW to the NCAA through the lens of the 1982 Rutgers women’s basketball team, check it out here.

Now to the column…

1. Don’t let the normalization of A’ja Wilson’s box scores lead to less coverage for an all-time great season.

Another week, another set of ridiculous A’ja Wilson stat lines.

Behold…

vs. Seattle (Wednesday, July 10) : 24 points, 20 rebounds, 38.9 FG%, 4 blocks

vs. Atlanta (Friday, July 12) : 33 points, 18 rebounds, 56.5 FG%, 5 blocks

vs. Washington (Sunday, July 14) : 28 points, 17 rebounds, 63.2 FG%, 2 blocks

It’s something we’ve become pretty accustomed to this season. A’ja being A’ja essentially means that she’s being more dominant than any other player we’ve seen in WNBA history. She’s a machine. Utterly consistent night in and night out.

But here’s where we need to do better.

We see this happen all the time in sports. Whether it’s Lebron James, Serena Williams or Patrick Mahomes, we do become somewhat inured to greatness. It’s just there and eventually the novelty wears off. First Take won’t talk about it if there’s more juice to be wring out of the fruit that is Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese’s popularity. That’s not covering the game properly. Statistically, Wilson stands to have the single most dominant season in WNBA history. Her PER sits at 35.89, higher than Lauren Jackson’s 2006 and 2007 seasons. It’s better than Cynthia Cooper, Sheryl Swoopes, Elena Delle Donne and Wilson herself, just last year.

No one is touching her in 2024 and the MVP race feels like all but a formality at this point.

To be clear, coverage doesn’t start and stop with ESPN or First Take. It feels often like when people want mainstream discussion, they don’t care if it’s seen here or in HerHoopStats or The Athletic. They want it on the debate shows and talk radio. I get that. Those shows move the needle and generate a bulk of the conversation within sports culture. At the same time, there is something to be said about the idea that those shows are allowing the single most dominant season the league has ever seen to become something of a footnote behind the rookie class. But while Lebron fatigue exists because he is always talked about, even if the MVP voters are looking for the next best thing, Wilson continues to be relegated to coverage essentially boiled down to “here, damn!”. It is a business and there is clearly some type of metric showing that Wilson isn’t moving the dial the way Reese or Clark are. But content is a chicken or egg. We are not beholden to our audience at all times. If you continue to put something or someone on TV viewers can be conditioned to understand its’ importance (the WNBA itself is a literal example of this). I’m not saying Wilson needs to be shoved down people’s throats but, at the very least, the basketball portion can’t be ignored. But maybe, we also need to boost that kind of content elsewhere. It’s a problem that she isn’t getting the 2011 Lebron treatment (when he was arguably at the peak of his powers) and while I don’t expect the debate shows to be the best at alleviating that issue, I just hope fans don’t take cues from them and lose sight of the greatness we are watching.

2. Sabrina Ionescu has officially made the turn into WNBA Star.

Wilson is the prohibitive MVP candidate so the voting will look kind of funny this year. But take A’ja out of the picture and the race for second becomes a fun little exercise. In the last few weeks, a question has grown from a whisper to a legit discussion: “should Sabrina Ionescu be in the MVP conversation?”

Not as a winner, no. But as top three vote getter? It’s not far fetched.

A few weeks ago, I opined if the Liberty were able to be a WNBA title contender with Ionescu taking the majority of the touches. For years, I’ve been of the belief that while she might not be the dominant force she was in college, she still had plenty of star potential in this league. I’m curious to see the extent to which she can take a team to the promised land as the de facto number one on a team without two MVP’s but it’s clear that she can lead *this* team in that role.

In the last five games, Ionescu has averaged 21.8 points, 4.8 assists and 4.4 rebounds. That’s with five below average efforts from three point range. So far this season, she sits at 19.4 PPG, 6.2 APG and 4.4 RPG. While MVP voting has trended towards bigs for about a decade now, those numbers put her in a class with Kelsey Plum in 2022 (3rd in MVP voting) and Diana Taurasi in 2009 (MVP).

There is something to be said for year four being the leap season for guards (more on this in a later feature) generally but Sabrina has clearly found her footing in the league. While her three point shooting hasn’t been as crisp, she’s become a much better scorer on the drive and in the mid-range. Her turnover numbers in 2023 and 2024 have leveled out at 2.6 per game and while she still has some bad shooting nights, the good nights are more commonplace now. She’s a top three guard in the league on the best team in the WNBA. While there was a question of whether or not she would live up to the hype out of college (she did not, to be fair), it’s clear that Ionescu is here now. Her game, as it was constructed, needed to change and she had to get better but she has done all that and more. Is she a super star? I guess we’ll find out. But there’s no doubt now she’s beaten the role player allegations and found herself comfortably in the star ranks of this league. Sorry, Chauny!

3. The Mercury feel like they should be better than this. Why aren’t they?

It felt like, on paper, a roster built to compete this year. Brittney Griner, Diana Taurasi, Natasha Cloud coming off her best season in the league, Kahleah Copper and a defensive oriented wing in Rebecca Allen. Sophie Cunningham had established herself as an effective starter in the prior two seasons and it just appeared the Phoenix Mercury were orders of magnitude better than they were in 2023.

And yet, here they are, middling around the WNBA with a 12-11 record. Every now and then they clip an elite team and show glimpses of their prowess but the injury bug has hit them so hard one has to wonder if they just haven’t had enough time on the floor with each other. Something else seems to be amiss with this group that can’t solely be attributed to injuries though. Whether it’s by design or not, the Mercury get routinely beaten on the boards, particularly on the offensive end giving up 9.3 team rebounds per game. They’re 9th in the league in Defensive Net Rating and pretty much every opponent's offensive metric is up year over year against them. Whoever is playing the Mercury is shooting better, rebounding better, passing better, turning the ball over less, being blocked less and stolen less since 2023. And mind you, this team was very, very bad last season.

There’s a couple places you can look. Roster inconsistency due to injuries is one place. A lack of front court depth behind Brittney Griner is another. Natasha Mack has done admirably but there isn’t anyone to pair or spell her with when BG isn’t on the floor. The guard play is a mess defensively. Some of that falls on Diana Taurasi (109 Defensive Rating this yar) but there are also a lot of communication breakdowns that happen and lead to open three-pointers or an opposing big running in for an uncontested layup.

In spite of that, Kahleah Copper has had a career year and has emerged as arguably the best scoring guard in the W this season. Natasha Cloud’s distributed the ball well but also turned it over a good amount (77 total, 3rd in the WNBA). Taurasi is still an offensive force in the league and Griner’s plus/minus net is +19.5 when she’s on the floor vs. off of it. There’s plenty of time to make a push but the Mercury feel like one of the great enigmas of the league this year. I thought that BG’s return would turn Phoenix into a team like the Lynx but they are committed to confounding us all.

4. The Lynx look like a different team without Napheesa Collier and this break is coming at a perfect time.

Last week’s column concerned plantar fasciitis and why it was a tricky injury for players in all sports. Napheesa Collier spent this week out of the lineup after aggravating the foot injury three games ago. While the Lynx’s identity hasn’t changed, it’s clear they aren’t the same team without her. It’s completely understandable, for what it’s worth. Not many teams can absorb the loss of a player that was surely in the second tier (A’ja Wilson is in a tier of her own) of the MVP conversation.

While Minnesota easily dispatched the Mystics and Sparks on the back of some truly selfless basketball and deadeye three point shooting, they walked into a buzzsaw against Seattle. They were then upset by Indiana at home. Dorka Juhasz and Bridget Carleton were viewed as two players that could try and fill the stats in the aggregate but they might not fully be ready for the caliber of play Collier brought every night. Does it mean they’re cooked? No. But the matchup issues are very clearly present now.

You can be an extremely effective three point shooting team with great passing and spacing as long as Collier is on the floor. Juhasz is a very different player and doesn’t bring the degree of versatility and shooting the 27 year old does. It’s not her fault. She’s still so new to the league. That can put more stress on the shooters, which creates more variance in their shooting nights and can also have an effect on the other side of the ball. I do wonder, while you’re losing something on the defensive side, if Alissa Pili might be in line for more minutes. She is a spacer much more than Juhasz and has some of the best footwork in the league even as a rookie. The trick of it is that Collier is, statistically, the best defender in the WNBA (88 defensive net rating) and Dorka is a superior rim protector than Pili, who is already somewhat undersized as a frontcourt option.

Collier’s status for the Olympics is still up in the air but at the very least she’ll get a week off for All-Star before heading to Paris. It can go one of three ways for the Lynx. She can recuperate and come back into the season ready to go. She can also sit and the conclusion would be that the foot injury is worse than originally feared. Or she comes back, plays and reaggravates the injury. I hope, as a writer and fan of the game, that it’s door number one. The league is better when the Lynx are good and when Collier is on the floor.

5. Angel Reese’s double-double streak is over. That’s a good thing for her Rookie of the Year case.

It might be a hot take but I’m of the mindset that the streak had to come to an end and, for Angel Reese’s Rookie of The Year case, it was becoming a distraction. I’m a TV guy by trade. Still work as a news reporter for CBS News in Denver. I see a lot of coverage and content through the lens of how we do things in the broadcast industry. What you want is easily packageable content. Quick sound bites, easy snippets of information and, for the debate shows, tidy ways to distill your argument into a couple social media friendly hits.

So, with that lens in mind, the double-double streak is a really easy and ready made way to be able to make your point about an Angel Reese Rookie of the Year argument.

Only, it’s not the only argument. Nor is it even the best one.

For example, lost in the streak was Angel’s 27 point, 10 rebound performance with two three pointers made. That was a game that could’ve been hung on as not only an indicator of a player’s potential dominance but a statement of what she could be in this league. Instead, it devolved into streak talk. What most punditry started to take away towards the end was the Tina Charles foul to extend the streak and the Liberty quadruple teaming her in the paint to stop it. The hard truth is that not all double-doubles are made equal. Is a 10 and 10 all that much more impressive than a 14 and 9, for instance? In reality, there are far more stats supporting an Angel Reese case beyond a double-double.

She is, by and away, the most elite offensive rebounder in the WNBA already. She leads the league in total rebound percentage, in total offensive rebounds, offensive rebound percentage and rebounds per game.

Here’s what she needs in the final 17 games of 2024 to set WNBA single season records in her rookie year.

• 53 offensive rebounds (3.1 ORPG average)

• 128 rebounds (7.5 RPG average)

• 148 defensive rebounds (8.7 DRPG average)

Those numbers are not only attainable, they should hold substantially more weight than a 10-10 achieved in the dying embers of a game. She’s having a historically elite season on the glass and that’s what should matter. There’s three WNBA records — not just rookie records, mind you — that she is on pace to break. It’s a better argument against to use against Caitlin Clark, who is on pace to bring down the league’s assist record set by Ticha Penichiero. Trying to turn a streak into a selling point was preposterous because it put more pressure on Reese to think about and continue it than just play the game. I’ll be curious going forward if, with that pressure off, things will come a bit more naturally to her the way that it did when she first started stringing these performances together. Those were the games that were really promoting a ROTY race for the ages. It’s harder to sell on First Take but we should be better than that anyway.