Five Out: The Rookie of the Year gap widens, a Sunny day for Marina Mabrey and TCU's Sedona Prince problem

The Aces feel...in trouble, Caitlin Clark is winning over her doubters and is the Olympic break evidence that the W needs a schedule fix? Our WBB column for the week of August 19, 2024.

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WNBA basketball is back and the Olympic break was good for some and bad for others. Some players came back well-rested and ready to go. Others looked a little sluggish readjusting to the speed of the game. The returning Olympians were a mixed bag in terms of their energy levels. With time, things will likely stabilize as we head into the stretch run.

But I’ll say this for the WNBA, they gave us plenty to talk about the minute the break ended so this column will touch on a lot today. Before we begin, a little honorable mention for the five. As noted by Across The Timeline, Tina Charles is closing in on some major league records. Her 22 point, 15 rebound performance against the Sun was her 100th regular season 20/10 game, the most in WNBA history. She’s 10 double-doubles away from tying Sylvia Fowles career record and needs just 10 points against Phoenix on Wednesday to pass Tina Thompson for No. 2 on the league all-time scoring list. We always want to put you on game and provide some coverage equity so if you want to be the change you want to see in WNBA world, tune in and get on the socials for Tina. She’s more than earned it.

So can you expect in your inbox this week from No Cap Space? Here’s what we got cooking for you…

Tuesday: Luxury Tax heads to Los Angeles. Former UConn star and current Sparks forward Azura Stevens joins Chauny and I. She speaks on returning from injury, her relationship with rookies Cam Brink and Rickea Jackson as well as some of her favorite memories of the UConn - Notre Dame rivalry. It’s a top three interview we’ve ever done so tap in.

Wednesday: The Legendarium returns with a profile on one of the first sport-defining buzzer beaters in NCAA women’s basketball history. Western Kentucky is a program that, for over a decade, was synonymous with stars and success. How did it begin? What happened? And can the magic captured in the 80’s and early 90’s ever be replicated again? If you want to check out our last Legendarium submission that covers Long Beach State’s legacy in women’s basketball, click here.

Thursday: Dr. Clemette Haskins, Lillie Mason, Kami Thomas and Paul Sanderford all lend their voices to The Legendarium podcast. We know these big 3,000+ word profiles may be a lot. So we compile the interviews into a podcast for you to still get the history fix you need! You can find all our podcasts here.

Friday: Las Vegas Aces forward Megan Gustafson is back stateside after an Olympic run with the Spanish national team. But during that two week period, what did the WNBA’s most famous corgi do? We went to find out how Pancake spent her vacation.

Now, as always, to the column…

1. I think I’ve seen enough: Caitlin Clark has taken the lead in the Rookie of the Year race and, if she continues like this, it’s over.

Political redistricting expert and journalist David Wasserman has a famous phrase that, especially on Election Day, he is asked to say as if he’s Bart Simpson sitting in class.

“I’ve seen enough.”

He uses it when the vote counts suggest that a race is done and a candidate has won.

Watching Caitlin Clark this week, I felt like Wasserman in November. It’s very clear that all the rookie needed was a bit of a break and a few good nights’ sleep. Her legs look fresher, she’s flying in transition and the Indiana Fever clearly took the last couple weeks and worked on their chemistry. Beyond the actual basketball, they just look genuinely happier coming in and out of huddles, interacting on the floor and online. Against the Mercury, Clark completed the Diana Taurasi — who wasn’t wrong, it should be noted! Reality came, maybe just not in the way she expected — series sweep with 29 points on 50% shooting, 10 assists and 5 rebounds. That was followed up with a 23 point, 9 assist, 5 rebound, 2 block game against Seattle on Sunday where she broke the WNBA rookie single-season assist record held by Ticha Penicheiro. She needs to average about 7 assists per game for the rest of the season to break Alyssa Thomas’ single-season record of 316.

It’s not that Angel Reese is doing anything to lose ground. She came back from the break with a pair of double-doubles and is in striking distance of a few rebounding records. Even in a loss, Reese’s 19 point, 20 rebound performance gave us flashes into her potential as a face up four. It wouldn’t surprise me, nor would I blame you, if you watched that game last night and thought ‘this race is far from over’. Reasonable minds can disagree but, at least for me, something looks different about Clark these last two games. There’s a freshness to it. An energy that you can’t describe but gives you the feeling that she’s gonna lock this award up. It’s Steph Curry-esque, genuinely. With her leading the charge, Indiana returned from the break and beat the league’s current 4 and 6 playoff seeds handily. She does have help that Reese currently does not but if you take Clark off this team they simply don’t move like this. That matters. Since the Fever’s low-point in mid-June when they were mired in losses, questions about whether or not the players liked each other and debates over Clark’s role in quieting the more toxic parts of her fanbase, the rookie guard has been on a total heater.

Since June 14th: 19.8 PPG, 10.1 APG, 6.6 RPG.

Those aren’t just Rookie of the Year numbers, they’re All-WNBA First-Team numbers. In any other year, those are MVP numbers. It just so happens that A’ja Wilson is so far ahead in that race that it won’t even be a discussion. 8 of Clark’s last 11 games have also been double-doubles in points and assists.

Anything can happen, to be sure. But if this pace continues, it’ll be among one of the greatest rookie seasons we’ve ever seen in the league. Angel Reese could be the Rookie of the Year in many other years but this might just end up being a situation of running up on a potential all-time great debut run. It happens. Ask Sylvia Fowles.

2. With Marina Mabrey bolstering the offense, the Sun are coming off ‘fraud watch’.

So it is worth noting that Marina Mabrey had a pretty rocky second game for Connecticut after an excellent debut. But even on the heels of a 4-17 shooting performance, I’m ready to begin the preparations of lifting ‘fraud watch’ off the Sun. While they’ve been one of the best teams in the eastern conference for the past few years, I’ve left every season feeling like they were the 2024 Boston Celtics; you know they’re good but even if they won a title you’d still be wondering how good they are.

Now, with Marina Mabrey in the lineup, I can finally see the vision that Sun fans have had for the last handful of years. Why now? Well, it’s pretty simple; Mabrey is the shot creator they’ve desperately needed. For the last few seasons, it’s fallen to DeWanna Bonner to get Connecticut going offensively. Alyssa Thomas can give you good production but is not a scorer first. Her season statistics this year illustrate that point pretty well (11.4 points per game, 9.1 rebounds per game, 7.8 assists per game). While Mabrey has the capability of shooting you out of matchups, she can also get hot and propel you to a win. The caveat coming out of this week is that her offensive debut was against the Dallas Wings who are arguably the worst defensive unit in the league.

But Mabrey is walking into a team where she is going to be asked to do significantly less and has teammates that have a higher floor game to game than Chicago did. It looks like she’s occupying Ty Harris’ spot in the starting lineup and the questions about how she’ll perform next to DiJonai Carrington for the rest of the year are warranted. They combined for 5-22 shooting with 6 turnovers and 8 fouls in the Sun’s loss to the Dream on Sunday. But it’s enough to keep me watching. Will they beat the Liberty with a WNBA Finals trip on the line? It remains to be seen, but at least now I’m not completely dismissing it out of hand. And that’s progress!

3. From one investigation to another to their play on the court, something is off with the Aces. Can they figure it out?

Whew, man. The vibes in Vegas are bad and a plurality of their fanbase deciding to go full ‘no one likes us we don’t care’ is certainly a choice. Let’s start with their play and move from there.

It’s too early to say that Vegas just doesn’t have another title run in them. Despite looking out-efforted by the Liberty in Michelob Ultra Arena on Saturday, the game was still within reach up until the last five minutes of the 4th quarter. They responded by cruising to a win over Los Angeles and now get the Lynx twice in a three day span. From a roster construction standpoint, it just doesn’t feel like the same team. Chelsea Gray has lost a bit of a step while Jackie Young and Kelsey Plum remain equally mercurial. Some games, they’re locked in and others you wonder what they’re doing on the floor. A’ja Wilson is A’ja Wilson and you could reasonably argue that she isn’t touching the ball enough. But after that, there just isn’t a lot here that moves me. Alysha Clark is not having a great season, Kiah Stokes is a decent defensive presence but isn’t giving you much on offense. Tiff Hayes doesn’t feel like the splash they needed from a positional perspective. When you match them up with the Liberty, you see exactly where the disparity lies: New York went out and got big, skilled wings that are good shooters and plus defenders. Is Wilson enough to drag this team to a title when their heads don’t seem to be consistently in it? Time will tell.

Now to the other stuff.

Becky Hammon deciding to get on the podium and essentially do an impression of Kim Mulkey before the Washington Post published doesn’t seem like something I would advise if I was her lawyer. It also undercuts so much of the Aces fanbases’ arguments about why their players have been, at best, tight lipped and, at worst, openly contemptuous of ex-teammate Dearica Hamby’s issue with the Vegas front office. It is important to note that a lot of the critique of A’ja, Kelsey Plum and others not speaking in support of Hamby was a bad faith effort to try and point out a perceived hypocrisy about Caitlin Clark’s similarly perceived tacit acceptance of the more toxic parts of her fanbase. To be clear, they aren’t the same. But small things have added up in the last year or two that don’t exactly lead one to draw the best conclusions about where Aces players stand on the whole thing. Take the original two game suspension of Hammon at the conclusion of the WNBA’s investigation. Players got up and offered full throated support of their coach. Now, do I expect them to go out there and say ‘no, I back Dearica more? This is an activist league etc etc”? Not at all. But in the same way I don’t expect them to comment on an active investigation, those players all made a clear choice to go out of their way to defend Hammon too. Kelsey Plum, at some point, probably needs to answer for her tweet at the end of the WNBA Finals.

Nevermind the choice of framing these things as though they were intentionally done to try and deter an Aces championship run. Every athlete creates adversity to drive them. We know this. But what I can’t get by are the final two pieces. “Arrested” refers to ex-teammate Riquana Williams, who was arrested in July of 2023 after facing five felony charges including domestic battery by strangulation, coercion by force and assault with a weapon. While the charges were dropped, it certainly looks odd when a player being accused by her own wife of domestic abuse is considered an adversity piece on the road to a title. This isn’t to try and draw a conclusion about Plum’s values as a person or to ask you to do so.

But it is meant to illustrate that there is a pattern here with the Aces about a disregard or worse, disdain, for anything that gets in the way of winning. Which brings us to Becky Hammon.

It’s been hard to shake the feeling as of late that the Aces head coach has benefitted generously from the image of her mentor, San Antonio Spurs head coach Gregg Popovich. Pop is often seen as a gruff and occasionally cantankerous individual who makes up for it by having popular political and moral positions that show he actually has a heart of gold. At times, it feels as though fans have projected that onto Hammon when in reality she’s her own person with her own values and viewpoints. Her saying in the postgame press conference Sunday that Hamby received ‘over the top care’ felt revealing in that over the top reads as ‘more than what you deserve’. Clearly the lawsuit, in some way, has struck a nerve with her and the organization at large to the point that Hammon felt she needed to go out there and basically say she thought her former player was never bullied at all.

Hamby’s case brings up a multifaceted discussion about pregnancy in women’s sports and how tenuous that support actually is and can be as well as WNBA contract constraints and how they lead to potential ethical gray areas. Ultimately, I don’t know who is right and who might win the suit. But, for me, the whole issue boils down to this: Dearica Hamby is a woman who feels that she was unsupported, targeted and retaliated against by her former organization. For the response to be anything other than silence or an acknowledgement of a baseline level of hurt feels like an admission that, on some level, the accusations hit close to home. In these types of situations, all your choices matter and it feels like each one the Aces have made points in the direction of a belief that the ends justify the means, no matter what the cost. The WNBA players and their union don’t have to be activists but in a league run by and for women, I would hope they’d be willing to protect and rally around one of their own even if it means upsetting a few others.

4. Is this Olympic break evidence that the WNBA needs to fix its’ annual competitive calendar?

It’s hard to draw a full conclusion just yet because every player in the league has had a different experience coming back from the long break. Some, like Caitlin Clark, have clearly benefitted from the time off. Others look either sluggish or not up to speed yet. To me, some of the biggest takeaways have been increased chemistry among teams that weren’t heavily impacted by the Olympics and some better legs. Play has looked a bit sloppy across the board but I chalk that up to getting back into the speed of the W after nearly three weeks off.

But it does bring up an interesting discussion about whether or not we should push back the WNBA calendar. The reason they haven’t in the past is pretty simple: they don’t want to get swallowed up in the coverage maw that is football — primarily the NFL — season. The WNBA playoffs already start on September 22nd while the last possible Finals date this year is October 20th. If you were to push the calendar back, say, three weeks you’re bumping up against the women’s college basketball season and some football games that carry conference title implications. I don’t entirely blame them for wanting to try and hold some of the interest before we all pay attention to the pigskin and college hoops.

At the same time, it feels like the W is past that. Even with the NBA Finals happening, Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese (for the right and wrong reasons) dominated the coverage cycle. With Paige Bueckers, JuJu Watkins and Milaysia Fulwiley coming in the next few years, it feels like that attention won’t go away.

Currently, a player conceivably finishes the Final Four in early April, declares for the WNBA Draft within 48 hours, is selected two weeks later and two weeks after that is in training camp. That run-up has always been entirely too quick and it makes sense why players — even generational ones — have a tough first few weeks before they get their feet under them. With more attention and a higher quality of play coming into the league (these new kids are raising the floor of the 144, let’s be clear), I’d like to see the W lean into its emerging status. Feel comfortable and confident in the women you have and your ability to wrestle some air time, even in November. Even just a couple weeks would help these kids breathe after the college season and that means a better product on the floor. Food for thought!

5. Sedona Prince’s situation on TikTok is messy, complicated and worrisome. What will TCU do about it?

Much like with the Aces piece of this column, I’m going to stay out of the actual nitty gritty of who I think is right and wrong. Instead, we’ll focus on the choices of the organizations and stakeholders. For those unaware, TCU and former Oregon basketball player Sedona Prince is a sensation on TikTok. Her ascent began with her calling out the NCAA for their unequal treatment of March Madness and there’s a legitimate argument that, were it not for her TikTok’s, the women’s tournament still might not be able to use the name. From there, she started to cultivate a massive audience among the LGBTQ population on the app.

In the past, there’s been messy breakups that have happened involving Prince and former partners. But the most recent set of videos, posted by another one of the basketball star’s exes, enters into different territory entirely.

I’ll admit, I’m a little out of my depth here as a cishet white guy. There are gender dynamics at play, norms within lesbian relationships that I simply am just not super familiar with. I highly recommend

Frankie de la Cretaz

and the excellent Substack

Out of Your League

, where there’s a piece titled ‘How Do We Talk About Sedona Prince?’. It’s a really illuminating dive into how these dynamics created a certain image of Prince and what happens now that that is beginning to shatter.

For my part, I’m focused on TCU head women’s basketball coach Mark Campbell and how he handles these accusations, many of which venture into the territory of domestic abuse (if not outright physical, certainly emotional and psychological). He was a part of the staff that recruited Sedona to Oregon. Head Coach Kelly Graves felt at the time that allowing her to be herself on social media was not something that he needed to reign in or tamper with. In short, he wanted her to be her. But even then, there were rumors that circulated among the Oregon beat corps (of which I was a part of from 2018-2022) about Prince’s off the court behavior, whether or not it affected the team and the nature of a torn elbow ligament she sustained in 2022 that ended her Ducks career.

I like Mark a lot. I covered him at Oregon and then again at Sacramento State. He wants to win, knows how to cultivate a healthy atmosphere with his players and is a generally sharp basketball mind. But, much like the Aces, at what point do the ends justify the means? Prince is 6’7 and one of the only true bigs on TCU’s roster this year. She was playing at an All-American level while battling injuries, was named a Lisa Leslie award finalist and was the only player in the nation to average at least 20 points per game, 10 rebounds per game and 3 blocks per game last year.

None of that matters if there is truth to these allegations. Currently, there are others that have corroborated the series of events and over 150,000 people have signed an online petition calling for Prince’s removal from Horned Frogs basketball. For her part, Prince went on social media and denounced the personal attacks, said the stories had false narratives, were inaccurate and that she would not be speaking on the matter further.

It’s a hard situation for Coach Campbell to be in. There are no charges, there is no legal cover and most of what is happening is being litigated on TikTok. But even with that there is a dynamic of empowerment to consider. In circling the wagons around a potentially problematic person, are you, in turn, making them feel invincible? At the same time, if you’re a coach that believes in a kid you’ve known for years and their capacity to change do you leave them to their own devices when they might need you more than ever? It’s a worthwhile question on both ends but it’s one Campbell and his staff need to tread lightly in. Collegiate sports is littered with the careers of coaching staffs that thought rehabilitating individuals was possible, only for it to open a Pandora’s box of controversy. Regardless, I hope that those affected by Prince — as well as Prince herself — get the help they need.