WNBA Dissected 2023 Week 3: Moves explained, Marine exalted, money's exciting and more

From roster machinations to no-look passes, a jump around important and interesting topics in the WNBA this week

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What's Going On?

Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Sparks had a player return from injury and be declared fit to play for the first time this season. Their response, on the face of it, was to release Karlie Samuelson, waive Joyner Holmes, then re-sign Samuelson. If you're not the kind of person who follows WNBA transactions very carefully, you could be thoroughly forgiven for being confused by this. Even if you are that kind of person this was fairly confusing, to be honest. Having discussed what happened with some sources, allow me to break it down for you.

As I've mentioned several times in multiple articles and tweets, the WNBA quietly added a new rule this year, allowing teams to keep a replacement for players who are out due to pregnancy or giving birth. Teams didn't have to waive players in training camp and then sign them afterwards as replacements but could just keep the extra player at the end of camp. They did, however, have to designate a specific player as the replacement. That player would then have to be the one released when the pregnant player returned - or even if the team wanted to make other roster moves.

In LA, Layshia Clarendon was the designated pregnancy replacement player (why they chose Clarendon isn't entirely clear, given she started every game in preseason, and every game since). Karlie Samuelson was on a hardship contract, created due to Jasmine Thomas and Azurá Stevens being out due to injury, dropping the team below 10 available healthy players. So when Stevens came back, Samuelson had to be released. So far, so relatively simple. However, the Sparks wanted to keep Samuelson, given how well she's played so far this season. The League, in their wisdom, decided to allow a one-time switch of the designated pregnancy replacement player. A new addendum to the new rule, just to keep us on our toes. So LA were able to waive Holmes, shift Clarendon to a regular contract designation, and re-sign Samuelson as the new designated replacement. So Karlie is now officially the replacement for Katie Lou Samuelson. If Katie Lou were to return from making Karlie an aunt at some point this season, Karlie would have to be released. However, there doesn't seem to be much likelihood of that happening, so in this instance a 'Rest-of-Season' contract may well be exactly that.

Just in case another team wants to do something similar, it’s important to keep in mind a couple of extra notes on changing the designated replacement player. Teams won't be allowed to switch after the contract guarantee point at midseason (July 14 this year), and the player being moved to a regular contract can't be traded for a month after the switch (not that in-season trades are remotely likely in this league given current cap situations). Also as another side note, players signed via hardship exceptions usually receive 75% of the regular scale of minimum salaries. The pregnancy replacement players are being treated somewhat differently, receiving the full 100%. However, if a team simply wants to release the designated pregnancy replacement player and sign someone else in that spot, they can do that. Same as with a regular unprotected contract.

Before all this happened in Los Angeles, I was only expecting to have to explain a much simpler roster situation in Atlanta. They waived Lorela Cubaj this week, which was something of a surprise to many fans because she'd had her best game in a Dream uniform the night before against Las Vegas. The reason for the cut was that Cubaj is in Italy's squad for EuroBasket Women, which starts in a week. The Dream could've temporarily suspended her, as they've already done with France's Iliana Rupert, and as we've seen with Bernadett Határ in Indiana, and the departing Teaira McCowan and Kristine Anigwe. However, when you temporarily suspend a player, you continue to carry their salary number on your cap. So outside of potential hardship exceptions if they dropped below 10 available players, the Dream wouldn't have been able to replace Cubaj. Instead, they chose to waive her, which gives up her rights but removes her from their cap sheet (apart from the salary already paid to her over the first couple of weeks of the season). That left open both the roster spot and the cap space to replace Cubaj with Taylor Mikesell. Given that the Dream announced a day or two later that Aari McDonald was out for several weeks with a torn labrum - their second injured point guard, alongside Danielle Robinson - there may still be more moves to come from Atlanta in the near future. But that's what's happened so far.

Chicago have been scrambling to cover for some of their own injury issues so far this season, which seem to keep occurring in the same area. Astou Ndour and Li Yueru were both ruled out before the season even began, Ruthy Hebard is still recovering from giving birth, and then injuries to Isabelle Harrison and Morgan Bertsch have depleted them yet further in the post, even before Anigwe left for Europe. According to James Wade, the Sky will be signing Australian forward Anneli Maley via hardship at some point this week to help out, but even she serves to illustrate how crowded the women's basketball calendar is and how difficult it can be to please everybody. Maley was in Vienna playing in the 3x3 World Cup last weekend, which may well be why she is yet to join the Sky (at time of writing). She was also named in Australia's initial extended squad for the Asia Cup, which starts in less than three weeks. The Opals left out all of their WNBA players from that squad, so if Maley has a genuine WNBA opportunity maybe they'll pick a final 12 that doesn't include her, but she's racking up the air miles either way. The WNBA may want players to 'prioritize' their league, but there's still a lot of other basketball being played around the world. It's not always easy to choose, even if you understand the rules.

Worth Waiting For

Some late arrivals are already illustrating exactly why their teams were willing to wait:

Those are Marine Johannès's first four assists of the season, plus a ridiculous no-look I threw in at the end where Nyara Sabally missed the shot. Every one of them was one-handed, just because it's more fun that way. Johannès's scoring can be impressive in bursts, but it's the vision and passing that really stands out. Occasionally one or two will end up in the third row, but you live with that for all the ones that work. New York obviously have oodles of talent, but she adds an extra little spark of inventiveness and flair. Even better for the Liberty, because she wanted to be in the US, the French federation decided to move ahead for EuroBasket without her. Enjoy, Liberty fans. You're getting really spoiled.

Valuing the Product

This stuff is important. Long-time owner of the Sky, Michael Alter, brought in a group of primarily female investors this week, selling 10% of the franchise at a price which valued the Sky at $85m. The investment the Seattle Storm brought in back in February to help build their new practice facility valued them at nearly double that. Considering most sales of WNBA teams in the past have been for next-to-nothing, this is significant progress.

It's not just good for the current owners because the value of their property appears to be increasing. It's also because when current teams can show some genuine actual cash payments that reflect that value, expansion becomes more profitable. One of the reasons you don't expand is because money coming in centrally then has to be split more ways. Everyone’s slice of the pie gets smaller. That's why new owners usually have to pay an expansion fee to buy their way in. The more you can claim current teams are worth, the more you can charge the new folks for entry. While that may bring down the number of people or groups who have the money to start new teams, the league primarily wants to attract new ownership with lots of cash behind them anyway, so that's probably a good thing. If someone's already struggling to scrape together the money to start the team, maybe they shouldn't be the people in charge of a new franchise. That perspective makes particular sense if you're one of the people whose response to New York and Las Vegas breaking the rules in recent times was "well that should be legal anyway." If you want charter planes and extra payments to be commonplace, you better have ownership league-wide who can afford it.

Money is going to be a big topic around the league over the next couple of years. Within the next 16 months, one side or the other is inevitably going to opt out of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement (probably the Players Association). The next broadcast deal will dictate the sort of sums that are included in the next one, hopefully without any kind of lockout or strike along the way (because that wouldn't be good for anyone). Expansion is finally looking somewhat realistic, which would help attract more fans and keep players happier by adding extra jobs. Increasing valuations can only help.

Winning when you're losing

No one likes losing. Especially when you've been doing it for years, and things are meant to be getting better. But you can make the argument - and I have - that Indiana pulled off two great results in their last couple of games.

The Fever are obviously better. You don't even need to look at the numbers, because you can see and feel it in the games. They gave the undefeated reigning champs everything they could handle on Sunday, leading the vast majority of the game before being out-executed in the final moments by the Aces. It was a similar story on Tuesday night when Chicago had to fight tooth and nail to drag them to overtime, where the Sky finally managed to pull away. And if you want stats then those show it too, with their -6.2 net rating putting them ninth in the league, a meaningful step up from the -13.6 and -12.9 of the last two seasons, both of which left them rock bottom in 12th.

Photo Credit: Chris Poss

But this is the thing - ninth is the highest number they should want to see in Indiana this year. They have building blocks now with NaLyssa Smith and Aliyah Boston, who's already putting up efficiency numbers for a rookie that have basically never been seen before. But they're far from the finished article. And especially when you're far from being a popular free agent destination, your best way to add to that core is the draft. The Fever don't need to be terrible this year - they already have that 5-31 record from last year banked in the two-year standings used for lottery odds - but scraping into the eighth seed would be a terrible idea. Two games getting shellacked by the Aces, Liberty or whomever is not a preferable conclusion compared to very good odds in what will likely be a very good draft class. So keep doing this, Indiana. Play as well as possible, show lots of signs of progress, figure out which of your complementary players should still be around in a couple of years, and keep losing plenty of games. At least enough to finish ninth.

On a slight tangent away from the Fever, it's very early to be considering this, but I already wonder how many teams are actually going to want those lower playoff seeds. There'll be four or five teams who think they can win the title if they perform and things break their way, and Chicago don't own their 2024 first-rounder anymore, so have no incentive to miss the playoffs. After that, if the top teams are as good as people think they are, is a first-round matchup against one of those powerhouses really preferable to lottery chances in a draft that might feature Caitlin Clark, Cameron Brink, Angel Reese and other useful talent? As always, the players and coaches will be doing their best on the floor, but we might see a little additional rest, or some injuries given an extended recovery period late in the season. Several other franchises may see ninth as the highest spot they want to finish as well.

Clark's Corner

Perhaps not a classic entry for this section, but I loved this because it's so ludicrously simple. And that's part of the ethos here in Clark's Corner - do the simple stuff well, with 100% effort, and that'll get most of the job done.

In a vital situation, coming out of a timeout, the Aces essentially just stand in a long diagonal line. Look at them at the start of that play. Even including the entry passer, that's just a straight line of five people. Jackie Young runs hard from one end to the other, cuts around the bottom, and the traffic creates enough room for her to separate from Kristy Wallace and receive the pass for an easy layup. She may not even have been the first option - all the other Fever defenders were petrified of A'ja Wilson springing open back at the end of the line - but Young was open first. In case you somehow hadn't noticed, the Aces are scary good.

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