WNBA Dissected: Minnesota mess merits concern, League Pass losses, plus more from 2022 Week 1
The return of the weekly column covering everything interesting, intriguing, annoying or ridiculous from around the world of the WNBA
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Major Minny Maladies
First of all, let me preface everything that's about to follow by saying that no real conclusions should be drawn about a sporting season after less than a week. We may be in a 'hot take' business, and I may have a column to write, but six days is a ridiculous amount of time in which to claim we know anything. Especially in the WNBA, where preseason is desperately short and nearly every team is still waiting for at least one meaningful player to show up from overseas commitments. All of that being said, the Minnesota Lynx have been a mess so far this season.
Much of this was pretty easy to see coming. Napheesa Collier's pregnancy meant they were starting off a star down, which is never easy for any team to handle. Damiris Dantas came into camp with her foot injury still lingering and is yet to play. Kayla McBride is still in Turkey with Fenerbahçe. They were always going to have to make tricky cuts in camp to stay under the salary cap (for what was always going to be a 10-player roster, given their expensive group and Collier continuing to count while pregnant). However, some of their issues have been of their own making.
Three days before the start of the season, the Lynx put out a press release about signing Odyssey Sims, quietly throwing into the body of the text that they'd also waived six players. Cutting six players in one day isn't necessarily an unusual occurrence during camp, but when it includes the player expected to be your starting point guard, her primary backup, and last year's first-round pick, it raises some extra eyebrows. Whether Layshia Clarendon is fit and capable of being a regular WNBA starter right now appears to be a matter of opinion - Lynx head coach and general manager Cheryl Reeve implied the answer is no, whereas Clarendon tweeted this days after being waived:
Regardless, Reeve also dumped 2020 Rookie of the Year Crystal Dangerfield, who most would've seen as the likely backup option. As I said in my analysis of likely cuts in preseason, I didn't think they'd repeat the mistake of last year, where the Lynx started the season with only one primary ballhandler on the roster, hoping the likes of Rachel Banham and Aerial Powers could provide backup minutes for Dangerfield. Instead, they one-upped themselves. Sims had all of two days to reacclimate to the Lynx after spending 2021 having a thoroughly mediocre season in Atlanta. Yvonne Turner, also one of those six players culled in the Sims press release, was brought back on a hardship contract. And Banham is back again, toiling away. None of these players are really point guards. Sims is probably the closest, but would usually rather create her own shot or dribble into traffic than move the ball or create for others. Banham's ballhandling often looks shaky when asked to be the primary distributor, and she'd be much better off playing off-ball as a designated outside gunner. Turner's been out of the league for two years, and while she's had her exciting moments never been more than an average backup. She's also a natural off-guard, always looking for her own offense rather than the pass.
Reeve complained about selfish play in preseason, then proceeded to make cuts that left her with a raft of perimeter players who want to shoot rather than pass. This is a team that wants to be focussed around Sylvia Fowles's low-post dominance in her final season but is struggling to get her the ball. Aerial Powers has so far looked more like the player we saw in her early WNBA seasons - the one who basically shot or turned the ball over whenever it touched her hands - rather than the vastly more useful and complete player she shifted into in Washington. Veteran addition Angel McCoughtry looks a shadow of her former self so far at both ends of the floor. Next to all those 'combo' guards, it's made offense a real struggle in their opening three games.
The positive angle is that the Lynx started slowly last year as well, before going on a tear when players arrived from overseas and Clarendon was signed to fix the 2021 point guard issues. The problem is that Minnesota may not have the same level of solutions coming in 2022. Collier isn't walking through that door, at least not any time soon, considering she hasn't even given birth yet. If she plays at all this year, it won't be for months. McBride and Dantas will certainly help - they're both very good players who started a combined 52 times for the 22-10 Lynx last season. But they're not superstars of the level of Collier that swing the quality of a team almost on their own. They also got very lucky falling into Clarendon last season when Reeve's lack of faith in Dangerfield (and the lack of real backup for her) led to a search for point guard help. Can they find someone who can organise this team more effectively on the floor? The likes of Lindsay Allen, Te'a Cooper and Moriah Jefferson are free agents (along with Clarendon and Dangerfield themselves). So there are options out there they could at least try. But discovering the kind of spearhead they found in Clarendon last year might be a one-time trick.
Except it's one week into the season and this is all a little insane. Maybe McBride and Dantas improve their general quality, McCoughtry plays her way into shape, Sims returns from the personal matter that meant she missed Tuesday night's game and settles into a leadership role, and everything's fine. It just doesn't feel like it's going to be as straightforward as it was last year when Collier and Clarendon arrived to save the day.
League Pass Fail
Not to make this whole piece feel like I'm whining about negatives, but let's go on to another product that made difficult changes in the offseason and has opened the year struggling - WNBA League Pass. On the positive side, it definitely looks slicker now. All the white-on-black text and sliding rows of videos make it look more modern. The problem is pretty much everything else. They've taken away the DVR controls that made it easy to jump forward and back within games. There's no multi-game view, so if you want to swap between games you need multiple tabs/windows or to just accept you're going to miss plenty of action. The streams also desperately struggle if you try to use the scroll bar to jump from one point to another within a game, adding to the difficulty of trying to keep track of more than one. There's also no easily-accessible calendar to find games from throughout the year, which is going to become increasingly annoying as the season goes on and the archive gets deeper.
Although I don't use it myself, I've heard a host of similar complaints about the updated WNBA app as well. All of this is particularly disappointing because the WNBA's $75m capital raise in February was in part supposed to help the league improve their digital offerings. So far, it's essentially gotten worse. Also, every year we hear complaints from hardcore fans that they don't get to watch preseason games. Maybe if this relaunch had come a couple of weeks earlier, and they'd used those preseason games to trial it, we could've given them an early heads-up about what was wrong. Instead, the early days of the regular season are filled with social media comments about all the problems, both from the fans and their own constituents:
If there was an opt-out option that let me revert to last year's variant of League Pass, I'd happily be using it. That's not what's supposed to happen when you 'update' a service.
Evans Above
This is just a dreadful call on multiple levels.
Obviously, the big issue in this particular case is that Dana Evans basically gets out of the way and doesn't even touch the shooter, Jordin Canada. However, the more generic issue is shooters contorting or throwing themselves into unnatural positions to draw contact and whistles. It's something the NBA has actively tried to regulate out of their games this season (somewhat successfully), and we need it out of the WNBA as well. Yes, you want to protect shooters (or anyone in mid-air) and give them room to land. That doesn't mean they get to throw themselves forwards or sideways and just expect everyone to get out of their way (or stay in their way and then be called for a foul). Stop rewarding this nonsense, even if Evans actually had been there for Canada to land on.
Lineup Minutiae
The return of your favourite section and mine, where I delve into all the weird and interesting choices coaches are making around the WNBA about who to play and when. Choices that can be particularly strange and interesting in early games where they're still trying to work out what they have and missing players create holes in their lineups.
In Los Angeles, Derek Fisher is still somewhat making things up as he goes along. Rookie third-rounder Amy Atwell started their opener on the wing, played less than eight minutes, and then came off the bench and played even less in their second game. Jasmine Walker started that one, but also didn't actually play that much. For now, Canada and Brittney Sykes appear established starters on the perimeter with Nneka Ogwumike and Liz Cambage inside, but that fifth spot is up for grabs. Big-name addition Chennedy Carter was the sixth perimeter player to see action in their opener, which was a shock, but played her way into much more significant minutes in their second game. With Lexie Brown and rookie Rae Burrell also fighting for playing time and Kristi Toliver expected to arrive at some point, juggling that perimeter rotation in LA is going to be interesting all season.
Over in Las Vegas, Becky Hammon made the switch that many have been requesting for quite some time. After years with some kind of true big alongside her, A'ja Wilson is starting at center, opening up room for Dearica Hamby to come in at the 4. On the perimeter, the decision was somewhat made for Hammon by Riquna Williams's injury, but Kelsey Plum has come in to add quickness, shooting and offense to their opening unit. It's not like Bill Laimbeer eschewed lineups like this entirely - we saw them plenty of times within games - and Kiah Stokes still being overseas took away the most likely option for a center to start next to Wilson. However, it feels like the signal of a new era.
New Year, Same Silliness
This was just too absurd not to mention:
Meesseman made it more entertaining by commenting herself, referencing the time ESPN showed a woman in the crowd who definitely wasn't her mother, however much they claimed she was:
The spelling really shouldn't be that hard. It's like Mississippi - every letter where it makes any sense at all for it to be a double-letter, it is. Thinking she bears a striking resemblance to Destanni Henderson, I have no answer for.
Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. If you like our work, be sure to check out our stats site, our podcast, and our social media accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.