Sean Highkin of Rose Garden Report had the first scoop that I saw:
The Fire have waived Haley Jones, Kamiah Smalls and Sug Sutton, and converted both of their developmental players (Frieda Bühner and Holly Winterburn) to standard contracts. They also activated Teja Oblak, whose contract had been suspended due to injury.
Both of Portland's developmental roster spots are now open and can be backfilled.
Shortly after this was announced, we learned that Jordan Harrison, the undrafted rookie from West Virginia that spent the pre-season with Portland, was signed to one of the newly opened development player roster spots. Harrison was waived earlier this season when other players started coming back from injuries.
I was not expecting anything like this. I know that players getting waived is much more common in the W than it may be in other sports, but this is the first time that it is happening to a team that I am closely following and invested in.
An addition to the feeling of severity is the deep rotation of players that Portland uses: all of these players, due to injuries or not, are playing quite a bit in games. Haley Jones has played in every game this franchise has participated in. Kamiah Smalls was an essential piece of Portland’s first-ever win against the New York Liberty. Sug Sutton was asked to lead the team in their second game as injuries piled up, and was a positive addition to the team’s second win.
Maybe most importantly, in a move that I noted when the Fire traded Maya Caldwell and drafted Iyana Martin and Freida Bühner: the team is in a city where Black representation has struggled to keep its footprint, especially after intentional displacement and gentrification in the past. The WNBA was founded upon and carried to the present on the talent and labor of mostly Black women. The Portland Fire just waived three Black American women, and replaced them with three white Europeans.
I have basketball reasons that I think these moves were made, and I’ll share those below, and they are protecting me from believing that race or ethnicity plays an explicit factor in the team-building goals of the Fire’s front office. That said, it seems clear to me that these cultural sensitivities are not strongly represented in the rooms where decisions are made. The team is helmed by a white Slovenian female General Manager and a white British male head coach, and, genuinely, I’m not sure how to think about non-Americans making these choices that have deep-seeded roots in American culture, many of those roots being painful and shameful. I wish someone would ask them about this.
Here are the reasons why I think the Fire may have come to these decisions:
Sug: I am thinking that Sug was not moving the ball in the way that Fire wanted to be. No one has said this explicitly, but you can see it in the way the ball moves when the point guards who remain on the team are running the show. More passes, different passes, more driving and kicking rather than driving and getting to the floater/mid-range game. I think this move is similar to the trade (which was essentially a cut) of Maya Caldwell in the pre-season.
Haley: similar to Sug, I think there is a style difference here. Jones has been one of the better rebounders on the team, and has been a great transition offense presence, two spaces the Fire have not been great at, which makes the choice hard. I didn’t see her running the kinds of sets or actions that the rest of the team is trying to run, but her energy and skills made her productive regardless.
Kam: Unsimilar to Sug and Haley, when Kam played in their first game, it felt like the Fire offense ran differently, and in a way that I associated with what I believed the Fire wanted to be doing. Teja Oblak is set-up to be a pretty direct replacement for Kam, and maybe Smalls’ injury is worse than we think, but I liked what I saw so far.
Freida: I know Bühner was a second-round draft pick, but the Fire really think she can be great, and have said that they were surprised she was still available. It is not surprising that the front-office continues to prioritize her involvement over other options. I do think she is better than what she has shown so far in limited minutes, and I think the transition to the W has been difficult. Hopefully she works through those difficulties quickly.
Holly: the Fire’s reliance on players who have basketball history with coach Sarama, GM Černivic, or both, is shown here, as Holly played on the London Lions team that Sarama was a part of. I liked what Holly brought to the bench two games ago, and I understand why they lean into the familiarity. She runs the offense, she gets off the ball fast, she is active on defense; I think she will be a quality backup guard.
Teja: We have yet to see Teja Oblak play with the Fire, but there are some YouTube compilations we can watch. We know she is a 35 year-old Slovenian point-guard who has good passing vision and shoots 3’s, which is what the Fire are looking for. She is the oldest player on the roster by over five years, so the experience is something the Fire might be interested in as well. Though, they had an experienced point guard who passes and shoots in Kamiah Smalls, as well.
Jordan: A fan favorite that fought hard, and showed real promise as a defender, Harrison clearly impressed the Fire staff, who felt they didn’t have enough roster spots to initially keep her on the team. I think Harrison will play minutes from her dev. spot in the near future.
Ultimately, I think the Fire are trying to streamline and narrow their vision to the style of basketball that they want to be playing. My head can see the reasons for these moves. My heart hurts for these women, whose lives just got made really hard really fast. I appreciate fans of the W for their bigger hearts than fans of other leagues, as most of the responses I see scattered around the internet today are akin to “how could ____ be cut? They’re so good!”. W fans are very supportive of their people. That is valuable, and we should hold onto that.
I do think that these three players are talented and qualified to be in the W, and I hope they get another shot with other teams this season.
Also, there is a sneaky strange and potentially direct reason why these moves were made today, specifically: starting tomorrow, May 22nd, W teams can offer standard contracts to (most of) any other team’s developmental players (if they have been signed to a dev. contract for more than 14 days). May 22nd marks 14 days from the start of the season, which means many players, including Bühner, can start fielding offers from other teams. Will tomorrow be some kind of free-agency 2.0? Will the best two development players get forced onto their own team’s roster for protection, leading to other vets getting waived? Is nothing gonna happen at all? I have no idea.
The Tanking Take
The day of the college draft, I started really hearing the tanking take. “Portland is clearly tanking this season”, and “Portland is trying to get JuJu” – JuJu Watkins, that is, who will be in the WNBA draft next year and who will be one of the best prospects this decade.
Ever since that day, I have been thinking over why that is clearly not the case here. And I don’t want to brush the idea away with the wave of a hand, or even say that “the Fire is tanking” is an outright “bad” take to have. I genuinely want to talk through why tanking isn’t a thought anyone should be having. I hope I give myself the time to actually sit down and put my many, many thoughts onto paper. I’m working on it.
In short, I believe this with my entirety: Portland is not tanking. They are trying to walk a different path, and it is going to look and feel different to W fans. It is not guaranteed to work, and it is certainly going to take some time to turn from concept to successful product.
I won’t blame anyone for being frustrated at the current abilities of this Fire team. I absolutely understand and empathize with anyone who feels gross or sad about today’s roster moves. I don’t have much of substance to help curb those feelings, and I won’t blankly repeat GM Černivec’s oft-repeated line: “trust me”.
But I will remind you, and myself, that women’s basketball in Portland is something we want, and this team is filled with young women trying to make it in this world and in this sport, and we can choose to continue supporting them, even if they don’t reflect or represent each one of us, and even if they are going about things in a way we don’t yet understand for ourselves.
I hope you make the choice that feels best for you, and I hope to see you at the Rose Garden.✌️♥️