Once again, it proves to be the best possible decision to be a sports fan on the west coast: there are WNBA games on every day, there is typically a game starting the moment I get home from work, there are games on at 10:00AM on Saturdays, there games throughout the day all weekend, there are double headers on multiple weekday nights. This is a simple checkbox to check for a sports league, but it might be the most important one, so I’m glad the W has taken care of that business. We are eating.

I watched nearly every second of the last two rounds of 2024’s WNBA playoffs, which meant I was watching a lot of Minnesota Lynx basketball. At that point in the season, teams are locked the hell in, they’ve deeply scouted their opponent, and they get to play the same team multiple times, allowing for subtle tweaks in their attacks and their defenses. Every team was playing great, every player was showing their strengths. As a new fan to the league, I didn’t know if these performances were products of the moment, or just the way these teams and players operate. Some players thrive in those situations, some players shrink, some play just the same way they do on day 1 of the season.

Collier and Williams were absolute killers in those playoffs, and they played up to every moment they found themselves in. In game 1 of the 2025 season? They were exactly the same.

In the third quarter, particularly, Collier and Williams started running pick-and-rolls with each other, and did so for several possessions in a row. Each time, they found a new way to create space for one or the other, a new way to exploit a mismatch, and a new way to score. Collier made 7 of her 9 shots for 18 points, and Williams was 5-for-5 for 15 points, all in the 3rd quarter.

Clearly, these two players have only one mode of play throughout the season: elite.

I learned from a high-frequency of injuries to rookies that these kids are not set-up to succeed in their first season in the W. In addition to that, now that the season has started, it is clear to me that players don’t get a ton of time to get situated with their new team, which they don’t have any control over choosing, and get thrown into a much faster, much more physical version of basketball only five weeks after the tournament ends.

NCAA Season: November 2024 - March 2025

NCAA Tournament: March 20th - April 6th

WNBA Draft: April 14th

WNBA Training Camp: April 27

WNBA Pre-Season: May 2nd

WNBA Regular Season: May 16th - September 11th

WNBA Postseason: September 14th - October 17th

That is about three weeks shy of playing basketball for one entire year, with only a couple of breaks that are longer than a couple days, and never longer than a month.

That is a grueling schedule, and that is an entire year of your professional career that you have to play without having a true off-season, which is where players get real rest, make real strength gains, and make needed improvements to their games. Tie that in with the physical and mental stress that places upon the youngest players in the league, and you have a damn hard situation for all of your new talent.

Watching Paige Bueckers is a treat right now, but watch how frequently she’ll decide to create a shot for herself, get to a spot on the floor that she likes to shoot from, and attempt a jump shot – she is a great point-guard and ball-mover, so this isn’t often – and you’ll find a defender typically draped all over her, making her shot attempts really difficult. She didn’t have a problem getting to her spots with separation when she was cooking in the NCAA tournament, but she’s playing veterans, grown-ass adults, and players who have had a full offseason to prepare for these games. She’s operating at a disadvantage.

The only solution would be a massive schedule change, which I’m sure the WNBA is in no rush to make while their league is on the rise, and while they have a lot of sports viewers eyeballs during the otherwise slow months of summer for major American sports.

The WNBA is exploding in popularity. The internet at large is deflating in quality, sanity, trustworthiness, and more. These two things occurring simultaneously is a strange world to live in.

Twice already, in the first week of play, two stories that are not based in reportable fact have taken over the “front pages” of WNBA discussion, both disparaging a player or a fan base. One was about an inappropriate relationship between a team’s CEO and a player, and one was about a fan making racially insensitive sounds/jeers at the Fever vs Sky game on opening weekend.

There is a ton of great fan activity, reporting, writing, speculation, and general conversation online for the WNBA. But as the league gains attention, it will also gain the worst parts, and the worst people, who operate on the internet: trolls, liars, literal nazi-sympathizers; if you can think of it, someone is posting it in a player’s Instagram comments.

It’s going to be tough sledding to be an engaged fan, let alone someone involved in the league itself, or heaven forbid an actual player. This is why we need to start – or continue – our fandom practices with adhering to all of the simple rules we learned as kids about being kind, being humble, being empathetic, being good. Of course, we should all add a little spice to our chatting, too.

I am already a nervous new-franchise fan. I have taken in a ton of Golden State Valkyrie content, and have had my on-court expectations for the team tempered by local writers and national experts, all surmising that new teams take a while to really get going. I have watched most of the minutes of the Valks’ first two games, and it has already led to a lot of stress in my body. But in just two games, they’ve secured their first win as a franchise. It is a genuine treat to hear the roars of the crowd throughout each of their two games. Their fan base seems energetic, supportive, and they show up. I hope the Portland crowd can deliver the same type of environment. I think they will.

I like looking at the “Per 36-Minutes” stats for basketball, which take everyone’s stats and extrapolates them on a per-minute basis, then calculates what a player would be averaging if they played 36 minutes per game. Why is it 36 minutes, rather than any other number? I think the website I’m using (basketball-reference.com), is just taking that stat from the NBA. The problem here is that NBA games are 48 minutes long, and WNBA games are 40 minutes long. There are 12 NBA players that actually play 36 minutes-per-game, or more. So far, in only a couple of games, there are only 3 WNBA players that play this much. In the 2024 season, there was only one. So, these aren’t attainable stats, because no one is playing this much, but they show what players are doing per-minute on the floor, which is a fun way to consider stats.

Here are some fun league leaders (who have actually played real minutes, not bench players that have played four minutes in two games):

Points: Napheesa Collier - Minnesota Lynx (27.3 pts per 36 minutes)

Rebounds: Angel Reese - Chicago Sky (17.2 [!!!!!!!!] rebounds per 36 minutes)

Assists: Natasha Cloud - New York Liberty (10 per 36 minutes)

Field-Goals Attempted: Satou Sabally - Phoenix Mercury (19.1 per 36 minutes)

3-pointers Attempted: Rhyne Howard - Atlanta Dream (10.1 per 36 minutes)

Free-Throws Attempted: Brittney Sykes - Washington Mystics (12.6 per 36 minutes)

Blocks: A’ja Wilson - LV Aces (2.5 per 36 minutes)

Turnovers: Angel Reese - Chicago Sky (5.2 per 36 minutes)

Small sample sizes are the best. We’ll see what all these numbers are like next week.

Note: I was gone over Memorial Day weekend, so there’s a bunch of stuff I have to catch up on. Hopefully y’all got some hoops into your holidays.

Nekias Duncan is one of my favorite basketball analysts. He explains every action in acute detail, and just loves hoops, writing infectiously about cool stuff that players and teams are doing. He just published a Power Rankings report over at Bleacher Report.

Marine Johannes was cooking last night. Check out the one-foot lunging three-pointer to beat the shot clock:

This was a random YouTube algorithm find for me a couple of weeks ago, and now I listen to every single episode? I love these two together — you can tell they are great friends, which is the best pairing of podcast hosts you can have.

Smiles all around.