Hello, hoopheads! The Toronto Tempo needed overtime against the last-place Connecticut Sun and the Los Angeles Sparks trailed the Seattle Storm through three quarters, but the higher teams in the WNBA standings eventually came out on top while everyone was watching Taylor Swift watch the Knicks’ historic comeback in Game 4 of the MNBA Finals last night. Brittney Sykes led Toronto with 38 points, matching a career-high she set less than a month ago, while Nneka Ogwumike was the Sparks’ high scorer with 24 points. Tonight will be quite a bit busier with four games on the schedule, all of them first meetings of the teams this season, including one between two of the league’s top teams. That game, which will likely determine who represents the Eastern Conference in the Commissioner’s Cup title game, features my beloved New York Liberty (8-4) visiting the Atlanta Dream (8-3) (7:30 ET, local affiliates/League Pass), and will be the main focus of today’s Roundup even though the programming folks at Prime Video went with Sky-Fever and Mercury-Wings for their doubleheader. Perhaps someone had bad info on Angel Reese’s likely whereabouts this season and expected her rivalry with Caitlin Clark to be renewed tonight.
New York and Atlanta are both looking to become the second team in the WNBA to reach 9 wins this season, with only the Minnesota Lynx (10-2) having gotten there thus far. The Dream enter the night tied with the Las Vegas Aces for second in the standings, with New York a half-game back. Depending on where you get your stats, they have either the second-and-tied-for-third-best net ratings (according to Her Hoop Stats, with the Liberty ahead at +7.3 points per 100 possessions while Atlanta and Las Vegas are both at +7.2) or second-and-fourth-best (according to WNBA dot com, with Atlanta second at +8.3 and New York fourth at +6.4). The fact that I spent over a year writing for the HHS newsletter on a daily basis certainly plays a part in my general preference for their numbers, but that is not the only reason. I also think they do a better job of estimating the number of possessions, which is the part of the process where the discrepancies arise, as both sites are ultimately deriving their numbers from identical box scores. Both sets of numbers have the teams as Nos. 2 and 3 in defensive rating, with Atlanta slightly ahead, and I’m going to stick with HHS numbers from here as usual and tell you that the Dream are allowing just 96.9 points per 100 possessions while the Liberty are allowing 99.0. This could have the makings of a defensive battle, not only because the teams are so strong on that end, but because they’ve both been in the middle of the pack on the offensive end. New York is 6th at 106.3 points per 100 possessions while Atlanta is 8th at 104.1, although the Liberty offense has actually been more efficient than it was last year, when it finished 3rd with an offensive rating of 104.7. Atlanta’s has legitimately fallen off a bit from last year, when it was 2nd with an offensive rating of 105.9 points per 100 possessions, but not as far as the six-spot drop in rankings might lead you to believe. Let me explain why I’m increasingly of the opinion that the Liberty and Dream offenses are, in fact, doing just fine.
I’ve mentioned this in passing recently (including in yesterday’s Report Card), but the biggest reason the Liberty and Dream are ranked lower than expected in offensive rating is that the whole league is scoring more points than ever this season, and doing it more efficiently. The teams from 7th (Los Angeles, 106.2 points per 100 possessions) through 3rd (107.8) in offensive rating all would’ve had the league’s second-best rating last season, and are packed tightly enough that their positions could probably flip based on one night’s worth of results. The team which currently has the second-best rating, the expansion Toronto Tempo, would’ve tied last year’s leader, the Minnesota Lynx, with a mark of 108.1, while this year’s Lynx are way out in front of the pack again at 109.8. The per-team scoring average of 84.8 points per game is also on pace to shatter the WNBA record. Teams averaged 83.1 points per game in the Wubble, but have never put up more than 82.8 ppg in any non-Wubble season. The increased scoring can be traced pretty directly to the much-discussed (and, in my opinion, extremely positive) changes in the league’s officiating, as teams are averaging a league-record 9.6 trips to the free throw line per game. That’s at least a full trip more than any season since 2016, when they had the second-highest average on record at 9.3 per game. In a league where everyone is scoring more efficiently, being 6th or 8th in offensive rating doesn’t seem like as big of a deal to me as being on the short list of teams doing the best job of limiting opposing offenses. By that token, these are two of just three teams currently with defensive ratings under 100 compared to 8 of 13 teams with double-digit defensive ratings last season.
The Liberty come in having won five straight since a three-game skid, while Atlanta is looking for its first three-game win streak of the season. The Dream have gone win-win-loss through their first 11 games, and I am obviously only hoping that the pattern continues because I like patterns. Nothing to do with being a Liberty fan, of course. Neither team will get its notable absent star back tonight, with Atlanta still awaiting Brionna Jones’ season debut and New York awaiting Sabrina Ionescu’s second game, but they will have two of the most prolific 3-point shooters in the league. New York’s Marine Johannes leads the WNBA with 35 makes from deep while hitting 42.2% of her 6.9 attempts per game while Atlanta’s Rhyne Howard is 3rd with 33 triples and hitting 37.9% of her 8.7 attempts per game. Johannes is coming off of a 1-for-5 effort in a win at Connecticut on Monday, but went 19-for-34 (55.9%) over the previous five games and has made multiple 3-pointers in 8 of her 12 games this season. Howard also struggled from deep her last time out, going 1-for-10 in a win at Chicago, but she was 18-for-38 (47.4%) over her previous four games. In other words, either one of them is liable to make a whole fucking bunch of 3s on any given night.
The night’s first game will see the Chicago Sky (4-8) try to send the Indiana Fever (6-5) (7:00 ET, Prime Video/local affiliates) back to .500 for the fifth time in six opportunities this season in the teams’ first encounter of 2026. Indiana poked its head back above the equator in a 78-76 win over the Washington Mystics on Monday thanks to a game-winning 3-pointer from Caitlin Clark in the final seconds, but that shot masked a pretty rough night for Indiana offensively in its second straight game with a rating under 90. The Fever’s star trio of Clark, Aliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell collectively scored 92 points on 39.1% from the field in those two games, which also included a loss in Brooklyn, while dishing out 23 assists compared to 22 turnovers. The Sky defense is certainly capable of holding them down again tonight, ranking 5th in the league allowing 101 points per 100 possessions according to Her Hoop Stats, but Chicago has dropped seven of its last eight games as it searches for any consistent source of points (13th with an offensive rating of 95.7). Just like I think it’s a pretty good thing to be one of the only teams playing good defense in an offensive explosion, it’s pretty bleak to be one of the only teams scoring at a rate that would’ve been bad in any era.
The second half of the BezosVision doubleheader features the first meeting of the season between the Phoenix Mercury (4-9) and the Dallas Wings (7-4) (9:00 ET, Prime Video/local affiliates), with both teams trying to avoid their second straight losses. In the Mercury’s case, that would undo the progress they made over the two games before their hard-fought loss at Golden State on Monday, and represent an 8th loss in 10 games since a 2-2 start. Dallas is looking to win for the fifth time in six games after having its first four-game win streak in almost three years snapped in a 100-76 thumping at Minnesota on Tuesday. Neither team has been on the list of those playing good defense, as they rank 10th (Dallas, 103.7 points allowed per 100 possessions) and 11th (Phoenix, 104.3) in defensive rating, but the key difference thus far has been that Dallas is 5th in offensive rating (106.9 points per 100 possessions) while Phoenix is 11th (100.8).
Last but not least, the Las Vegas Aces (8-3) visit the Portland Fire (6-7) (10:00 ET, local affiliates/League Pass) to round out First Meetings Night. The reigning champs haven’t quite been at their dominant best during their current four-game win streak, but they also haven’t been sweating things out, with three of the four wins coming by exactly 10 points and the other by 5. They’re third in offensive rating (107.8), fourth in defensive rating (100.6) and tied with Atlanta for third in net rating (+7.2), with both A’ja Wilson and Jackie Young coming in scorching hot. Portland has dropped three in a row, as well as four of five since a 5-3 start to its rekindled existence, and is sitting in 12th in both offensive (99.3) and defensive (106.3) rating to go with 13th in net rating (-7.0). It doesn’t look like it’s gonna be a very pleasant night for the fans in the “Fire Pit.”