Hello, hoopheads! While the WNBA has been celebrating its 30th season since the start, today is the league’s actual birthday, in a sense, as it’s the 29th anniversary of the first games in WNBA history. The very first of those matchups, featuring my beloved New York Liberty and the Los Angeles Sparks, will be recreated tonight, and I’ll have plenty more to tell you about both the inaugural game and tonight’s Libs-Sparks showdown in a bit. I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to acknowledge a couple of things that happened yesterday, however, because the final day of the WNBA’s 29th trip around the sun was historic in its own right. Up first on Saturday, the Atlanta Dream tallied a second win over the Indiana Fever in a span of about 40 hours while scoring a franchise-record 113 points and recording a third straight 100-point output, which ties the longest streak in WNBA history. I hope we can all agree that the Dream’s offense is no longer slumping? Saturday’s three-game slate ended with a thriller between the Chicago Sky, who didn’t deserve to lose for the 10th time in 11 games, and the Dallas Wings, who erased a 14-point deficit entering the final frame. According to both Sports Reference and Across the Timeline, the Sky became just the second team to lose consecutive games by one-point margins, and the fact that both sources returned the 2003 Connecticut Sun as the only other team to suffer such a fate makes me confident that I didn’t fuck up the queries. The Wings’ win made home teams 3-0 on the day and brought the league’s collective home record to 59-60 on the season, just one win from erasing the 21-7 start that road teams got off to last month.
Dallas won the 6,789th game in WNBA history, including playoffs, with another shout to Sports Reference for making it relatively easy to pin that number down with the right query and some URL manipulation on my part to avoid clicking through results in batches of 200. The 6,792nd game will see my New York Liberty (11-5) visit the Los Angeles Sparks (7-8) (8:00 ET, ESPN/Disney+) look to replicate the result of the league’s first game while breaking a 35-35 tie in the all-time series. A win tonight would also give the Liberty their first lead in the series since June 2016, when the Sparks — amidst their most recent championship season — pulled even with the Liberty at 20-all in the second game of a five-game win streak in the series. Los Angeles took the lead the following month and opened a 33-25 gap in the series before the Liberty won eight straight meetings from 2022 to 2024 to bring it even again at 33 wins apiece. The teams have alternated wins in four games since then, including two Liberty wins in three meetings last season. Unfortunately, the one loss was the one that broke the Liberty’s backs, because it was the night in late July when Breanna Stewart suffered a bone bruise in her knee.
Before getting into the matchup itself, I want to push back on a notion that I anticipate hearing throughout tonight’s broadcast, which is that the league was initially ignored by the masses and only became cool in the last few years. It’s been repeated quite a bit over the last few years and it gets on my nerves, because it simply isn’t true. It is, however, in the league’s best interest, which generally means the best interest of NBA owners, to revise this history for a variety of reasons. Not the least of those reasons is the role that NBA owners played in endangering the league in the 2000s, but today’s not the day to get into all of that. It is, however, the perfect day to fight back against the idea that the WNBA was initially thrust upon a disinterested public.
According to Across the Timeline, the Liberty’s inaugural 10-point win over the Sparks was attended by 14,284 people, which is about 2,800 more than the 11,481 who attended the Sparks’ latest home loss to the Minnesota Lynx on Wednesday. It wasn’t just the inaugural game that people flocked to. All eight of the WNBA’s original teams averaged at least 7,500 fans at home games in 1997, a bar that four of the 15 teams aren’t clearing so far this season. As much as I mock the Connecticut Sun — who deserve it — they wouldn’t have ranked last in the 1997 WNBA in average home attendance, but Atlanta (7,439), Chicago (7,144), Dallas (6,217) and Washington (4,200) all would have. As far as I can tell, those 2026 averages include yesterday’s games, and thus include the 17,000+ fans the Dream drew to State Farm Arena to see them hang 113 points on the Fever. Nine of 10 teams averaged at least 7,600 fans in 1998, including the expansion Washington Mystics and Phoenix Mercury, although the Sacramento Monarchs’ attendance did fall off (6,578.5). Eleven of 12 teams cleared 7,500 in 1999, again including two expansion teams, the Minnesota Lynx and Orlando Miracle, with all 12 teams averaging at least 7,000. This time, the dearly departed Charlotte Sting were in last, while Yolanda Griffith’s 1999 MVP season buoyed the Monarchs. It’s harder to pin down TV ratings from almost 30 years ago, which was also a time when TV ratings meant something very different than they do now, but what I can say with a high degree of certainty is that the Liberty-Sparks game 29 years ago did pretty damn well on TV. None of this is meant to deny the fact that the WNBA eventually had some very tough years before landing in its current era of prosperity, but I refuse to accept the revisionist narrative that fans only showed up when the current crop of Instagram-famous stars did.
Haters will tell you that I just spent almost 1,000 words trying to avoid telling you that the Liberty had their eight-game win streak snapped by the Mystics on Friday night, and haters won’t be entirely wrong. My squad also had a six-game streak with offensive ratings of at least 100 points per 100 possessions snapped while allowing a rating of at least 108 for the third time in four games according to Her Hoop Stats. In short, it was a pretty bad effort all around. I’m not going to dwell on that loss for too long, but I really hope that first-year coach Chris DeMarco recognizes that he screwed up his allocation of playing time on a night when his starters all played at least 27 minutes, four of them with negative plus/minus ratings (the margin was even in Stewart’s minutes), while Satou Sabally (+6) and Pauline Astier (+4) played 27 minutes combined. Depth should be one of this team’s greatest strengths now that it’s healthy, but that can only manifest if the bench actually gets a chance to contribute. Tonight seems like another great opportunity to give the bench some time to shine given the cross-country road trip, Tuesday’s Commissioner’s Cup final preview at Las Vegas and the Sparks having a significant rest advantage.
Los Angeles hasn’t played since taking the aforementioned loss to Minnesota on Wednesday to close out Commissioner’s Cup play, its second straight loss by a combined 36 points after being thumped by the Golden State Valkyries at Ballhalla in the previous game. The Sparks have been alternating three-game win streaks and three-game losing streaks since a 1-3 start, with this game due to wrap up the latest skid if the pattern holds. If the two teams’ respective forms this season hold, it’s a get-right game for the Liberty, who bring the WNBA’s 4th-rated offense according to Her Hoop Stats (107.8 points per 100 possessions, knocked out of 3rd by Atlanta’s explosion yesterday) and 3rd-rated defense (99.8 points allowed per 100 possessions) to Hollywood to face a Sparks team that owns the 9th-rated offense (104.6) and 13th-rated defense (108.5). LA’s offense is as potent as any when Kelsey Plum is on the floor, however, and that looks like it’ll be the case after she missed the loss to Minnesota, as Cameron Brink (who’s out with an ankle injury) is the only player listed on either team’s injury report.
If not for my thoughts about the Liberty-Sparks showcase, today’s newsletter probably would’ve focused on the best on-court matchup, which sees the Golden State Valkyries (10-6) visit the Las Vegas Aces (11-4) (4:00 ET, CBS/Paramount+). Having already blown past 1,350 words, it’s gonna be a couple of quick previews from here out instead. Las Vegas came out flat in its 10-point win at Phoenix on Wednesday, but eventually made the necessary comeback and pulled away to secure its spot in next week’s Commissioner’s Cup final at Barclays Center. The Aces improved to 10-0 this season when they hold opponents to offensive ratings under 110 points per 100 possessions according to Her Hoop Stats (1-4 when they don’t play any defense), which is a mark Golden State has not come all that close to while dropping the first two meetings this season by margins of five and 10 points (the closer one was more recent and at Ballhalla). The Valkyries had a four-game win streak snapped on Friday night against the Lynx, letting what was briefly a double-digit lead slip away while falling to 3-6 when failing to put up a rating of at least 110 points per 100 possessions according to Her Hoop Stats. Moral of the story: if the Valkyries don’t light the Aces defense up, the Valkyries probably won’t win.
Today’s second game features the Washington Mystics (7-7) visiting the Minnesota Lynx (13-3) (6:00 ET, NBA TV/local affiliates) trying to snap the WNBA’s longest active win streak for the second straight game after Friday’s upset of New York. The Lynx, whose three-game win streak is technically tied with Atlanta, have won 11 of 12 dating back to the start of their recent eight-game streak, which is tied with the Liberty’s snapped streak for the WNBA’s longest this season. Rookie of the Year Olivia Miles struggled for the first time in her career in Friday’s win over Golden State, but then made a couple of the game’s most important free throws and one of its biggest defensive plays in the final seconds. I’m guessing we’re going to learn that Miles is the sort of player who bounces back from bad games by putting on a show (head coach Cheryl Reeve calls her “The Show,” after all), but there’s only one way to find out.