WNBA Roundup, June 27: Double Dose of Pride Takes Spotlight, Mabrey’s Encore Center Stage

Hello, hoopheads! The WNBA’s brief period without a team on a multi-game streak of either the winning or losing variety has gone as quickly as it came, as Chicago, Connecticut and Golden State all won their second straight games last night at home while sending Washington, Portland and Atlanta to their second losses in a row. The best game of the night and probably a top-five game so far this season closed out the slate when the Golden State Valkyries outlasted the Atlanta Dream by a 78-75 margin on Pride Night at Ballhalla. Gabby Williams scored 13 points of her 16 points in the fourth quarter and further endeared herself to a Ballhalla crowd that adored her as soon as she got there when she screamed “for the gays!” in the moments after the final buzzer and then added “I couldn’t lose on Pride Night” in the postgame interview. As it turns out, the latter sentiment has been a near-universal truth in the WNBA this season — home teams are 10-2 in Pride games so far, with the only losses coming when the Washington Mystics and Minnesota Lynx stole wins on each other’s floors on their Pride nights in the last week.

I always hate to give flowers to the detestable Connecticut Sun, but I do think it bears mentioning that Roneeka Hodges stepped in for head coach Rachid Meziane (out due to illness) last night and led the team to a rare win. If I were the rapidly dying Sun, I would hand the job to Hodges and let her make a case to be the team’s permanent head coach when it heads to Houston after the season. I mean absolutely no disrespect to Meziane, but I expect he will be let go either way after two disastrous seasons that were almost entirely not his fault. Hodges, on the other hand, is practically a lab-grown candidate to be the inaugural head coach of the new Houston Comets, as: 

Chicago’s win saw center Kamilla Cardoso make WNBA history with a 13-for-13 effort from the field, the most made field goals on a perfect shooting night in league history. She finished with a career-high 30 points as the Sky won consecutive games for the first time since the first two games of the season. Rookie guard Sydney Taylor added 29 points, her third time scoring at least 24 in the last six games, a span which includes her first five starts and during which she’s averaging 20.8 points per game. It was Taylor’s fourth 20-point game this season, second only to Olivia Miles among rookies (she has seven of them). I don’t want to overreact to two offensive outbursts against the league’s last-place defense according to Her Hoop Stats defensive ratings and tell you the Sky are about to turn their season around. It’s almost certainly too late for that. Taylor looks like she may be a diamond in the rough, however, and that would give the Sky’s youth movement a real boost by adding a reliable bucket-getter in the backcourt to go along with Cardoso, first-round rookie Gabriela Jaquez and the injured Rickea Jackson.

The bookends on today’s schedule are the last two Pride games of Pride month, with first one also set to be the first WNBA Pride game to take place north of the border as the Phoenix Mercury (6-13) visit the Toronto Tempo (9-9) (2:00 ET, CBS/Paramount+/local affiliates). This will also be Marina “Buckets Without Borders” Mabrey’s first game since tying two of the most venerated WNBA records with 53 points and 9 makes from deep on Thursday night against the woeful and deflated Los Angeles Sparks defense (which was in last place before Portland got torched last night and slipped past it). Two of the three previous times that a player scored 50 points in a WNBA game, they followed it up with fewer than 20, as Riquna Williams scored 17 points in her encore while A’ja Wilson scored 18. Liz Cambage, however, scored as many points in her encore (35) as Williams and Wilson did in theirs combined, so there’s reason to believe the pendulum swings both ways. Some more good news for Mabrey and the Tempo is that the Mercury are 12th in defensive rating and they’ve been gracious visitors to both Dallas and New York’s Pride parties already. Phoenix will also notably be without Alyssa Thomas as she serves a one-game suspension for what was retroactively deemed a flagrant 2 foul against Caitlin Clark earlier this week. As I’ve said elsewhere in conversations both public and private, I think AT deserved a suspension — I actually would’ve given her two games, as missing one is essentially just the enforcement of the retroactive flagrant 2. I also think that, as tends to be the case when matters involve Clark, this whole thing has been blown out of proportion.

A loss to Toronto would make Phoenix the first team to lose three Pride games this season, but it wouldn’t be alone for long, as the loser of tonight’s Atlanta Dream (12-6) at Seattle Storm (4-15) (9:00 ET, local affiliates/League Pass) game will also drop a third Pride game. Atlanta was on the wrong end of the Indiana Fever’s Pride game before suffering the loss last night at Ballhalla, while Seattle lost to Las Vegas and Phoenix. My picks to win the WNBA title, the Dream have followed their first win streak longer than two games (it got to four) with their first consecutive losses of the season over the last three nights at Ballhalla, although they were certainly more competitive last night than in the first game. The location didn’t help, but I think Golden State is also just a bad matchup for Atlanta as one of the only teams that can disrupt the Dream’s offense just as much as the Dream can disrupt theirs while also being able to make more 3-pointers. Atlanta finished those two losses with offensive ratings of 88.0 and 87.2 points per 100 possessions according to Her Hoop Stats, with the difference in competitiveness mostly coming from the fact that they got their defensive rating back on track last night (91.8 points allowed per 100 possessions) compared to Wednesday (101.3). Despite the Storm having recently lost a franchise-record 11 straight games, they’re not necessarily the team you want to try to snap out of an offensive funk against on the second night of a back-to-back, sitting in the middle of the league in defensive rating at Her Hoop Stats (8th, 103.8). The Storm snapped their record skid with a 99-88 win over my beloved New York Liberty on Thursday behind Flau’jae Johnson’s career-high 28 points and are looking for their first consecutive wins of the season.

And that brings us to the game that has gotten several orders of magnitude more coverage than the ones before and after it on today’s schedule, as the Los Angeles Sparks (8-9) visit the Indiana Fever (10-8) (8:00 ET, CBS/Paramount+). First and foremost, I thought Seerat Sohi of The Ringer and my Bluesky mutual Maitreyi Anantharaman of Defector both put out excellent pieces yesterday about the Industrial Complex hysteria that surrounds Caitlin Clark, who is without question the league’s most visible player, if only because the league has made sure of that fact. I’ll warn you not to expect that kind of depth or nuance here, as they’re outstanding writers while I am merely a funny researcher with a newsletter. The most important thing for me to mention, even though you’re probably already aware, is that Clark is not playing today. No one associated with the Fever seems to be making the assertion that it’s a direct result of Thomas’ fist to her throat or the landing space foul that wasn’t called a reckless closeout later in the game, which drew just as much of Fever coach Stephanie White’s ire in the aftermath of the Fever’s loss to the Mercury on Wednesday. Clark is instead out with a back injury that has seen her listed as probable on every Fever injury report for the last five weeks or so before ultimately playing in every game. That started happening after Clark was a last-minute scratch for a game against the Portland Fire despite being absent from the previous injury report, an absence which provoked a league investigation for potentially skirting injury reporting rules. 

I’m not pretending to know anything about Clark’s back, but the Fever have spoken openly about wanting to manage her workload after injuries derailed her 2025 — the first absence this season was publicly called a planned rest night before quickly that was quickly walked back — and it’s hard not to notice that the games she’s missed have been home games that the Fever ought to be able to win without her (they cruised the first time). The uncomfortable truth is that the Fever using the specter of a back injury to engage in some creative load management is probably the best-case scenario, because the alternative is that Clark genuinely does have a lingering back injury that is threatening to ruin another of her seasons. That happening would be a disaster for the league financially, for Indiana on the court, and for the English language every time it provoked Christine Brennan to vomit out another insane screed. On top of all of that, I just think it would suck, because injuries suck and I genuinely enjoy watching Clark play. I just wish one could believe she’s more like a top-10 player with MVP potential than a transformational league savior without risking running afoul of the Caitlin Clark Industrial Complex.