Hello, hoopheads! It’s a glorious day here in the Big Apple, where the basketball team I love won its third straight game last night and the one I don’t care for won its 12th in a row, which is pretty silly given it was Game 1 of the MNBA Finals. Most importantly, the World’s Most Famous Arena, once home to both of those teams (now just the one adorned in those accursed Mets colors), is going to be graced by the presence of the one and only Phoebe Lucille Bridgers tonight, and by some stroke of incredible luck, Bestie and I will be in attendance. As Pheebs is banning screen time on her pop-up tour, I won’t be in a position to recap tonight’s BezosVision doubleheader, but it looks to be a pretty damn good one. Should make some great viewing tomorrow while listening to the album Phoebe is obviously going to surprise-release tonight after the show!
Perhaps I’m only saying this because it’s the game I might catch the second half of, but I think the better of tonight’s two excellent matchups is the back end of the doubleheader, when the Golden State Valkyries (6-3) visit the league-leading Minnesota Lynx (7-2) (9:00 ET, Prime Video). It is a matchup of the clear best team over the first month of the WNBA season and one which has been arguably the second-best in the league in that span after all, although one only needs to look at last year’s Lynx for a lesson in how much it ultimately means to be the best team over the first month of the season. The Lynx lead the WNBA in both offensive rating (109.2 points per 100 possessions) and defensive rating (93.7 points allowed per 100 possessions) according to Her Hoop Stats, as well as sitting atop the list in both effective field goal percentage and opponent effective field goal percentage, which is certainly a formula that’s gonna win you a lot of basketball games. The Lynx’s net rating of +15.5 points per 100 possessions is better than double any other in the league so far. Golden State is third in that category at +7.3, but it’s functionally tied for second with the Atlanta Dream, who sit at +7.4 (unless a rounded tenth of a net point per 100 possessions means a lot to you, in which case, fine, Golden State is third). The Valkyries rank fourth at each end of the floor with an offensive rating of 107 points per 100 possessions and a defensive rating of 99.7 allowed.
Minnesota has won five in a row since falling to 2-2 in a home loss to the Chicago Sky, with two of the wins in the streak coming against the Sky (who’ve been freefalling since losing Rickea Jackson in the win over Minnesota), one of them coming against my title picks the Atlanta Dream (who won in Minnesota on opening day), and the most recent one coming by 34 points over the Phoenix Mercury on Monday to open Commissioner’s Cup play. Golden State’s offense should pose a better test for the Lynx defense than any opponent Minnesota has faced since opening it with a rout of the Toronto Tempo (2nd in offensive rating) as Atlanta (9th), Phoenix (12th) and Chicago (13th) all sit in the bottom half of the league in offensive rating. Including the portion of the season before the current win streak, those three teams make up seven of Minnesota’s nine games. The only exceptions are the win over Toronto and one by four points at Dallas (3rd in offensive rating) on the season’s seventh day.
Courtney Williams (17.8 points per game) has created a little separation in what had been a very tight race to lead the Lynx in scoring after dropping a 30-burger on the Mercury, her first one in a Lynx uniform. The shorter-haired StudBud also scored 25 points three games ago in the win over Atlanta and has had at least 15 in six of her last seven games, averaging 19.3 points, 5.4 rebounds and 3.7 assists per game in that span while making 54.2% from the field and 53.6% from deep (15-of-28) in that span. She made exactly 3 triples in five of the last seven games while going exactly 0-for-1 in each of the other two games, so my one piece of friendly advice before moving on to the Valks is don’t forget to shoot 3s.
As dominant as the Lynx have been, a Golden State win tonight would pull the Valkyries into a tie in the standings (not necessarily for first place, pending Atlanta’s result at Indiana in the first game). Golden State hasn’t lost a game yet when it posts an offensive rating of at least 100 points per 100 possessions (6-0), but it’s worth noting that all of those ratings were at least 108.4 points per 100 possessions, a mark Minnesota hasn’t allowed yet this season (the highest so far is 106.2 in the win at Dallas). The part about Minnesota feels particularly relevant because the Valkyries also haven’t won when they don’t have a triple-digit offensive rating. For a team with a reputation for being predicated on its defense, there hasn’t been the same correlation on that end of the floor so far. Golden State’s three losses came in the game when it had its highest defensive rating (112.3 points allowed per 100 possessions vs Las Vegas), the one where it had its lowest defensive rating (87.3 vs Chicago) and one which falls right in between (fourth-highest out of nine games, 103.4 at Indiana).
The Valks opened their Commissioner’s Cup journey with an 18-point home win over the Portland Fire on Tuesday, bouncing back from a more-decisive-than-the-margin 10-point loss to the Las Vegas Aces the previous time out. Veronica Valkyrie (Burton) continued her streak of starting every game in franchise history after being listed as questionable going into the game, and also continued to display why I believe she’s the WNBA’s best pure point guard at the moment with 10 points, 9 assists and just 1 turnover. Burton is tied for the team-high averaging 14.2 points per game and is eighth in the league with 6.1 assists per game while committing just 1.6 giveaways per game. All of those averages, including the turnovers, are suppressed by Golden State playing at the league’s slowest pace for the second straight season, but Burton’s early pace would make her the first player in WNBA history to average 14/6 with fewer than 2 turnovers per game.
The first half of tonight’s doubleheader also has quite a bit of banger potential as the Atlanta Dream (6-2) visit the Indiana Fever (4-4) (7:00 ET, Prime Video), but nowhere near enough to make me question the decision to seal my phone up in that Yondr pouch and abandon the game when the time comes for Phoebe Lucille Bridgers to come out and play. I’m also giving this game the one-paragraph treatment because it’s just about time to wrap this puppy up and pretend I can sleep during the early hours of Phoebe Day, but please don’t take the quick preview as me dissing this game like it involves the Connecticut Sun or something similarly untoward. Anyone who didn’t hit the Phoebe lottery should probably be watching this game, whether on BezosVision or by less odious means. Atlanta played with its food for a while on Tuesday night before eventually opening Cup play with a 16-point win over the Connecticut Sun, its second straight win and second game in a row posting a season-high offensive rating with a mark of 112.3 points per 100 possessions. The Dream matched their previous high of 106.2 in a rout of Portland the previous game, and the first 106.2 game came in the season’s fourth game — all of which is a roundabout way of saying Atlanta’s offense looks like it’s starting to come around, posting its three highest ratings so far in the last five games. The defense, which ranks second only to Minnesota allowing 95.6 points per 100 possessions, doesn’t need to come around. Indiana’s had a few days to regroup since getting throttled in Portland for its second straight loss and falling to 4-4 on the season in the process. The Fever have kind of been the reverse of the Valkyries so far, which is to say they’re 4-0 when they hold opponents to an offensive rating under 100 points per 100 possessions and 0-4 when they don’t, with all four of those ratings having been at least 108.4. That number, which you might remember as the low end of Golden State’s winning range, is the mark the Valkyries hung on Indiana two games ago. Also similar to the Valkyries is the fact that there isn’t as strong a correlation on offense so far despite that being the Fever’s signature end of the floor, as Indiana lost the game in which it had its highest offensive rating and won the game in which it had its lowest.