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Is Caitlin Clark or Angel Reese the top newcomer so far? WNBA rookie rankings
Even in a game where Angel Reese was ejected, her impact was undeniable. The Chicago Sky rookie was tossed for picking up a second technical with just over two minutes remaining in Tuesday’s loss to the New York Liberty. Her second foul was rescinded a day later by the WNBA.
Nevertheless, Reese had already logged 13 points and 10 rebounds, recording her second double-double. It is the kind of statline Chicago has already come to expect from the No. 7 pick in April’s draft. Reese has been a consistent contributor over the first month of the WNBA season, but she isn’t alone among members of her rookie class.
From their final college seasons through the WNBA Draft to the start of their pro careers, these rookies have brought new star power and a fascinating dynamic to the league. They’re working out the kinks as they adjust to a higher level, but there’s no doubt they are delivering in meaningful ways.
Feeling the love, Skytown 💙 pic.twitter.com/nK2wIbN9lR
— Chicago Sky (@chicagosky) May 26, 2024
Though it feels like the year has just started, somehow, someway, some franchises have already crossed the quarter mark of the season. With that, here’s our look at the five best rookies the first month of the season.
15.6 PPG | 6.4 APG | 5.1 RPG
Clark has been the center of attention during her first month in the WNBA, especially last week. But amid some struggles, she still has found ways to produce. She is aggressive attacking the basket, already attempting 48 free throws, which are the seventh most in the WNBA. She’s also impacted Indiana’s offense despite not hitting 3-pointers at nearly the same clip as she did at Iowa. Reese certainly has made a case for the No. 1 spot, but Clark also shoulders significantly more defensive pressure than any rookie. Her 25.8 percent usage rate is more than WNBA stars like Skylar Diggins-Smith, Breanna Stewart, Kelsey Plum and Sabrina Ionescu. She’s shown growing pains and reasons for optimism. A focus in June should be cutting down on turnovers, as Clark leads the league (56) and has 21 more than Phoenix Mercury guard Natasha Cloud, who is second.
GO DEEPER
Has Caitlin Clark lived up to the hype so far in her WNBA rookie season? Experts debate
2. Angel Reese, Chicago Sky
10.8 PPG | 9.0 RPG | 5.0 ORPG
At LSU, Reese recorded double-doubles on a near nightly basis. Thus far, she’s been pretty close to that. Entering Thursday night’s matchup against the Washington Mystics, Reese had recorded at least 8 points and 8 rebounds in six of her eight games..
Reese’s impact on Chicago has been tangible. She leads all rookies with 9 rebounds per game and leads all WNBA players with her average of 5 offensive rebounds per game. Sky coach Teresa Weatherspoon, a Naismith Hall of Fame player, has taken a liking to what Reese provides, especially on the glass.
“It’s a knack,” Weatherspoon said two weeks ago. “She’s just relentless. She does a relentless pursuit for the ball and that’s who she is, that’s what she’s about.”
Reese frequently establishes high-quality rebounding position and is aggressive in attacking the rim if she isn’t boxed out by opposing bigs. On offense, she also has already shown she’s unafraid of contact, attempting at least six free throws in six separate games.
Reese’s impact has been evident despite other limitations in her game, making her first month especially impressive.
So far, almost all of her offense has come around the rim. She’s attempted only nine jump shots this season, according to Synergy Sports, making just one. Even around the basket, she has struggled, shooting 29.9 percent. Yet, minimizing Reese’s importance is a focus for Sky opponents.
Improving her perimeter shooting and ability to finish around the hoop will be paramount to her growth. Chicago guard Marina Mabrey has also assisted Reese on only six baskets, an indication there is room for improvement in Chicago’s pick-and-roll action. But if this is Reese’s floor, the Sky have plenty of reasons to be optimistic about their future.
8.0 PPG | 5.4 RPG | 2.6 BPG
Brink, like Reese and Clark, has shown flashes of the skills that made her a star at Stanford. Although the Sparks are just 2-7, Brink scored a career-high 21 points in 23 minutes against the Dallas Wings on May 26, and she tallied at least 5 rebounds six times. Coach Curt Miller hasn’t stretched the No. 2 pick’s usage. Brink has yet to play more than 30 minutes in a game but she’s displayed her offensive repertoire. She’s been solid on catch-and-shoot opportunities and looks comfortable around the rim, shooting 63 percent from the field, according to Synergy Sports. Though Brink developed a reputation as a vaunted shot-blocker in college (and is averaging 2.6 blocks per game so far), some opposing bigs have succeeded going up against her. Brink allows bigs she’s guarding to shoot 43.9 percent.
Despite rather limited minutes, Rickea Jackson’s 3-point shooting and rebounding have stood out. (Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)
9.1 PPG | 3.0 RPG | 46.7 FG
Jackson has played the fewest minutes (208) of anyone in my current top five, but she’s taken advantage of her opportunities. She’s tied for the third most 3-pointers (seven) by rookies, but she’s shooting the second-best percentage of any rookie with at least 10 attempts (only Alissa Pili is better). She’s been a solid rebounder (3.0 per game) and proven she can score in different facets. Sometimes that has taken the form of being aggressive in transition, other times from behind the arc or slashing to the rim. She’s made at least 50 percent of her shot attempts in five of nine games, though done so only once since being inserted into the starting lineup on May 28.
6.6 PPG | 5.0 APG | 2.6 RPG
Uzun is making her WNBA debut this summer, but she is no stranger to playing with — and against — some of the world’s best competition. The 26-year-old guard spent last winter playing for EuroLeague champion Turkish club Fenerbahçe, where she played alongside notables like Napheesa Collier, Kayla McBride, Natasha Howard, Nina Milic and Emma Meesseman. Uzun made the Wings’ opening night roster after signing a training camp contract and was thrust into the franchise’s starting lineup.
Right away, she’s been trusted to draw the best out of a team with top-four aspirations. Uzun is averaging 31.3 minutes per game, the second most on the roster and the second most among rookies behind Clark. Though she’s continuing to figure out how to play alongside Arike Ogunbowale, the early returns are positive. Twelve of Uzun’s 40 assists have been to Ogunbowale, and she has also found Dallas bigs Teaira McCowan and Monique Billings on multiple occasions. In addition to her offensive playmaking, the 5-foot-10 Uzun has been an excellent defender so far, with opponents shooting only 28.6 percent on shots she’s guarding, according to Synergy Sports.
🇹🇷Dün gece yine ilk 5 başlayan ve 26:24 dakika saha kalan milli oyuncumuz Sevgi Uzun, karşılaşmayı 4 sayı (1-8 FG, 2-2 FT), 2 ribaund, 4 asist ve 1 top çalma ile tamamladı.pic.twitter.com/FH2dwrQ6II https://t.co/QnJHxul5Ml
— Women Hoops (@womenhoop) June 6, 2024
She plays with fearlessness on both ends. Exhibit A: It didn’t go down, but she nearly made the shot of the year when she threw an inbounds off Sun center Brionna Jones with less than 10 seconds remaining in a one-point game, collected her own pass, and shot it.
Others considered: Julie Vanloo ( Mystics), Pili (Lynx), Aaliyah Edwards (Mystics), Kate Martin (Las Vegas Aces)
(Top photos of Caitlin Clark, left, and Angel Reese: Jeff Haynes / NBAE via Getty Images)
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
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