Culture
The best women’s basketball games and performances from 2024 … and what’s next in 2025
Caitlin Clark. A’ja Wilson. Breanna Stewart.
Ratings growth. Increased attendance. Record merchandise sales.
It was a historic year across women’s basketball with professional and college games breaking into the broader cultural zeitgeist like never before. Before turning the page to 2025, our team of The Athletic women’s basketball writers are handing out their superlatives from the year that was. They highlight some of their favorite games and performances, and even tell you what they’re watching for as the new year gets underway.
Best game
Sabreena Merchant: Game 1 of the WNBA Finals. The drama of Minnesota’s comeback (and the fourth-quarter replay reviews) set the stage for a tense, back-and-forth five games with so many big moments, highlighted by Courtney Williams’ four-point play. Even though the Lynx didn’t win the championship, they gave us a series that will live on in our memories.
Chantel Jennings: National title game between Iowa and South Carolina. This game was most memorable because of how historic it felt in the moment. Sitting courtside, even as it became clear that South Carolina would cap its undefeated season in style, everyone understood we were witnessing history. My guess of 15 million viewers (a number that would’ve felt unbelievable even a few years earlier) was still nearly 4 million short of the women’s title game viewership totals.
Ben Pickman: I agree with Sabreena here. While Sabrina Ionescu’s game winner in Game 3 of the 2024 WNBA Finals makes this a close discussion, the madness that ensued in Game 1, coupled with Williams’ heroics at the end of regulation, lift that game above all others.
Best individual performance
Pickman: With all due respect to the countless records broken by Clark, Wilson and Angel Reese this year, Arike Ogunbowale orchestrated the best individual performance of the year. Sure, it came in the WNBA All-Star Game, but going up against Team USA, Ogunbowale set an All-Star Game record with 34 points, all of which came in the second half. Her 21 points in the third quarter were the most in a quarter in All-Star Game history, and the variety in which she scored was the best stretch of offensive basketball I saw in 2024.
High Level MVP Buckets 🤌
34 PTS, 6 REB, 6 AST for Arike Ogunbowale
2024 @ATT #WNBAAllStar | #WelcometotheW pic.twitter.com/MQbiC4r4UX
— WNBA (@WNBA) July 21, 2024
Merchant: Nyara Sabally’s third quarter in Game 5 of the WNBA Finals. Not the most prolific performance by any means, but her 9 points in less than five minutes — as New York busted out a previously unused three-big lineup — changed the game and helped the Liberty win their first title in franchise history.
Jennings: Clark’s first quarter against Michigan. Barring any kind of historic meltdown, everyone knew Clark would break the Division I scoring record against Michigan in February. But it was her unbelievable first quarter, starting the game 3-of-3 from the floor and capping it with a logo 3 to break the record, that felt like something out of a movie. She ended the night with a program-record 49 points (breaking teammate Hannah Stuelke’s record of 48 from just a few games earlier).
The moment Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA DI women’s basketball all-time scoring record. 👏 @IowaWBB | @bigten pic.twitter.com/f2t7ISYjyA
— NBC Sports (@NBCSports) February 16, 2024
Favorite reporting moment
Jennings: Gold medal game between Team USA and France. Diana Taurasi started the Olympic cycle by saying that not enough people were talking about the challenge of playing France in France, and Team USA got a taste of that in the gold medal game this summer. The energy and electricity in Bercy Arena was unforgettable, and hearing the French fans sing their national anthem ahead of the game gave me chills. It was nail-biter of a game, and for a decent portion of the second half, I wondered if I was really going to be writing a game story on how the run of eight straight gold medals for the American women was ending. But Team USA pulled out the victory as Gabby Williams’ shot that would’ve tied the game was just a few inches short of the 3-point line. The arena’s energy ebbed and flowed with every possession and was unlike anything I’d ever felt.
Pickman: I know I speak for the three of us in saying how fortunate we were to attend so many memorable moments in women’s basketball in 2024. But if we’re narrowing it down to just one moment of our own reporting, I’ll take breaking the news of Candace Parker’s retirement to Breanna Stewart. Parker retired on the first day of WNBA training camp, and the Aces announced the news not even three minutes before Stewart’s first media scrum of the season. I remember reading the release about Parker’s retirement over and over in the intervening minutes because I was so surprised by its timing — and really to ensure I wasn’t being punked. Then, I asked Stewart about it, and her reaction was one that I and the internet will remember for a while.
Candace Parker has retired from the WNBA.
I broke the news to her. Here’s her instant reaction ⬇️ https://t.co/t9CpY5wrnr pic.twitter.com/WD8unfrBdt
— Ben Pickman (@benpickman) April 28, 2024
Merchant: Covering the last Pac-12 tournament. For all of the conference’s lifers, like Tara VanDerveer, it gave the strange feeling of attending one’s own funeral. It was emotional to celebrate the greatness of the conference with past legends in attendance, especially in a year when there were so many individual highs for the Pac-12. It was a reminder of how our job in covering this sport is to tell the stories of the people involved, and when those people (broadcasters, administrators, families, etc.) are seeing their lives change in a meaningful way because of forces beyond their control, it hits you.
Best quote
Pickman: I’ll throw two out there. The first came in the WNBA Finals when I asked Courtney Williams if she knew what it meant to be “Minnesota nice.” She laughed and responded, “I ain’t never heard that.” Chantel is the Midwesterner in this roundtable, but I — as a New Yorker — had just assumed it was a rite of passage for anyone living in the state to know what “Minnesota nice” means. But alas. On another note, Cheryl Miller gave a rare news conference ahead of coaching Team WNBA in July’s All-Star Game and gave a particularly strong response when I asked her about the WNBA receiving a $2.2 billion TV rights contract. The line that stands out: “A two’s nice, an eight would be better,” referring to her belief the WNBA is still not receiving enough in its media rights deals.
Cheryl Miller was asked about reporting about the WNBA’s next national media rights deal at $2.2 billion.
“Not enough, not even close. Two’s nice, an eight would be better… Because they know… All you have to do is look at college basketball and what’s coming next.” pic.twitter.com/TkWDb32fc7
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) July 20, 2024
Merchant: Everything Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve said in her postgame presser after losing Game 5 of the WNBA Finals. From calling out the referees and saying the game was “stolen” to subtly shading New York for needing 28 years to win one title while Minnesota was chasing its fifth, the full 15 minutes was raw emotion at its finest.
Jennings: By the time coaches and players get to the Final Four, there aren’t many questions that can be asked in a news conference that they haven’t heard already. But Dawn Staley decided to switch things up in Cleveland when she kicked off her Final Four presser with a highly serious question for reporters: Is it lay down or lie down? And then, she dropped this gem: “Someone taught me you lie to get laid, right? Sorry. So excited to be here!”
Is it lying or laying?
For those of you who missed @dawnstaley’s opening statement today and need a laugh:@wachfox @GamecockWBB pic.twitter.com/mJxA2CaEF4
— amanda (@amanda_1815) April 4, 2024
What we’re looking forward to in 2025
Merchant: How do the Las Vegas Aces respond after coming up short of their expectations in 2024? If New York and Las Vegas are supposed to be the great rivals of this generation, then it’s the Aces’ turn to elevate their game and figure out how to once again play championship-worthy basketball for a full season. On a related note, the South Carolina Gamecocks lost their first game in more than a calendar year to UCLA, but they still appear poised to claim their second straight title. Can they end the eight-year repeat drought in the NCAA Tournament?
Jennings: The finances of women’s college hoops are going to drastically change in 2025. For starters, women’s college basketball will finally receive units starting during the 2025 NCAA Tournament (assuming the Division I membership approves the plan in January). Also during the 2025-26 academic year, revenue sharing will hit college sports. It’s an unprecedented moment in NCAA history, and it could shift the power balance in women’s college basketball. The name, image and likeness model will change significantly as the NCAA will need to approve all NIL deals, and the “pay-to-play” NIL model, as many coaches have called the current structure, will fall by the wayside. Money makes the college sports world go ’round, and 2025 is a year in which the money — especially in women’s college basketball — is going to change.
Pickman: One on-court matter: After an All-WNBA first-team season, what happens with Clark’s development and the Indiana Fever, more broadly, under new coach Stephanie White? One off-court: After a year of explosive growth in women’s basketball in 2024, what will TV ratings, attendance, merchandise sales and overall business changes look like next year?
(Photos of Caitlin Clark and A’ja Wilson: Scott Taetsch / NCAA Photos via Getty Images, Ethan Miller / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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