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)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. 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 works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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