After focusing on the top half of the playoff bracket last week, it’s time to check in on a surprisingly spirited race for the eighth seed. With about two weeks left in the regular season, seven playoff teams are essentially set in stone, though the matchups aren’t yet set.

There is drama at the bottom of the postseason bracket. Chicago has been in a tailspin since the Olympic break, relinquishing what had been a comfortable lead over the lottery teams. The Sky have lost six in a row, suffering from the absence of Chennedy Carter (illness) and already without Marina Mabrey due to the pre-deadline trade. Chicago is still slotted into the No. 8 seed by virtue of a 2-1 head-to-head tiebreaker over Atlanta; however, a Sept. 17 showdown against the Dream looms charge. The Sky don’t have a true incentive to tank out of the playoffs because they don’t own their first-round pick, but they do have a swap with Dallas. If it seems like the Wings also will land outside the top eight, missing the postseason would ensure that Chicago at least gets a lottery pick, even if it’s not the best selection.

The Atlanta Dream (11-21) have now matched the Chicago Sky’s record! 😳 #WNBA pic.twitter.com/ei16oNr1V1

— I talk hoops 🏀 (@trendyhoopstars) September 2, 2024

Atlanta seems to be the betting favorite to make the postseason. The Dream have the fifth-best net rating in the league since the Olympic break and are tied in the standings with the Sky. They also got a gift in the form of Natasha Cloud’s suspension for technical fouls accumulation against the Mercury, improving the possibility of stealing a win in Phoenix to end their West Coast road trip. Atlanta also doesn’t own its first-round pick in the next draft, so it has every incentive to push toward the postseason.

A week ago, it seemed as if only two teams were in contention for this final playoff spot. But recent surges by the Dallas Wings and Washington Mystics added additional intrigue. Dallas had won three in a row — including back-to-back wins over Las Vegas and Minnesota — before succumbing to Indiana on Sunday. Even so, the Wings are only two games out of the final playoff seed spot, and their next three contests are against the Mystics, Dream and Sky, which gives Dallas a chance to make up ground quickly. The Wings also have the most talent among any team chasing the playoffs and the best chance of winning postseason games if they make it there.

Washington also sports a recent three-game winning streak and hasn’t really lost a step since trading away Myisha Hines-Allen. The Mystics have four games remaining against the other three teams in this field, and their recent play suggests they are probably closer to a .500 team than the one that started the season 0-12.

The race for eight isn’t nearly as consequential as how the top seeds shake out, considering most of these teams aren’t really capable of hanging with the New York Liberty in a three-game playoff series, there is always value in seeing how players respond to game pressure and higher stakes. Even if younger squads like the Sky and Mystics don’t advance to the playoffs, merely being in the chase is a useful experience. The games still matter.

Three standout performances

1. White T A’ja Wilson is absolutely terrifying

The two-time MVP and reigning two-time defensive player of the year has become additionally famous for her tunnel fits over the years, dazzling as much off the court as she does on it. But recently, Wilson has taken to a simpler approach, coming to games in a plain white T-shirt and sweats before changing into her Aces uniform. As she told the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “I have to want to put on clothes. Right now, where I am, I don’t feel like I deserve to put on (dressier) clothes.”

No matter what Wilson wears to a game, defenses have no prayer of stopping her. On Sunday against Phoenix — an opponent that boasts Brittney Griner but little other forward depth — Wilson scored 41 points on 16-of-23 shooting, adding 17 rebounds, one block and no turnovers in an 18-point road win. Wilson became the first player in WNBA history to post 40 points and 17 rebounds in a single game, and she tied Breanna Stewart and Diana Taurasi for the most 40-point games ever. As a reminder, Wilson is only 28.

Through 32 games this season, Wilson has 42 turnovers, which belies comprehension. She had to create more of her offense than usual to start the year without Chelsea Gray and still regularly navigates through double teams. She operates with a live dribble considering how often she faces up to score, instead of with her back to the basket. Turnovers should be the price of doing business for such a high-volume scorer (the highest in league history to date, if her average holds for the rest of the season), and she still leads the WNBA in turnover percentage (5.5), more than two percentage points better than second-place Kayla Thornton.

The Aces were 3-4 since the Olympic break (19-12 overall) when Wilson made that statement. That record may have made Wilson feel that she wasn’t performing to her standard — and why I argued last week that she wasn’t the no-brainer MVP — but it’s still worth acknowledging just how ridiculous her individual performances have been. No less an authority than Taurasi called Wilson’s season “unthinkable.” Already one of the game’s all-time greats, Wilson continues to get better.

“What she’s doing right now is unthinkable. … She’s just unguardable. You guys look at her as a post, I look at her as a guard.”

Diana Taurasi to @AlecCipollini about the Aces’ A’ja Wilson against the Mercury (41 points, 17 rebound) and her dominance in the WNBA this season. pic.twitter.com/6dshfeXf1F

— DANA (@iam_DanaScott) September 1, 2024

2. Satou Sabally’s 3-pointer is a difference-maker

The first thing that stood out when Sabally returned to the German national team was how comfortably she stepped into pull-up 3-pointers. The long ball has historically been the differentiator between good and great seasons for Sabally. When she shoots above 30 percent (which isn’t even league-average) from distance, she’s an All-Star.

Sabally is currently canning 48.8 percent of her triples, including nine during the Wings’ recent three-game winning streak. Dallas forces Sabally to the perimeter on offense more so than European teams because of the glut of frontcourt players on the Wings, but Sabally is making that a winning proposition. Even though she’s taken nearly as many midranger jumpers (23) as shots in the restricted area (24), her efficiency hasn’t wavered. Her effective field-goal percentage is a career-best 55.6 (though seven games, admittedly), and Dallas is back from the dead after a horrific start to the season.

Satou Sabally stuffed the stat sheet to lead the @DallasWings to victory!

🔥 28 PTS (10-14 FGM)
🔥 7 REB
🔥 5 AST
🔥 4 3PM
🔥 2 STLS pic.twitter.com/YBA6tH9e3I

— NBA (@NBA) August 28, 2024

If anything, Sabally might be better served shifting more of her shot attempts beyond the arc. In the loss to Indiana, she made 4-of-9 3-pointers but only 2-of-7 2-pointers, as she shared the court the entire game with two other bigs. The Wings’ defense has still been terrible even though they have strung together a few wins, so they need to continue to put up high point totals. More 3s from Sabally, especially if she is shooting the ball this well, could be part of the recipe. It would also save the oft-injured star from taking a beating in the paint, since Dallas needs her on the court as much as possible to close out the regular season.

3. The best backcourt in the league?

The superlatives keep coming for Caitlin Clark, but her backcourt mate Kelsey Mitchell has been no less impressive during Indiana’s surge. Since the Olympic break, Mitchell is the WNBA’s second-leading scorer (she’s ninth for the full season), while shooting 50 percent overall, 40 percent on 3-pointers and 90 percent on free throws. Leave her for a second, as Sabally did when she and Arike Ogunbowale miscommunicated on a switch Sunday, and Mitchell will rise up with no hesitation. She and Clark have an easy chemistry on backdoor cuts as Mitchell is one of the fastest guards in the game, especially when her defender turns her head for a beat. Indiana’s transition attack has been effective with Mitchell running the floor and Clark hitting her with outlet passes.

THE FEVER ARE THE MOST FUN TEAM IN BASKETBALLpic.twitter.com/cRefDPsh4w

— whitney medworth (@its_whitney) September 1, 2024

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Against Dallas, the pair combined for 64 points and 15 assists. To be fair, the Wings’ defense creates some inflated offensive totals, but the ease with which Mitchell and Clark created offense was something to behold.

It begs the question of whether the Fever already have the best backcourt in the WNBA. Neither Clark nor Mitchell is an ace defender, but that isn’t exactly necessary when they’re scoring at this rate. Perimeter players for New York and Las Vegas will have their say in the postseason, but for now, the fact that Clark and Mitchell already entered the discussion is a win for Indiana.

(As an aside, between Wilson and Mitchell, it’s been quite a moment for the 2018 draft class. Even beyond those top two picks, Gabby Williams, Jordin Canada, Hines-Allen, Ariel Atkins and Monique Billings could all play meaningful roles in the stretch run of the 2024 season).

Rookie of the week

Kamilla Cardoso, Chicago Sky

Cardoso had a bit of a lull, taking four shot attempts in each of the Sky’s losses against Washington and Indiana last week. She responded with the best game of her young career against Minnesota (albeit another loss). Part of the change was how she was used in the offense. The Sky generally throw the ball directly to Cardoso in the post; considering she’s 6-foot-7, runs the floor well, and works hard to seal her defender, it’s the most efficient way of getting Cardoso involved. However, it’s also predictable and allows defenses to bring help. Even a team like the Lynx that isn’t particularly tall inside can send a second defender to bother Cardoso at the rim.

What was fun about Cardoso’s performance against Minnesota was that she ran some pick-and-rolls with Lindsey Allen, and Allen delivered a couple of pinpoint pocket passes that gave Cardoso open looks inside. Chicago’s spacing isn’t always good enough to enable clean entry passes into the paint, but if Cardoso evacuates the lane to set a screen, that creates some daylight inside. Cardoso isn’t the most versatile big offensively, but she can definitely do more than catch lobs over the top. The Sky should be using these opportunities to expand her scoring skill set, especially with a roster that doesn’t have a ton of offensive pop.

Kamilla Cardoso continues to improve with each game ✅

The rookie posted a career-high 22 points and 9 rebounds in today’s loss vs. the Lynx!#WelcomeToTheW pic.twitter.com/e14joh3OQx

— WNBA (@WNBA) September 1, 2024

Game to circle

Las Vegas Aces at New York Liberty, 4 p.m. (ET) Sunday

This is the last regular-season meeting between the 2023 WNBA finalists, and thus the last chance for the Aces to prove that the Liberty haven’t passed them by. Getting swept during the regular season doesn’t mean Las Vegas can’t flip the script during the playoffs — for instance, in 2020, the Storm lost both regular-season games to the Aces but swept them in the finals. But another loss certainly wouldn’t be a good omen, especially with Las Vegas now at full strength.

(Photo of Angel Reese: Michael Hickey / Getty Images)

The basic arc of Andy Roddick’s life goes something like this:

One day you’re a chirpy, hot-shot teenager with a thunderclap serve, who wears a baseball cap on a tennis court before that becomes a thing, and then one day you’re not good enough anymore, because inevitably nobody is. In between, you go to the top of a sport that doesn’t love chirpy teenagers in baseball caps all that much.

Then one day you wake up and you’re a soon-to-be middle aged guy at the end of his career, wondering what the rest of your life is supposed to look like. There has to be something else besides 27 holes a day to occupy the brain.

Coach? Commentator? The guy who gets paid to show up and shake hands with some company’s sales force, to tell stories about what it was like to face Roger Federer and all your worst fears, in the forbearance of overtime in the fifth set of a Wimbledon final, shadows slanting across the grass?

Roddick didn’t have an answer. So what did he do? What came after everything the itinerant life of pro tennis had taught him, after 15 years of lonely hotel rooms, of too-long layovers in places he might never have chosen to be? “Wasn’t really motivated to work much,” he said.

He disappeared for a while, from the experience that made him vow to never “punt control of my geography to someone else again.”

Then he decided to wing it, thoughtfully.

“I’ve always been curious,” he said.

Roddick is talking from his garage in North Carolina. It doubles as the set for “Served with Andy Roddick,” the weekly (and sometimes more frequent) podcast that the Tennis Channel shows on its T2 network. It’s also where he sometimes beams in from for post-match analysis. There are plenty of moments when he still sounds like that chirpy teenager in the baseball cap, like when he recounts a guy questioning one of his calls during a recent set at a local club.

“Really pal? I played three Wimbledon finals, won the U.S. Open and spent three months as the world No. 1, and you think I’m hooking you on Court 11 in the Carolina ‘burbs?”

Listen a little more closely, and something else becomes pretty clear. Somewhere along the way during the dozen years since he called it quits, Andy Roddick morphed into a fully fledged grown-up, whether he likes it or not.

How did that happen? How did that chirpy teenager suddenly get to this middle-age existence, wife and kids and in-law dinners, wearing the status of millennial tennis wise man?

Where does life, his and ours, go?

When Roddick became a spunky 21-year-old, he went to the cathedral of American tennis in 2003 and came out with the trophy in his hands and the cap on his head. 21 years on, Roddick, 42, is a dozen years into retirement yet younger than Roger Federer.

No American man has cradled that U.S. Open trophy since, with No. 12, No. 14, and No. 20 seeds, Taylor Fritz, Tommy Paul, and Frances Tiafoe all vying to match Roddick’s achievement in 2024.

Roddick was still in his 20s when he married Sports Illustrated model Brooklyn Decker. Roddick and Decker, who is now a successful actor, have two children: Hank, their 8-year-old son, and Stevie, their 6-year-old daughter. Given what they could be doing, they live what is, by all accounts, a pretty normal life close to her parents. They gather for dinners on many Sunday evenings.

He has also amassed a small fortune built around what he described as “the most boring business you’ll ever hear about.” It’s a commercial real estate company that owns more than 100 properties. He and a partner began to scoop them up on the cheap after the financial meltdown in 2008. Their tenants are companies like Starbucks, Lowe’s, and Home Depot.

One thing he doesn’t do is coach. One thing he does do is stay in regular contact with roughly a dozen tour players who come to him for advice. Sometimes, it’s just texts or a phone call. Sometimes, they appear in North Carolina for a day or two of serving help from one of the masters of the most important shot in tennis. Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula are in this group.

“I’ve never been paid for coaching and I never will be paid for coaching,” he said.

Roddick is a tennis nerd who likes talking through shots and strategy and the psychological challenges of the game. Don’t even think about asking him to consider heading out on the road to focus on one player.

During the final years of his career, there were some hints that life might go this way for Roddick. Pretty much everyone missed them.

Maybe it was the ball cap. Maybe it was that chin-first approach to the game, or the increasingly visible frustration of having the three best players of the modern era come along and hijack his career. The raw pain of those three final Sunday losses in five years to Federer at Wimbledon, plus another in a U.S. Open final, may have dulled. But it’s always there, a thematic reference point that can become jovial material for a podcast episode, a callback for the audience to go: “Hey, I know that bit!”

He won the U.S. Open in 2003, the last American man to do so. (Nick Laham / Getty Images)

To be a master of delusion and magical thinking is practically a requirement for world-class athletes. They have to convince themselves that they can win any match or game against anyone in the world on any day. Roddick could do that — and then he couldn’t.

A drubbing from Novak Djokovic was what broke him. Djokovic deigned to spend just 54 minutes on beating him 6-2, 6-1 at the All England Club during the 2012 Olympics, on Roddick’s best surface. These guys at the top of the game had a level he no longer possessed, if he ever even did.

Cursed with self-awareness, he woke up in a New York hotel room a month later, in the middle of the U.S. Open. He was feeling a little strange. He called Decker, who was out for a walk, and asked her to come back to the hotel. He needed to talk to her about something.

When she got there, he told her he would be done playing when the tournament spat him out. It didn’t matter that he’d won two of his last four tournaments. Didn’t matter that he could have likely survived with a ranking somewhere between No. 5 and No. 40 for another four or five years. Other statesmen of his era either retired just recently or are still out there, toiling in the three-figure ranks. Roddick wasn’t going to do that.

A few days later, he lost in the fourth round to Juan Martin Del Potro. The tournament honored him with a ceremony at its conclusion. And that was that.

“I know who I am, and I know who I’m not,” he said.

It’s a quality that has come in handy for Roddick, and in a meandering way, it helped bring him back to New York for this year’s U.S. Open, to accept an award for his work with hundreds of less-advantaged children in his hometown of Austin.

They participate in after-school and summer enrichment programs created by his foundation. The programs involve a bit of sport, but are more focused on making up the learning gap with wealthier children, who have access to all manner of extracurricular activities and summer camps when they are not in school.

Roddick started the foundation when he was still a teenager and without much thought. Raise some money. Give some tennis clinics to kids who probably would not be exposed to the sport otherwise. Pat yourself on the back.

For a decade, the foundation was what he described as a “typical athlete nonprofit.” Use your celebrity to raise a bunch of money and get your friends involved, and turn the money over to organizations that you like.

“Elton John would come play,” he said. “That’s not a hard thing to sell.”

Then during one of his final U.S. Opens, he was having dinner with one of his oldest friends, Jeff Lau. Lau is a buddy from their earliest years in junior tennis in Austin, when Roddick was 8 and Lau was 10. Roddick’s tennis got him to No. 1 in the world. Lau’s tennis helped him gain entry into West Point. After graduating, he served overseas, including in Iraq.

Andy Roddick serves to Juan Martin del Potro in his last U.S. Open. (Chris Trotman / Getty Images for USTA)

Lau eventually left the military and began working as an investment banker in New York. He and Roddick would have dinner whenever he came through the city, especially during the U.S. Open.

At one of those dinners, Lau started quizzing Roddick about the foundation, its mission, its structure, and its plan for survival. He wasn’t impressed.

“You’re on your way to irrelevance,” Lau told him. “How long do you think Elton John is going to come play for you?”

At the time, Roddick figured he had about three more years on the tour. He actually had about one. He left the dinner seriously irritated at Lau — because he knew Lau was right.

Roddick’s next thought was to start a charter school, like his hero, Andre Agassi, had done in Las Vegas. Then the smart people in and out of the government of Austin, as well as lots of parents, told him that the city didn’t need another charter school.

During their research, they stumbled on a piece of information that floored them. Texas sometimes used its fifth-grade literacy rates to project how many new prison beds it would need in the future. Could they lift those rates up?

“The biggest gap was actually out of school time,” Lau said.

That meant after school, when kids whose parents are working a second or third job are home alone, while more advantaged children are receiving private lessons or other extracurricular enrichment. Then come summers, when it’s all too easy for kids to give back the progress they have made in the previous 10 months.

When Roddick and Lau launched their programs, they wanted proof that they were making a difference. After five years, they saw what they hoped they would see.

More than 200 Austin kids took part in this summer’s Learn All the Time program. According to Roddick’s foundation they miss fewer days of school, have fewer disciplinary problems and perform better on state tests than their peers.

The seriousness that brought about that initiative carries through on “Served.” The energy is all jocular, sitting around naming tennis players, reviewing results, and making predictions sure to be wrong, but as with Roddick the player, there’s brain inside the baseball cap. These are the two sides to Roddick, who is serious about his work but not too serious about himself.

The Roddick that Roddick presents during the show might easily be confused with some random, pretty decent middle-aged club player, who maybe rose to No. 700 in the world and took home a couple of Challenger titles. Rather than a guy who was world No. 1, and won a few Challenger Tour events and a U.S. Open.

There’s almost always some moment in every episode where he puts the Big Three in one category and then lumps himself with everyone else, and that includes you, with a reference to his own game that is something along the likes of, “schlubs like us.”

Andy Roddick’s on-court demeanour belied the seriousness of his thoughts about tennis. (Ian Walton / Getty Images)

He’s also not afraid to be on the receiving end of just about anything. Lindsay Davenport, a longtime friend who is a former world No. 1 and the current Billie Jean King Cup coach for the U.S., called him out for mocking U.S. Open quarterfinalist Emma Navarro. Navarro had had to perform something, ahead of her inaugural appearance on the national team. She chose to rap.

It wasn’t a great performance. Then again, Navarro is a tennis player, not a hip-hop artist, and Davenport didn’t like the way Roddick had been, in her view, demeaning to a good-hearted young woman who was playing along with a joke. It wasn’t so much his words but his tone.

“You didn’t have to be such a…” she said. You can finish the sentence. The word rhymes with “stick.”

Lulled by all the irreverence, the pretty important tennis nuggets can rattle past at Roddick’s excited clip, especially when it comes to serving, his greatest skill.

He was one of the first to notice that Alexander Zverev had lowered his toss by about a foot, letting him crack the ball as never before. The adjustment has taken him to No. 2 in the world.

Gauff’s second-serve issues? She probably wants to move her toss back a bit, he explained in pretty simple terms. She’s trying to go too far forward into the court, and the further forward you go, the harder it is to control the serve.

Gauff followed his advice. After her struggles at this year’s U.S. Open with her serve, she may well seek more of it.

GO DEEPER

‘They slow things down in their minds’: How tennis players return 130mph serves

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Carlos Alcaraz’s serve, having been good but kind of unthreatening compared to just about everything else he does, became borderline deadly at Wimbledon. Novak Djokovic couldn’t believe what was skidding and jumping off the grass in the final. Roddick saw why. Instead of raising his arms in a classic straight V-shape, Alcaraz was rotating his back shoulder more and coming around the ball. It was hitting the court and taking off in a more dramatic way. It probably felt a lot heavier when it hit Djokovic’s strings.

Drop any of those nuggets at your next tennis barbecue. Your buddies will be impressed.

He also took time to reveal his recent brush with skin cancer (he’s OK, but wear sunscreen, please) and he was one of the more sober voices after news broke that Jannik Sinner had tested positive for a banned anabolic steroid. No, he said, it wasn’t likely a signal that sustained doping, outside of those two failed tests, was a part of Sinner’s success. He explained the randomness of testing, the knocks on the door. He even explained it to Nick Kyrgios, who has his own “Good Trouble” media vehicle and no fear of having an opinion.

Lots of people in tennis have these thoughts. Players, fans, social media creators, tennis journalists. Roddick’s versions of these thoughts cut through, and it isn’t all to do with the cachet of being a former world No. 1, or taking Federer to an edge over which he would not be pushed.

“It’s one thing to be able to see the game and have clever thoughts,” said Bob Wiley, a top programmer at The Tennis Channel. “It’s another to be able to express yourself succinctly so people can understand it.”

Where all of this leads, not even Roddick knows, as if any of us ever do. At the moment, though, it’s a pretty beautifully boring grown-up existence.

“I just really like being home,” he said.

(Top photos: Cynthia Lum, WireImage; Tim Clayton, Corbis / Getty Images; Design: Eamonn Dalton for The Athletic)

By going chalk, United States captain Jim Furyk has created intrigue ahead of this month’s Presidents Cup.

Furyk selected Nos. 7-12 on the team standings for his six captain’s picks, announced on Tuesday. The move means Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley will be playing for Team USA for the first time in a decade, but longtime American stalwart Justin Thomas will be left at home.

The other American picks were Sam Burns, Russell Henley, Max Homa, Brian Harman and Tony Finau. Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, Collin Morikawa, Wyndham Clark, Patrick Cantlay and Sahith Theegala were the six automatic selections to the team.

The Presidents Cup is at Royal Montreal Golf Club from Sept. 26-29.

“Just trying to put the puzzle pieces together,” Furyk said in explaining his pick, calling it a “tough omission” but otherwise not offering an explanation to Golf Channel for leaving out Thomas. The 31-year-old was No. 19 on the points standings.

Bradley was initially slated to be a captain’s assistant for Furyk, his only chance to get team leadership experience ahead of the 2025 Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black in New York. Instead, he’ll be relieved of those duties, Furyk said, and will instead be allowed to focus on playing.

International team captain Mike Weir selected Christiaan Bezuidenhout, Corey Conners, Mackenzie Hughes, Si Woo Kim, Min Woo Lee and Taylor Pendrith. Conners, Hughes and Pendrith are all Canadians, giving the team a true maple flavor with a Canadian captain and three players. They’ll join Hideki Matsuyama, Sungjae Im, Adam Scott, Tom Kim, Jason Day and Byeong Hun An.

What to think about the United States team

This is simultaneously unsurprising and incredibly disappointing. Furyrk going chalk with the players ranked No. 7-12 saves himself from criticism because he can say “It’s fair,” but it means the U.S. has a team that fails at both current form and ushering in young talent. Max Homa has dropped to No. 86 on DataGolf amid a mess of a season, and Brian Harman has just one top-10 finish since March. Meanwhile, Justin Thomas is a U.S. Cup legend and is having a much better season than both of them. Thomas is 9-3-2 at Presidents Cups and finished T14 at the Tour Championship, and Akshay Bhatia won the Texas Open this year. It could have been invaluable to get the 22-year-old rising star in the team room for the future. It all feels like a missed opportunity that neither brings the best team nor helps the team going forward. — Brody Miller

Furyk might have gone straight down the list and picked the next six players on the U.S. Presidents Cup standings list, but a few of these selections are still baffling. Harman and Homa have been outplayed by several players who would have been excellent fits for the squad — including Thomas, who is widely known as one of the best American match-play players of this generation. Harman was likely picked for his driving accuracy in preparation for a tight and narrow Royal Montreal, and Homa will provide the fire and spirit that comes naturally to him in team environments. But think about Bhatia or even someone like 20-year-old Nick Dunlap. This year’s Cup could have been the perfect opportunity to prepare young blood for future team events, and instead, Furyk went with an older set of picks who aren’t even necessarily playing that well right now. Statistics most likely played a huge role in these decisions, in addition to partner fit. But you can’t ignore recent form, and it appears that Furyk did exactly that. — Gabby Herzig

What to think about the International team

Weir gives his native Canadians love, but maybe not the ones we thought. It would have been impossible for Weir to leave out Lee or Kim — two of his top talents — or Bezuidenhout, who is having a great year, so it essentially left three decisions to make. You could argue Conners is one of the five best international players, so that’s a no-brainer. Same with Pendrith, who has jumped to No. 25 in the world in DataGolf with a career year. It’s the choice of Hughes over potentially better talents in Adam Hadwin and Nick Taylor that’s so tough to make. Both Hadwin and Taylor have struggled mightily the last few months, so I get it, but Taylor is a killer with two big boy wins in the 2024 WM Phoenix Open and the 2023 Canadian Open, until an absolute mess of a summer. That stings. (Leaving off Australian Cam Davis is the right move. His nice win in Detroit was more of an outlier.) — Miller

Weir considered a variety of factors in his captain’s picks. Still, the Canadian home game element and an emphasis on recent form seem to have dominated his decision-making process. Of Weir’s captain’s picks, the three Canadians will relish playing on familiar turf in front of a supportive crowd. Hughes — who came in ranked No. 15 in the International Team standings — was notably left off the squad in 2022. He’s also known to welcome leadership roles, and should be an excellent fit for the team room. Pendrith and Conners got the nod, seemingly over Hadwin and Taylor, who are perhaps the more recognizable and fiery Canadians. The choice indicated that Weir prioritized consistency and recent tournament results. Then you have Kim: He brought some memorable heat to the 2022 matches and was undoubtedly a no-brainer pick for the locker room energy. Plus, Weir specifically mentioned Kim’s putting, which has been shaky as of late, but seems to be improving with a putter switch. Bezuidenhout sneaked into the FedEx top 30 and put together an underrated season, and Lee has emerged as one of the best drivers on the PGA Tour and has cemented himself as an easy fan favorite. Overall, not too many surprises here, besides the Hughes curveball and Davis being skipped over at No. 8 in the standings. Weir’s picks are strong and represent a deliberate, versatile strategy. — Herzig

Required reading

(Top photo: Keyur Khamar / PGA Tour via Getty Images)