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WNBA power rankings: Will the Chicago Sky slip out of playoff contention?

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1 year ago

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WNBA power rankings: Will the Chicago Sky slip out of playoff contention?

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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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)

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Culture

I Think This Poem Is Kind of Into You

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17 hours ago

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December 11, 2025

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I Think This Poem Is Kind of Into You

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By A.O. Scott

A.O. Scott, a critic at large for the Book Review, recorded the poem that appears in this piece.

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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.

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“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.

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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.

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Louise Glück in 1975.

Gerard Malanga

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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.

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“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.

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Can You Identify Where the Winter Scenes in These Novels Took Place?

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3 days ago

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December 9, 2025

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Can You Identify Where the Winter Scenes in These Novels Took Place?

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.

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Culture

From NYT’s 10 Best Books of 2025: A.O. Scott on Kiran Desai’s New Novel

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1 week ago

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December 2, 2025

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From NYT’s 10 Best Books of 2025: A.O. Scott on Kiran Desai’s New Novel

Inge Morath/Magnum Photos

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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.

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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.

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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.

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See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.

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