Connect with us

Culture

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

Published

2 years ago

on

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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)

Advertisement
Related Topics:
Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Culture

Finding Wisdom in a Poem by Wendy Cope

Published

24 hours ago

on

May 28, 2026

By

Finding Wisdom in a Poem by Wendy Cope

Advertisement

Aliza Aufrichtig

By A.O. Scott and Aliza Aufrichtig

A.O. Scott is a critic at large for the Book Review. Aliza Aufrichtig is a visual journalist.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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?

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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 …

Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.

Advertisement

Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.

Question 1/7

Let’s start with the first stanza.

Advertisement

Stop, if the car is going “clunk” 

Or if the sun has made you blind. 

Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk. 

Advertisement

Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.

Advertisement

Continue Reading

Culture

Can You Match the Places These Authors Lived With Settings in Their Books?

Published

3 days ago

on

May 26, 2026

By

Can You Match the Places These Authors Lived With Settings in Their Books?

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.

Continue Reading

Culture

Book Review: ‘America, U.S.A.,’ by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

Published

4 days ago

on

May 25, 2026

By

Book Review: ‘America, U.S.A.,’ by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.

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.”

Advertisement

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.”

Advertisement

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

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending