2025 WNBA Regular Season Discussion Thread

[Green Chile]

Taking on Jones and Griner with no JJ is a tough spot.

Good news is that EuroBasket is ending today, right?

[Green Chile]

This is getting rough. Sorry MDB.

[Green Chile]

Liberty trying to get something going, but it just doesn't feel like their day.

[Green Chile]

CC and Phee the 2 leading AS vote getters and AS game captains.

The bigger story is probably that both got about 1.2 million votes.

CC led with 600K votes in 2024.
A'ja led with 100K votes in 2023.

That's some incredible growth.

[Green Chile]

Candace's jersey retirement coming at halftime.

[Green Chile]

Liberty keep trying, but Dream has Allisha and they don't.

[MrDollarBills]

Welp. We suck bad without Jonquel and Leo.

[MrDollarBills]

This is getting rough. Sorry MDB.

Our defense and rebounding are atrocious.

I'm honestly disgusted.

[JustBuzzin]

Angel Reese you know her name!

[MrDollarBills]

Angel Reese haters look crazy right now. Her game is exploding to another level, she's out here crossing people tf up!!!

[hermes]

lighting the sun up, 12-0 run to start the quarter

samuelson with an injured ankle though

[DOT]

I knew the Sun were gonna be bad this year, but god damn.

[hermes]

the sun went like 8 minutes without scoring

[cdubbz]

VAAAAAALKYRIEEEEEES!!!!!!!!

[cdubbz]

Kaitlyn Chen plays with so much confidence and is comfortable in her role. Once she is released from Valkyries she will be picked up quickly

[Green Chile]

Angel Reese haters look crazy right now. Her game is exploding to another level, she's out here crossing people tf up!!!

She's doing a lot well, but I would venture that maybe the most important thing is she's slowed down (in the good way).

In her worst moments, it's often her intensity and motor getting the best of her. We know the plays. She's crashing the glass, gets the rebound, and is hellbent on putting it back even if she's triple teamed.

The play that turned the tide before the big 4th quarter explosion, was Angel driving in Azura there and somebody closing on the weak side. Previously, that was a block shot waiting to happen, but she took a beat and kicked it to a wide open Nurse for 3.

Fantastic to see her growing.

[Ice Man]

She's doing a lot well, but I would venture that maybe the most important thing is she's slowed down (in the good way).

In her worst moments, it's often her intensity and motor getting the best of her. We know the plays. She's crashing the glass, gets the rebound, and is hellbent on putting it back even if she's triple teamed.

The play that turned the tide before the big 4th quarter explosion, was Angel driving in Azura there and somebody closing on the weak side. Previously, that was a block shot waiting to happen, but she took a beat and kicked it to a wide open Nurse for 3.

Fantastic to see her growing.

Good observation. I will add that Angel's problem is a common one in the WNBA. More than in the NBA, bigs immediately force contested shots near the basket, rather than either 1) pump fake and use some moves or 2) kick the ball out. I think that's because until they reach the WNBA the leading women bigs are so physically dominant -- relatively speaking, more than the male players when they are in high school/college -- that they didn't need to develop altnerative plans.

[Doctor MJ]

Welp. We suck bad without Jonquel and Leo.

Jonquel's obviously a superstar, but I really think Leonie is an incredible player that may be the key to making New York a dynasty. You expect that a super-team is short on depth, you don't expect that secretly they've acquired star talent others missed.

[Doctor MJ]

VAAAAAALKYRIEEEEEES!!!!!!!!

What an amazing start for an expansion team!

[Doctor MJ]

I knew the Sun were gonna be bad this year, but god damn.

It's really something. We're talking about an SRS drop of 21.6 on a team that isn't having a youth movement. They may get better over the course of the year, but I really think they thought that by acquiring Tina Charles they'd at least be decent, and that's not how it worked out.

It's good to specifically praise the long-time franchise trio of Alyssa Thomas, DeWanna Bonner & Brionna Jones and they deserve it, and we should acknowledge that Charles is 36...but something that's struck me long before this is that Charles seems to have gotten extremely overrated beginning in her time in college.

Charles' is a volume post-scorer whose career TS% is 50.4 in the regular season and 47.3% in the playoffs. In general, that's someone I don't want being a volume post-scorer, and yet we're talking about someone who actually got named WNBA MVP. That's an incredible disconnect.

I would say this part of a general thing in the WNBA in the 2010s to the present where the consensus of the league didn't seem to internalize the issues the NBA was recognizing with volume post-scoring. Even if you do it efficiently, if you're not doing it as a great playmaker, you're almost certainly considerably less valuable than your volume totals suggest. And if you're doing it inefficiently, well, really not good.

Now I'm not saying Charles has had a completely ineffective WNBA career, but I don't she should've ever been talked about among the most valuable players in the game.

EDIT: Let me also specifically talk about Veronica Burton. In her first 3 years on Dallas & Connecticut (now the two worst teams in the league), she played back-up minutes with generally strong +/- numbers - especially last year when she had an OnCourt of +14.9 per 100 and an On-Off of +7.7

She's then let available for the expansion draft, and so now Golden State in their first year has her as a big minute player, leading the team in assist and +/-.

So first, Burton emerging as an apparently quite valuable starter is a big deal for her, and let's give her her props.

But if we look at the Valkeries big minute players this year, and see where they came from, and how good that team is now, what do we see:

Kayla Thornton - Liberty, 11-5
Veronica Burton - Sun, 2-15
Janelle Salaun - rookie
Temi Fagbeni - Fever, 8-8
Tiffany Hayes - Aces, 8-8
Ceceilia Zandalasini, - Lynx, 14-2

We should note that both the Fever & Aces have had injuries, and I think they along with the Liberty & Lynx should be seen as good teams for whom it made sense to have to give up good rotation players in an expansion draft.

But the Sun? Quite possibly they failed to expansion draft protect their most best asset because they never really understood what Burton was capable of.