What more can we say than “judge not, that ye be not judged”? After mocking Pat McAfee’s unintelligible rant about the WNBA and her subsequent apology, I must now express regret for my own view of the WNBA. I haven’t called anyone a “white bitch”, but I did something just as bad, which was write “Bring back Liz Cambage” in a post here two days ago. Jokingly! Obviously just joking! But the universe can’t read context or tone and did in fact, bring back Liz Cambage. The Athletic’s Sabreena Merchant spotted the former WNBA star on the court during last night’s Lynx-Sparks game in Los Angeles. Many thanks to the dozens of you who sent me this news with your heartfelt suggestions that I be “arrested” and “burned alive.” You’re absolutely right. Really sorry about that. Although I can’t go back and change my actions, I can and will do better in the future.
While you can blame Cambage about a million other things, you can’t blame him for wanting to go watch the Minnesota Lynx while they’re in town. Nine games into their season, they already look like a tough playoff contender, with their only two losses so far coming against the Sun (in a true overtime referee show) and the Aces. They took care of business against everyone else, including the Liberty, who sat and watched helplessly last weekend as Minnesota rained down threes on them, to the tune of 14 of 28 shots. The Lynx can beat you in every way – with that shot, with their active defense, with smart ball movement – and that’s entirely appropriate, considering the face of their team.
Napheesa Collier has long been so gifted in so many areas on both sides of the ball that it hasn’t always been easy to imagine her path to improvement. Her WNBA debut, against the Sky in 2019, introduced her to the league as something of a finished product. She finished this game with 27 points, six rebounds and three blocks. “I had to go out there and play as aggressively as possible, so as not to be a liability to the team,” she said coldly afterwards. And yet, she looks better than ever this year.
She handled the same heavy offensive workload as last season, when she made the highest volume of shots of her career. When the Lynx took an 8-0 lead to start the Sparks game last night, Collier had scored seven of those points in what would ultimately be an 11-point first quarter for her. (MVPhee? Maybe, but not so fast: Also Wednesday night, A’ja Wilson had 36 points, 12 rebounds and six steals against the Wings in Dallas.) Before the start of the 2024 season, she said to reporters that his offseason emphasis has been on his ball-handling and three-point shooting, which is at 33 percent this year, although still at a fairly low volume.
Defensively, she was also a real treat to watch. With the lack of an established center in the Lynx rotation, Collier has been asked to play a bit in the lineup, and she does it so well (her wingspan and positional instincts allow her to average of double-double this year) that you can actually I kind of forget that she’s only 6 feet 1 inch tall. (I actually forgot that fact until the show mentioned it last night, and it took me a second to recover.) I loved this moment from Minnesota’s game against the Liberty, where Collier sees all the matchup problems his former UConn teammate poses. on offense, and simply lays them to Stewart on defense. Do you have crazy arms, Stewie? Well, I also have crazy arms.
Collier had other advantages beyond genetic advantages: She landed with a great coach in Cheryl Reeve, who moved into second place for all-time WNBA coaching wins after last night and has been pretty in her bag as a player this season. This year’s hyped draft class got me thinking about the 2019 draft, which stands out as one of the best in the league for all the stars and solid rotation players it produced. Collier finished sixth overall, which seems ridiculous now. But who can dispute this adequacy? She always had a knack for being in the right place.
