u/EastAd1263

Note that the World Cup was previously called the World Championship.

The first USA Women's Team to compete in the World Cup featured seven players from the Nashville Business College, led by 20-year-old guard Katherine Washington. Washington continued to play for Team USA and was part of the gold medal teams at the 1957 World Cup and 1959 PanAmerican Games. The players on the 1953 had no international experience prior to being named to the roster. Prior to the World Cup, they were able to play one scrimmage in Cuba, but additional scrimmages in Ecuador and Nicaragua were canceled due to riots. Team USA guard Betty Clark wrote a letter to a sports columnist in her home state of Iowa that detailed Chilean fans throwing rocks, apples, and other objects at the court when a Chilean player fouled out of the game.

I recommend reading this 2022 post from PowerPlays.news that goes more into the chaos of the first World Cup: The apocalyptic chaos of the first women's basketball world championships

The excerpt below comes from a 2018 USAB article titled "1953 & 1957 Pioneers Set the USA Gold Standard":

Before there were T and Tree, Lisa and Dawn, Dee and Sue, there were a host of pioneers who laid the groundwork for USA Basketball in international hoops. Alberta Cox, Joan Crawford, Katherine Washington, Nera White - names few outside of the die-hard women's basketball world would know. These women, along with their teammates, helped the U.S. collect the first two FIBA World Championship gold medals in history.

FIBA, which debuted the men's world championship in Buenos Aires in 1950, in 1952 decided to hold a women's worlds beginning in 1953. In the United States the AAU had been holding national championships since 1929, but the U.S. had never competed in an event such as this and was unsure as to where the national team would rate against the best in the world. The Pan American Games didn't include women's basketball until 1955, the Olympics until 1976, so the U.S. was relatively untested outside the country.

The first FIBA World Championship was a huge deal for the city of Santiago, Chile. The Chileans built a wooden platform for the games in the national stadium. The stadium had seating capacity for 35,000 spectators and was reported as close to capacity for most of the games. In fact, Chile's president had a difficult time getting to his reserved seat at times, according to FIBA.

Featuring a team comprised of seven members of the Nashville Business College and two from Iowa Wesleyan College, the USA in an attempt to prepare for the World Championship played and won all five of its exhibition games in South America. The USA team then went on to Santiago, Chile, and led by the play of Katherine Washington, emerged from the first world Championship with a 5-1 record and the World title.

The tournament, which featured 10 teams, was lopsided in terms of participation from the Americas. In fact, eight teams came from what would eventually be known as FIBA Americas: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and the United States. The final two teams were from Europe: France and Switzerland. While nobody can say for sure as the reasons have been lost to history, there's a good chance that cost and a year to plan the first such championship played a factor in the make-up of the participating nations.

Of the 10 teams, six advanced to the final round, which was played in round-robin style. Unlike today, the preliminary round featured one game per team. France defeated Peru 62-22, Brazil downed Cuba 50-31, the United States pummeled Paraguay 60-28 , Argentina slipped past Mexico 39-24 and Chile won against Switzerland 37-28. All five winning teams advanced to the final round. The losing four teams competed in the repass round, which Paraguay won to gain entrance to the final round.

The USA went 4-1 in the final round to claim the gold, its lone loss was to Brazil. The placements for Brazil, Chile and France, having finished with identical 3-2 slates, were determined by FIBA's tie-breaking formula, and the host country came away with silver, while France, the tournament favorites heading into the championship, took home bronze.

------

Additional reading:
Part 2 from USAB: 1957: The USA's Second World Championship Gold
FIBA: The day Women’s World Cup was born: March 7, 1953
Flying Queens Foundation: profile of Katherine Washington

I'm not going to lie, I might bandwagon this team just for the merch 😂

Really happy for her. I think this counts as the official replacement for Jovana's suspended contract, if I'm not mistaken.

From a Lynx beat reporter. Hamzová's third 7-day contract expired but the Lynx will be adding her to the roster full-time.

One source inside the Atlanta Dream front office spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying "They're telling us the move is to provide more entertainment for fans during games, but I think they're just trying to curry favor with Dawn Staley before the Philadelphia expansion team kicks off their first season."

Another insider had concerns about Hip-Hop's performance after being retired more than a decade: "I mean really, when is the last time Hip-Hop somersaulted off a trampoline? I know he's a rabbit, but even they must experience some level of arthritis as they age, right? How many children are we going to traumatize when Hip-Hop breaks a hip during halftime?"

With the Houston Comets franchise set to make it's return in 2027 and the WNBA currently celebrating the league's 30th season, several former Comets have been front and center this season. But one key piece of the league's first dynasty isn't here to join in on the festivities: Kim Perrot, PG1 of the original Houston Comets. While most recognize the names of Houston's Big 3 (Cynthia Cooper, Sheryl Swoopes, Tina Thompson), many fans may not be as familiar with Perrot. Kim Perrot was a 3xWNBA champion, with the third title awarded posthumously after she lost her battle with cancer during the 1999 season.

My favorite anecdote about Perrot is that head coach Van Chancellor initially didn't want her on the team when she joined open tryouts in 1997, but the players who had already been signed advocated her because of the way she treated other players (such as encouraging players after a dropped pass). She became the glue piece for the team and a close friend of Chancellor's. Following her death, the WNBA renamed it's Sportsmanship Award in her honor. She was the first player to have their WNBA jersey retired.

This 2021 profile from Houstonia Mag is long but well worth the read.

Excerpt:

Everything was falling apart. Players were bickering, the red-clad Houston fans were losing hope, and Head Coach Van Chancellor was out of ideas. He looked up at the scoreboard to reaffirm what he already knew: His team was down 12 points with 7 minutes and 24 seconds to go. It was game two of the WNBA Finals, and the Houston Comets had already lost the first bout in the best-of-three series with the Phoenix Mercury two nights prior in Arizona. Now they were back on their home floor, back in Houston, and throwing it all away.

In a last-ditch move, exasperated, Chancellor whistled for a timeout—but he didn’t have anything to say.

The Comets, the championship-winning women’s team that had been racking up points and accolades since it was formed in 1997, just a year before, weren’t playing together, plain and simple. Not playing the brand of basketball that had helped them win the WNBA’s first ever league championship the previous summer and compile a league-best 27-3 record in year two. He knew it, they knew it, everybody in what was then Houston’s Compaq Center knew it. But he had called the timeout and he had to say something.

Crouching down in front of them, Chancellor opened his mouth to speak, but was warded off by a small hand.
“I got this, Coach,” said a voice, and into the middle of the huddle stepped the team’s heart and soul. Not Tina Thompson, Sheryl Swoopes, or Cynthia Cooper, the team’s perennial All-Stars that made up the “Big Three,” the trio that had helped already establish the team as the nascent dynasty of women’s basketball. Rather, it was tiny point guard Kim Perrot who jumped into the center of the cluster, right where the heart belongs. 

“He turned that timeout over to Kim, and Kim just rallied us,” remembers Cooper over two decades later. “She was encouraging, but she was stern, and she had always been that type of motivator. When we went out to play, we already knew we’d win.”

Thompson agrees. “She just had that personality where she would say things and you understood the feeling and the emotion of what it was that she was saying—and it could change the whole climate of a game just like that.”

The buzzer sounded, signaling the end of the timeout, and a new team took the floor—synchronized, composed, ready to show the world they were the best team in women’s basketball. The Comets erased the deficit before the clock ran out, forced the game into overtime, and ultimately defeated Phoenix.

Three nights later the Comets were back in the Compaq Center, easily winning game three and securing the 1998 WNBA championship, their second in two years.

“Who’d have thought Kim Perrot would be a two-time WNBA champion?” Perrot said when she and her 11 teammates were presented with their championship rings.

The Big Three got most of the attention that night—photographers loved taking pics of Thompson, acclaimed for her skills on the court, elegant, tall, and always sporting red lipstick—but everyone on the team knew that it was the 5’5” Louisiana-born point guard Perrot who’d pulled them together and made this happen.

“When she spoke, we listened,” Thompson says.

It was an amazing night, but one that would prove to be bittersweet for the legendary team. They thought this was just the beginning, that this was another step toward building a women’s basketball dynasty in Houston. What nobody knew at the time was that there was a problem with their beating heart. Inside Perrot, outlaw cells were already dividing and multiplying, and within a year she would be gone. This was the last WNBA game Perrot would ever play.

------

Some additional recommended reading on Perrot:
Kim Perrot will forever be in the hearts of the Houston Comets and Van Chancellor
How the late, great Kim Perrot keeps the Houston Comets’ legacy alive

Recommended viewing:
WNBA Legends Roundtable: Kim Perrot

In addition to Gravity, which the Inside the Game site has been tracking all season, they now have a new section on Shot Difficulty.

Explanation from the website:

What is Shot Difficulty?

Shot Difficulty measures the expected field-goal percentage, leveraging player-tracking data to unlock new insights into how the shooter and the defense interact.
 
Measured as Expected Field Goal Percentage (xFG%), it is a way to quantify the baseline probability of a shot being made based on the exact context of the attempt, completely independent of whether the ball actually goes through the net. 

Shot Difficulty evaluates the environment around the player at the exact millisecond the ball leaves their fingertips. It strips away the player’s individual shooting talent and answers the question: How likely is an average player to make this exact shot under these specific conditions? 

How does Shot Difficulty work?

The WNBA’s tracking system uses advanced cameras to capture spatial relationships on the court at 25 frames per second. For each shot, the data spans from 1 second before the shot until the ball is released to calculate various features. The model does not account for situational features such as the shot clock, player identity, or score differential. These real-time features fuel a machine learning model trained on thousands of historical WNBA shots. 

To calculate the difficulty of any given attempt, the model instantly measures several critical variables: 

Shooter Features
+Shot Distance: Distance from player’s center of mass to the hoop 
+Shooter’s Vertical Tilt: Degrees of the shooter’s tilt with respect to their positioning perpendicular to the court’s surface (Z axis) 
+Head Angle: Angle of the shooter’s head relative to the basket 
+Head Facing Percentage: Percentage of time the shooter’s head has potential visibility of the basket leading up to the shot 
+Speed: Shooter’s speed at the time of the shot 
+Velocity to Basket: Shooter’s velocity with respect to the direction of the basket. This is measured by how the shot distance is changing over time 
+Rotational Speed/Velocity: Direction and speed the shooter’s hips are rotating with respect to the basket 
+Full Rotation: Total degrees of rotation the shooter rotates in the second before and after the shot 
+Hang Time: The time spent in the air from the last time the shooter leaves the floor before the release up to the release time 
+Air Time Distance: Two-dimensional distance the shooter travels after the last takeoff to release 

Defender Features
+Closest Defender Joint Distance: Distance from the closest defender’s nearest hand and the ball 
+Relative Height of Contest: The difference between the closest defender’s nearest hand height and the height of the ball 
+Defensive Hand Contest Angle: Angle between the closest defender’s hand and the shooter’s potential apex 
+Vision Interference: The extent to which the defender is hindering the shooter’s view of the basket 
+Elbow Distance Prior To Shot: Distance between the closest defender’s nearest hand to the shooter’s elbow in the 1 second leading up to the shot 
+Defender Hip Distance: Distance between defender’s and shooter’s hips 
+Defender Angle Relative to Basket: Angle between the closest defender and the shooter, and the shooter and the hoop
+Defender Speed/Velocity: Speed and direction with which the defender is moving with respect to the shooter 
+Pressure Score: Defensive pressure exerted on the shooter by the matchup defender 
+Average Pressure Score: Average pressure exerted on the shooter by all defenders on the court 

Why does it matter?

For decades, field goal percentage was the go-to measure of shooting prowess. But raw percentages ignore context. Shot Difficulty closes that gap, connecting the box score to the eye test. 

See the shot difficulty leaders here: https://www.wnba.com/stats/inside-the-game/shot-difficulty

Dan Falkenheim does some really interesting analysis of the WNBA. You've likely seen his numbers for offensive and defensive efficiency shared on this sub. In his most recent piece, he analyzes multiple factors to determine which player has been the most clutch so far this season.

From Dan's article at SI:

Who has been the most clutch player in the WNBA this season?

Well, how do you even define clutch in the first place? The WNBA designates clutch time as the final five minutes of a game when the score is within five points. That’s not a bad definition: That specific window winnows down games to the most pressure-packed, critical moments that have an outsized impact on the final outcome.

It isn’t perfect, though. The definition identifies when impactful plays are likely to occur but doesn’t measure how much each play actually mattered. A decisive shot, like Sonia Citron’s buzzer-beating turnaround jumper to lift the Mystics to an 86–85 victory over the Tempo, holds the same weight as a layup that pulls the game to within three points with 4:59 left to play.

There’s a better way to measure clutch performance: win probability added (WPA). The first step is to estimate a team’s odds of winning a game at any moment, given who has possession, the current score, how much time remains and other factors. The second step is to quantify how much a player’s action (a shot or turnover, for example) changed those odds. Applied to those late, close-possession scenarios, WPA can identify which players produced the largest swings in their teams’ chances of winning.

That is closer to a more precise definition of what clutch really is. It’s not a novel concept. Mike Beuoy, who runs Inpredictable, has published WPA stats for the NBA since 2013 and for the WNBA since 2016. He uses a version of WPA for his Jerry West Clutch Player of the Year Tracker, which isolates the portion of a play’s win probability impact that exceeds what is typical for that type of action. In other words, a routine basket receives little or no clutch credit, while a shot that dramatically changes the expected outcome of a game receives much more.

This analysis takes a slightly different approach, using a custom win probability model and a simpler method for calculating clutch WPA than Inpredictable’s. Here, “clutch” is defined the same way the WNBA defines clutch, and WPA includes field goals, turnovers, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks. (Read until the end for a few more details on that front.)

The WNBA’s most clutch players

On a per-clutch-minute basis, no player has shifted their team’s expected chances of winning more during the final five minutes of close games than Sabrina Ionescu. She may be the sole reason the Liberty enter the season’s second half at 15–12 rather than below .500, and she’s done it the hard way, at all three levels. Nine of Ionescu’s top 10 clutch plays have come on unassisted makes. She’s converted game-tying and-ones (against the Sky, most recently), as well as overtime go-ahead floaters and threes (against the Wings). Need more evidence, beyond the numbers? Just ask Breanna Stewart. “She literally willed us and carried us at the end,” Stewart said of Ionescu’s performance in New York’s win against Chicago. “She wanted to do anything she could to kind of get the win.”

Doing anything one can to get a win also looks a lot like what Paige Bueckers has done this season. She had a slew of difficult, pivotal makes to both lead the Wings to an overtime win against the Storm on June 22 and secure a close victory over the Sun on July 2. She has contributed 1.29 total WPA on clutch shots, the highest among any player in the league. (Bueckers ranks fourth when giving the shooter full credit, rather than splitting some with the assister, behind Nneka Ogwumike, Sarah Ashlee Barker and Caitlin Clark.) Speaking of Ogwumike, she might’ve hit the clutch shot of the season when she splashed a buzzer-beating three to lift the Sparks to a 98–97 win against the Liberty on June 21.

Clutch WPA need not only come from shots. Only three of Angel Reese’s top 10 most clutch plays have come from makes, and the other seven include moments like her offensive rebound to keep a possession alive and eventual game-sealing block against Emese Hof in the Dream’s opener. It can be derived from assists, too, like when Kelsey Plum drove into the paint, drew three defenders and dished to Erica Wheeler, who proceeded to hit a go-ahead three late in the fourth quarter in a win against the Aces.

-------

Read the rest of Dan's analysis here (no paywall): https://www.si.com/wnba/most-clutch-players-in-wnba-this-season

With the trade deadline coming soon, Richard Cohen over at HerHoopStats has provided a brief explanation of some of the rules to keep in mind when it comes to trades in the WNBA:

+Both teams have to finish any trade under the salary cap (with one small exception detailed below). You can see each team’s current salary situation on our cap sheets. Any player traded moves their entire salary for the season from their current team’s sheet to their new team’s. So for example, if the Aces traded A’ja Wilson, she would immediately count for her entire $1,400,000 salary on the new team. It doesn’t matter that she’s already received 70% of that salary from Las Vegas. Hardship exceptions count on the cap, which is why you’ll see some teams closer to the cap than expected, and a couple even over it.

+The small exception mentioned above is that for trade purposes, Pregnancy/Childbirth Exception players are ignored. So in Golden State, where Ndjakalenga Mwenentanda and Nadia Fingall have combined as the replacement player for the pregnant Iliana Rupert, they can ignore the $276,585 committed to the two replacements. That puts them currently $148,440 under the cap for trade purposes, rather than $128,145 over.

+There is no matching salary requirement as you see in the NBA. You have to send something back, but three max players for a third-round pick is an entirely legal trade as long as both teams can finish under the cap and get back to a legal roster.

+No-trade clauses aren’t a thing in the WNBA. Players could obviously make their feelings known, but virtually everyone is eligible to be dealt. Shakira Austin and Iliana Rupert would have to consent to a deal — Austin because she was a restricted free agent who had an offer sheet matched, Rupert due to rules for pregnant players — but that’s about it. Even the much-publicised rule about players who sign for more than the regular max not being eligible to be sign-and-traded no longer applies, because those players become trade-eligible after the 30th day of the regular season.

+Developmental players can’t be traded.

The full article also discusses some possible trades. Source here (no paywall): https://herhoopstats.substack.com/p/wnba-trade-deadline-2026-part-one

Lots of familiar faces named to the official Australian Opals roster for the upcoming world cup.

More info here: https://www.australia.basketball/news/4544352/opals-final-12-confirmed-for-fiba-womens-world-cup

Phoenix is busy today!

It will be interesting to see if they move her back into a dev spot after this or if she'll end up on another team.

First, you have Buckets low-key soft-launching with Ellie when the mascots were all rolling together. Next thing you know he's on the jumbotron with Skye looking like an exec at a Coldplay concert. It's not all men, but it's always a man/rabbit (wolf?).