It’s up to WNBA fans to raise the roof (and the floor) of the conversation

It’s up to WNBA fans to raise the roof (and the floor) of the conversation

The WNBA is just days away, so there’s still time. Enough of it for fans who love this league to swoop in and save the conversation. Enough of it for fans who love this league to swoop in and save the conversation.

Across certain corners of the internet, the complexity of WNBA games is condensed into highlights, bite-sized and devoid of context. Any small and forgettable moment caught on camera, a cutaway shot shown on a national broadcast, can live on as a GIF. And fan bases will reveal their big, big feelings about lists and rankings, and mistakenly view even the game’s biggest allies as “haters.”

Where it’s most accessible for people to gather for sharing their fervor, opinions and drivel, the WNBA discourse needs help. Because right now, the conversation sounds too much like the NBA’s.

While those of us who try to live in a world outside of algorithms, we are fully aware that social media — and in particular, Elon’s echo chamber — is not a real place. Even so, that app amplifies so much racket that it can’t possibly be ignored. The conversations sports fans are having in real life? For better or worse, they’re shaped by the day’s trending topics.

So, judging by the engagement over the past week, with the WNBA preseason schedule underway, the conversation seemed to be curated by the kind of fan who prefers their most cynical and angry desires to be served with a side of hoops.

A clip of Atlanta Dream forward Angel Reese “cooking” one of her former Chicago Sky teammates racked up more than 2 million views. Then again, the anti-Reese sentiment was equally as strong; a separate post that mocked her shooting stats from that April 29 exhibition game generated just as much engagement. But at least Reese went viral by performing in that game, unlike Sky guard DiJonai Carrington, who was featured in a clip while sitting on the sideline, tossing her hair and scratching her face. The video, ripped from the game’s broadcast and posted without a caption, got more than 500,000 views because someone, somewhere, considered it content.

Pure basketball did indeed find an audience, such as a supercut of Dallas Wings guard Paige Bueckers scoring 20 points against the Indiana Fever, or the graphic about the SECOND-YEAR Golden State Valkyries’ estimation as the highest-valued WNBA franchise. However, those posts didn’t take off nearly as much as a screenshot of Seattle Storm rookie Flau’jae Johnson that intentionally captured her in a bizarre pose before her preseason debut.

More and more, the basic overshadows the basketball, and sophomoric reigns supreme. If any of this feels familiar, then you must be a long-suffering NBA fan.

That league has its own conversation issues. If social media is not breaking down Kevin Durant’s body language as though it’s game film, and analyzing Tyrese Haliburton’s double chin for the sole purpose of getting off “Haliburger” jokes, then it’s obsessing over highlight dunks and hot takes. Thankfully, for the NBA fan who wants just a little bit of analysis, the league’s 11-year media rights deals have kicked in at the right time.

The deal, which began at the start of the 2025-26 season, does more than pump $77 billion into the league’s pockets. It opened the door for two new broadcast partners, NBC Universal and Amazon Prime Video, to expand and elevate the conversation around basketball. Now, there’s more nuance, and not just noise, coming out of halftime studio shows. While the biggest mouths still go viral, former players who actually talk about the game can also land with audiences, like in October when Udonis Haslem broke down how the New York Knicks protect their defensively targeted star, Jalen Brunson, in “pre-switch” actions.

Similarly, the WNBA can move to the grown folks’ table this season as games stretch across more broadcast partners, like ION, Turner, and, of course, ESPN. But it’s up to the fans, new and old, to stop treating fair criticism directed at their favorite players as a reason to revolt.

Throughout the league’s 30 years, coverage of the WNBA largely came from those who championed the cause. The story was told by media that took the league seriously when elsewhere it had been disregarded as a niche. Then, a few years ago, everyone seemingly started watching women’s sports, and more mainstream exposure followed, as well as more critical coverage. Last year, former player Candace Parker had the audacity to appraise Reese’s game. Parker ranked Reese in a lower tier that made sense to everyone who has watched Reese’s game — everyone except Reese’s most extreme fans. And so Candace Parker, the two-time league MVP and three-time champion, that Candace Parker, caught the wrath of a segment of Reese stans.

“We have to come to a place in women’s basketball where we can critique without being labeled a hater,” Parker said, reacting to the backlash on her podcast. “And I challenge all of you to understand that in no way, shape or form am I a hater.”

Speaking of haters, RIP to the mentions of those ESPN writers who dared to list Caitlin Clark as the No. 10 player currently in the WNBA. When the rankings came out last week, the most passionate and protective in Clark’s fan base dismissed the analysis as clickbait, completely ignoring how their fave had played only 13 games last season and spent the majority of the time in a massive shooting slump.

This is the current state of social media — a place that not too long ago felt like the best virtual sports bar, where fans from all over the world could take in the games together. Now, toxicity has become the ticket to get in. It doesn’t have to be that way in the WNBA space.

Fans don’t have to be so quickly aggrieved by analysts, nor so easily entertained by the lowest of the low-hanging fruit. They can ignore the agitators who come around just to trivialize the game and the women who play it, and engage more with the content that centers around basketball. Ahead of what will be the WNBA’s most-watched and most-dissected season, true fans can rescue the discussion from all the dross. They’re the guardians who can keep their league from becoming NBA lite.

Editor’s note: The Athletic is launching a new weekly women’s basketball newsletter. Sign up here for No Offseason to keep up to speed with everything in the sport.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

Chicago Sky, WNBA, Opinion, women's sports

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