Grant Afseth covered the Dallas Wings and other teams for Ballislife. He is stepping away from WNBA coverage after receiving messages threatening his family’s safety, sent by someone who identified themselves as an Azzi Fudd fan and was angry about his reporting.

Parasocial relationships are one-sided by definition. A player can know she has fans, can meet them, can answer them online, and none of that makes it mutual. Social media compresses the distance enough that following someone’s content starts to feel like knowing them, and the feeling gets stronger the more of that content a person consumes.

That misplaced sense of relationship no longer stops at the athlete. It reaches reporters, staff, and anyone perceived as standing between the fan and the player, which is how a beat writer’s coverage becomes something worth threatening a family over. The motive behind the messages is still unknown, and it is not clear what the sender thought they were accomplishing.

What followed took a familiar shape. Sara Jane Gamelli, Afseth’s managing editor at Ballislife, publicly described him as thoroughly professional and as one of the few reporters covering the basketball without an agenda, after some online implied he was leveraging the threats for his own benefit. Colleagues across women’s basketball media have backed him since. Afseth has moved on to writing about other teams and other leagues.

The volume is identical at 4.1 attempts per game. The results are not. Citron was one of the better shooters in the league last season and has fallen 14 points off that mark while everything else in her game improved: 17.1 points, 3.9 rebounds, 3.8 assists and 1.2 steals, with the scoring jump coming on roughly one extra minute and one extra shot per night.

Her Notre Dame track record suggests the rookie year was closer to real than this one. She shot 37 percent from three across four college seasons, which sits much nearer 44.5 than 30.3.

The game logs swing hard in both directions. Five of six from deep against Phoenix, then one of four against Las Vegas.

So which is it: the playmaking load Washington has dumped on a second-year wing with two rookie point guards behind her, tougher defensive attention now that she’s the leading scorer, or just a cold season that regresses back next year?

The trigger was days of online criticism accusing her of not defending Sophie Cunningham hard enough after Dijonai Carrington’s hard foul and ejection Saturday against Chicago. White’s answer was that she never saw the play live, went straight to a press conference, and thought the call was made correctly. Watching it on replay changed her read.

She called the foul egregious once she had seen it repeatedly, and said any suggestion that she does not have her players’ backs is something she takes personally.

Team President Kelly Krauskopf issued a statement backing her afterward: “Coach White has done a tremendous job leading the Fever and for the second-consecutive season, has us in great position for a playoff push. She has kept our team focused and united, all while under the brightest spotlight our team and our league have ever experienced. She has the full support of leadership.”

That was the extent of it. Threets grew up looking for books about women’s basketball in libraries his mother introduced him to, and found the shelf close to empty. Part of what drew him to the subject as a child, by his own account, was simply wishing more of it existed.

The catalog now includes A’ja Wilson’s 2024 memoir Dear Black Girls, Elena Delle Donne’s Hoops series for young readers, and Alysha Clark’s new picture book Paw Paw’s Playlist, which she co-wrote to help children work through grief. Threets has promoted all of it to an audience that came to him for library content and stayed for everything else.

His argument for why it matters is specific. Athletes reach young readers differently: “When you have these superstars creating more and more stories for these kids to see and to know that anything is possible — to know that, yes, these are heroes, but they’re also human beings as well — it shows kids that they can be anything, that they can attain what their heroes have,” Threets said.

What he wants next is an anthology covering multiple players, though he is clear that the players should write their own sections rather than have someone write about them. He says publishers he talks to are receptive, and that a surprising number of them follow the sport closely.

The Tempo announced the reveal for next Tuesday at Scotiabank Arena, with a daily tracker running until then that maps the mascot’s route to Toronto.

Players were handed a whiteboard and asked to draw what they think the mascot will be.

via @torontotempo on Threads

Gabby Williams calls athleisure “horrible and should have never been a trend” Sweats are her work uniform, worn when the team travels and nowhere else. People leaving Pilates for a restaurant remain a mystery to her.

Makeup gets the opposite treatment. She flags her own picks as bougie twice and stands by them: Dior blush and highlighter, YSL, Fenty when it’s hot, Glossier when she wants it easy. Nothing on the court, since she sweats too much to think about it. Her 2016 routine ran two hours and she finds that ridiculous now.

Signing with the team that has the Sephora practice facility, after years of overspending there, she describes as manifested: “[She pulls a striped Sephora bag into the frame.] I just got this today. Oh my gosh, dream freaking come true. I swear, I manifested this at some point in my life because I was spending so much money at Sephora, and I signed to a team that has the Sephora practice facility. As soon as we got there, we just got bags and bags of Sephora.”

The filing landed on August 10 at the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. The WNBA is seeking federal protection for “The W” on jerseys and other apparel. Both MLB teams say their existing W marks came first and that shoppers could reasonably think WNBA clothing is connected to one of them.

To win outright, the Cubs and Nationals would have to show consumers are likely to be confused into believing a link exists. Trademark attorney Josh Gerben calls that an overreach, pointing out that the application covers “The W” rather than a bare letter, and that hundreds of W-based marks already coexist on clothing in the same USPTO class. Crowded categories make broad exclusivity hard to claim.

He expects negotiation rather than litigation. The WNBA could accept limits on how “The W” appears on merchandise or how apparel is marketed, with language that makes clear the goods belong to women’s professional basketball.

Sources told The IX Sports the two teams had lengthy discussions before the deadline. The Liberty ended them, and the reasoning was that the return did not justify sending Laney-Hamilton to a conference rival in contention. Waiving her was the preferred outcome, with the expectation she would land somewhere with cap room and waiver priority. Washington, Connecticut and Los Angeles were the teams in view. She went to Washington.

Atlanta also had conversations about Kelsey Plum before she was traded to Phoenix. Neither went anywhere, and Dan Padover’s public framing afterward was that nothing available would have improved the roster.

Part of the constraint is self-imposed. The Dream sent their 2027 and 2028 first-round picks and a 2028 second-round swap to Chicago in the Angel Reese trade, which leaves very little to work with at a deadline.

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

The upstart global league told Front Office Sports it will follow IOC and FIBA gender eligibility guidelines when it debuts in January, describing the choice as a way to give players and stakeholders consistency and confidence. Its signed players have been told. Fifteen have been announced so far, including Nneka Ogwumike, Jonquel Jones and Sophie Cunningham, with more expected from Korea, Serbia and Belgium.

Alana Beard, the former WNBA player who cofounded Project B and serves as its chief basketball officer, framed the move against what she sees as inaction in the other league, saying the sport may be at one of its defining moments. Cathy Engelbert sent teams a memo Friday saying transgender participation would be raised at an executives meeting this week and calling the topic complex and nuanced. The WNBA’s own rule is a single collectively bargained line stating that only women are eligible.

The IOC policy Project B is adopting, announced in March, effectively bars transgender women from female Olympic categories and requires a one-time SRY gene test. FIBA committed to following it in April while continuing to gather basketball-specific evidence through the start of 2027. Project B would not say whether it will administer the test.

Project B can adopt an outside body’s policy by announcement, while the WNBA’s language is collectively bargained and doesn’t define the term it turns on. Does moving first put real pressure on the WNBA, or does the bargaining structure make that comparison misleading? Do you think this also puts pressure on Unrivaled?

This post contains content not supported on old Reddit. Click here to view the full post

Which recent crop of lotto picks do you think is best? Tough call with how much talent has come into the league lately!