Episode 41 - A'ja's Fifth MVP, Two Sweeps, and a Finals Nobody Predicted

Cold Open: Why USWNT Fans Overreact to a Loss

Caitlin: That is part of our challenge as U.S. Women’s National Team fans. We are used to seeing wins, and when we don’t see a win, we are immediately like, oh my God, burn it down. It’s over.

Caitlin: Hi, I’m Caitlin.

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex.

Caitlin: And this is Raising the Game, a women’s sports podcast covering prime time performers, the business behind the athletes in the leagues, and what the growth of women’s sports means for the next generation of women’s athletes.

Episode 41 and What’s on the Docket

Alex: Episode 41, and we are in the finals for the WNBA.

Caitlin: Not quite.

Alex: We have a week off, but we know who’s in it.

Caitlin: We do.

Alex: We know when it starts.

Caitlin: We do. And we have lots to say about it.

Alex: Yeah, we have a ton.

Caitlin: We’ll also be reviewing the first of the two friendlies that the U.S. Women’s National Team had against Spain. Both will have been played by the time you’re listening to this. We of course record on Mondays. They play the second match on Tuesday, so you will know more than we do about any adjustments or different results from those friendlies. We will of course be coming back to a heated playoff push for the NWSL, so we’ll do a little recap on where that stands. And then as usual we have a number of headlines and other ancillary WNBA topics to talk about, because it’s never just about the basketball. Although we have a good amount of basketball.

Alex: It’s a lot of basketball.

Caitlin: So we’ll get into all of that.

Alex: But before we do, make sure to follow, subscribe, like, thumbs up, share, heart, comment, anything, all those things.

Caitlin: Interact.

Alex: Please interact with us.

Caitlin: We love it. We do. Favorite thing?

Alex: Yeah, let’s do a favorite thing.

Favorite Things: October Sports Outside and High School Soccer Playoffs

Caitlin: Okay. So I have two. One of them, it continues to be glorious here in Minnesota for almost mid October. And so we had the opportunity this weekend to watch all of our major sporting events outside, which included the game threes for both series in the semifinals, the WNBA on Friday night, and then the U.S. Women’s National Team game on Saturday. There’s honestly, to me, nothing better than being able to be outside with a cold beverage, watching sports. So that was awesome.

Alex: That was also my favorite thing, because that is what we did sports-related this week.

Caitlin: That’s what we did sports-related. I’ll throw in an extra. I’ve mentioned on the pod before, I coach high school, help coach a high school soccer team, and we are headed into playoff season. So it’s a short and sweet season for high school leagues here in Minnesota. But we have the two seed in our section. We’ll play our first game tomorrow night, so we’ll see what happens. Hopefully I’m still talking about it next time.

Alex: Yeah, for sure. All right, should we do headlines?

Caitlin: Let’s do it.

Headlines: Golden State and Atlanta Sweep Into the WNBA Finals

Alex: All right. Number two Golden State and number four Atlanta complete semifinal sweeps, and will play for the 2026 WNBA title.

Caitlin: There is so much going on here that we want to talk about and highlight, the series victories for these two teams and what that means. But we could not be more excited for this final series.

Headlines: USWNT Falls 2-0 to Spain in the First Friendly

Alex: U.S. Women’s National Team falls 2-0 to Spain in the first of two friendlies over the weekend. We’ll have played the second match by the time you hear this episode.

Caitlin: Yes, as mentioned, we have plenty to diagnose from that first match, so we’ll share our thoughts on that, and I will make some suggestions as to what I hope to see different as they come into that second friendly that you’ll have seen by the time you’re hearing me say this.

Headlines: WNBA Sets a Record With 3.79 Million Fans in 2026

Alex: Sports Business Journal reports that the WNBA drew a record setting 3.79 million fans to their games across the 2026 season, marking 20% growth year over year.

Caitlin: So we’ve talked about this right throughout the season, that we were on pace for record breaking attendance, both obviously in-person attendance and also viewership. We’re focused here on the in-person attendance. They break this down. This is driven primarily by 25 games over the course of the season that were moved to larger capacity venues due to demand. Toronto alone played in multiple 19,000 to 20,000 person capacity arenas across Canada. So they sort of ran this marketing tour of, we’re Canada’s team, and they played in Montreal, they played in Vancouver, and they were often selling out those arenas that they played in. I think the cherry on top, so to speak, was their game against Dallas at Bell Centre in Montreal, an attendance record for the WNBA at almost 21,000 people. One other side note, I think Dallas, the Dream, and the Mystics all had games played in their NBA counterparts’ venues. And so Dallas and Atlanta in particular are actually shifting their full time from 2027 and hopefully beyond.

Headlines: Atlanta Dream Move to State Farm Arena in 2027

Alex: Atlanta Dream will move to State Farm Arena in 2027.

Caitlin: There you go.

Alex: There it is.

Caitlin: We’ll talk about this because there’s a whole other subplot here, but Gateway Center, where they have been playing their home games for the last number of years, is 3,500 seats, while State Farm Arena can hold over 17,000. We’ll probably get back into this in the WNBA segment, but no sooner did they announce this move to permanently make that their home in 2027 and beyond, that’s a multi-year deal that they signed, then they make the finals and now there’s controversy over whether or not they’re going to be able to play in State Farm Arena when the buzz around this team could not be bigger. So we’ll get into that a little bit more. There’s definitely some opinions.

Headlines: Golden State Valkyries Pass $100 Million in Revenue

Alex: Sportico reports that the Golden State Valkyries are the first women’s sports team with $100 million in revenue before the playoffs.

Caitlin: I mean, that’s what happens when you sell out every game. They literally sell out every single game they play. They’ve had at least three more sellouts since the playoffs started. That’s the number of games that they’ve played there. They will inevitably have at least two more.

Alex: I think the number I saw was basically every game after the playoffs started is another three to four million in their pockets.

Caitlin: Yeah. And they also have a huge number of sponsorship partners. So 40 plus sponsorship partners. The community piece around it, that extends to businesses in the area. There’s businesses with money to burn probably in that area, right? And they have been valued around a billion dollars. I’ve seen everything from 850 million to over a billion, so it depends on how you’re doing the valuation. But they are a juggernaut.

Alex: Yeah, for sure.

Headlines: Cheryl Reeve Named WNBA Executive of the Year

Alex: Minnesota Lynx general manager.

Caitlin: I realize there’s going to be also opinions on this one, but I think to me, this doesn’t really come as a surprise. And I understand for our listeners who know we’re Lynx fans, you’re going to be like, you’re biased. But let’s just read down the credentials from the season for Cheryl Reeve. I think it’s the same reason that she won Coach of the Year in the regular season. And while Minnesota had a very disappointing postseason showing, we are still bitter about it, that doesn’t detract from what was accomplished during the regular season. So that regular season record earned the number one seed in the playoffs. They set a record with 18 road wins. That’s a WNBA record. And they recorded a 10 game win streak starting in July and ending in August. It’s the Lynx’s longest since 2016, so in 10 years.

Caitlin: I think the biggest moves that Reeve made as an executive were, obviously, drafting Olivia Miles and being able to see her potential grow or play out in a big way in her rookie season. I think the signing of Natasha Howard was huge. Her ability to come in kind of in the later stages of her career, she’s a starter in all 44 games, she makes the All-Star team I think for the first time in like six years or something. She’s been an All-Star before but certainly was, you know, back at that level. And then Reeve also earned Coach of the Month honors in June. She was an All-Star coach for the sixth time. And she set the record for winning as coach in WNBA history this season. She finishes the season with 397 career wins. So kudos to Coach Reeve.

Caitlin: One more thing on this. This is voted on by other executives. So this is not a media or fan vote. The only people voting are one single executive from each of the teams, and what they do is they submit their top three. Reeve was on 13 ballots. The next closest was Dan Padover, I don’t know exactly where the accent falls in that name, of the Atlanta Dream, and he was on 11 of the ballots. So it was close between the two of them, given the Dream’s postseason success, right? It’s paying off for the moves he made. Obviously bringing Angel Reese in was a big one. So that’s that. Snaps for Cheryl.

Headlines: PWHL Expansion Team Jerseys Revealed

Alex: PWHL expansion team jerseys have been revealed.

Caitlin: Yeah, I was a little, this felt less climactic than I wanted it to be. I’m still a little confused. Are we going to get team names, or are they just going to be for the season?

Alex: I think I saw team names are coming in.

Caitlin: Okay. In December, so we still get some hype, some hubbub.

Alex: Because they’re not going to put them on the jerseys this year, so we don’t need to reveal them until later.

Caitlin: Okay, I wasn’t sure about that part. So the jerseys are what the jerseys were at the start of the inaugural season of the PWHL. They just take the city name and want it diagonally across the sweater. So they actually look pretty cool. The colorway, obviously we already knew. I will say I am pleased to announce that Las Vegas will not be wearing puke green. They will be navy blue, which actually looks pretty sick.

Alex: Yeah, for sure. And for those of you who remember the beginning of this podcast, some people call them hockey shorts.

Caitlin: Not if you’re from Minnesota though. They’re called breezers, folks. Hockey shorts is not a thing.

Headlines: Serena Williams Becomes a Barbie Role Model

Alex: All right. Serena Williams becomes the newest Barbie role model.

Caitlin: I’m honestly, I was shocked she didn’t already have a Barbie.

Alex: I thought there was already a Barbie for her, not in the role model series. There’s another series that I think she does have.

Caitlin: Okay, well, there she is.

Alex: I know a lot about Barbie dolls apparently.

Caitlin: You’re just a connoisseur of Barbies. It’s probably not a feather in your cap.

Alex: All right, let’s move it on.

WNBA MVP: A’ja Wilson Wins Her Fifth and Third Straight

Alex: WNBA. I think before we talk playoffs, we’ve got to talk MVP.

Caitlin: We’ve got to talk MVP. So I think no surprise to anybody. A’ja Wilson was named WNBA MVP in 2026. It’s her fifth MVP award. It is her third in a row, and it is her fifth in nine years in the league. So you want to talk about complete and total domination of a league. She is the best basketball player in the world right now. I don’t think you can argue with that.

Alex: I have a note here that the only other back-to-back winner was I think Cynthia Cooper in 97 and 98.

Caitlin: Right, right off the bat. It hasn’t happened at any other point. So for her to have the three in a row, plus the five total, which is the most of anybody in the WNBA, she joins the likes of Michael Jordan and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. So definitely in a class of her own. Got any stats?

Alex: I got some stats here. 26.2 points per game, 9.4 rebounds per game, 1.9 blocks per game.

Caitlin: That was a big one.

Alex: 52.7 field goal percentage, and 40.4% from the three.

Caitlin: Ooh, what did she shoot from the free throw line? Because would she have 50, 40, 90?

Alex: I don’t have that one.

Caitlin: She might have been a 50.

Alex: She led the league in points, blocks, and efficiency.

Caitlin: Yeah, I believe it. Her ability to impact the game on both sides of the ball is unparalleled. There were some plays in the playoffs with steals and blocks and just defense, if you just watch her defense, that were incredible. Obviously her offense is regularly on display too, although I’ll talk about it in a minute, but not so much against Golden State. The whole team kind of struggled there.

Alex: I feel like kind of one of the intangibles too, that if you really watch her, if something doesn’t go her way on the offensive side of the floor, she just shakes it off and gets back on defense. Like she’s not one of those people who’s going to sit here and complain a whole bunch.

Caitlin: Yeah, right. And she definitely wants her foul called, just like anybody. But yes, we saw that a number of times. We kind of pointed that out, like, okay, that didn’t go our way, and now she’s hustling back on defense. She’s locked in. She wants to compete. She wants to win.

WNBA MVP Voting: Olivia Miles, Kelsey Mitchell and the Caitlin Clark Debate

Caitlin: I do want to just take a brief second to talk about the overall MVP voting. So A’ja was not the unanimous MVP first place winner, or what have you. So the way that this works is the players get ranked by whoever’s voting. So you get a first place, second place, third, fourth, and fifth, and then you get points. So as you go down the list, A’ja was first in overall points. She had 713 points. The next closest, and this is the only one I’m going to talk about points on, is 442, so she won by a landslide here.

Caitlin: Now, second place and first place vote getter was Olivia Miles. She got six first place votes and she was the one with the 442 points. She had 40 second place votes, 15 third place votes, and 17 fourth place votes. She had three fifth place votes. But I think that speaks to what she accomplished over the course of the season. For a little bit of just brief WNBA lore, there’s only ever been one player, Candace Parker, who won both Rookie of the Year and MVP in the same year. So I think for Liv to even get first place votes, honestly, is a big deal.

Alex: I don’t think she would have, even if she would have stayed at the same clip, I don’t know if she would have eclipsed A’ja.

Caitlin: No.

Alex: But it still would have been interesting to see.

Caitlin: Maybe a little bit more. Yeah, agree. And then following Miles, you had Kelsey Mitchell, who got two first place votes, and Caitlin Clark, who got one. Now I think there’s some chatter, of course, around Breanna Stewart. She didn’t get a single first place vote. She got seven second place votes. You had Paige Bueckers, where her votes mostly came from third place and beyond. And we had talked, when we had speculated on an MVP, we didn’t really think that those players were in the conversation. Our kind of top three were Mitchell, Miles.

Alex: Yeah, for sure.

Caitlin: I do know that obviously there’s strain around the lack of first place votes for Clark in some factions. Again, our perspective on that is I don’t think that she’s the best player on one of the best teams in the league.

Alex: Yeah, it’s essentially not the best player on her own team.

Caitlin: That’s what I mean. Yeah. So, interesting to see how this shook out. I would say other players getting votes: Angel Reese, Rhyne Howard, Shakira Austin, Veronica Burton, Gabby Williams, Jackie Young, and Jessica Shepard. So these are folks who just got votes down the ballot at those five spots. Obviously the voters could put in whoever they wanted to in each of those five spots. So kudos to A’ja, job well done again, regular season awards, playoff performance notwithstanding, for any of these folks who had those incredible accomplishments throughout the 2026 season. And now we’ll talk about how the Aces got knocked out of the playoffs.

Alex: Let’s talk about it.

Caitlin: We’re actually going to talk about Atlanta and New York first. It’s first on our sheet. I feel like we’ve got to lock in on that one first.

Alex: Yeah, we do. Do you want to talk about game two right away?

Caitlin: Yeah, I feel like throw what you got out there. I’ve got a little bit more of a, like there’s, we can talk about the outcomes, but then I feel like there were themes in these series that were pretty consistent. So I’ll probably chime in with those a little bit more.

Alex: I don’t actually have the result labeled in here.

Caitlin: Oh, I do. I got it. So game two went to overtime. The Dream won 101 to 98 in OT. So it was a tight game. All of the games in this first series between the Dream and New York were pretty close, which was great.

Alex: Yep.

The Reset Timeout Controversy in Dream vs. Liberty Game Two

Alex: I mean, the reset timeout controversy in overtime. So I guess, to put it out there, were they shooting free throws down on the Liberty end?

Caitlin: So yes. There was a side out, out of bounds for the Dream and they were up by one, right? Very, very astutely, Angel Reese went over and asked the referee, you can see her do this, is it a back court violation if the ball is being passed from out of bounds in the front court into the back court? Like would I get a back court violation? Because then that’s what they did, right? She kind of did this handoff type move where the defense was kind of still setting up, not paying attention. And she ran into the back court, DeWanna Bonner passed it to her. She got it and she could kill some clock running around back there before she got fouled.

Caitlin: Now, as Ryan Ruocco likes to remind us all series, Angel Reese was the player to foul because she was a 72% free throw shooter during the season, which to be fair is basketball, it’s logical basketball moves. It’s the repetition of that statistic that got to me. So they fouled Reese, right person to foul, very heads up play from her to kill some seconds. Okay, she is shooting her free throws.

Caitlin: While this is happening, Breanna Stewart is checking with the referee on whether or not New York has what’s called a reset timeout. So a reset timeout is, once the play is dead, basically, so the free throw is made or the Liberty rebound the basketball, you can call a reset timeout in the WNBA. And this is, I think it’s 20 seconds, but it automatically advances the ball to the front court. You don’t really have time to huddle or anything. It’s just you’re moving the ball to the front court. Makes a huge difference at the end of a game if you have to go the full length of the court in four seconds versus half the length of the court.

Alex: They had about four, four and a half, something in that range.

Caitlin: Yeah, it was like 4.4.

Alex: I think we’re sitting there yelling like, what are you doing?

Caitlin: Well, we were yelling, yes. So what happened is Stewie asks the referee. The referee appears to, and says that he told her she did, appears to signal to Chris DeMarco that he doesn’t, and there’s some miscommunication. Angel Reese makes both free throws. They inbound the ball, and everyone and their mom, based on the reactions online, were probably screaming, use your reset timeout.

Alex: You’ve got to use it, and they didn’t.

Caitlin: And they got a shot off.

Alex: They chucked it down the court, didn’t they?

Caitlin: They got the ball down to Breanna Stewart and she was able to take a three, and that’s not the worst thing, but it was an off balance runner of a three pointer versus, could you have had some screening action? I’m going to talk about Marine Fauthoux, excuse me.

Alex: Yep.

Caitlin: My French wants to be. Fauthoux, who had been on from three and had made the three to get them into overtime in that game. It was a bummer. And I’m just going to say it is the coaches, it’s the coaching staff’s job to keep track of your timeouts. You’ve got to be keeping track of this. It is your job to communicate that to your team, and if you don’t know, you need to make sure that it is clear to you what the situation was. This to me is 100% on DeMarco and his staff, but him at the end of the day. There is absolutely no reason why that shouldn’t have gotten called.

Alex: He apparently said later that they should have pushed harder on it, and I was like, it didn’t seem like.

Caitlin: Sure, what? He didn’t, there was no reaction. No reaction. You can watch the film.

Alex: I think I even saw Stewie turn around and go like this to signal for it, and one of the bench coaches went like this.

Caitlin: Yeah. It was really poor management. I think also from my perspective, really disappointing afterwards that in the postgame press conference, there was this really awkward interaction between DeMarco and Stewie where they were asked the question and he’s like, do you want to talk about it or should I? And then she just was like, I’m going to do it. And so when we joke that Stewie was the de facto coach of that team, we’re not actually joking, I don’t think.

Caitlin: Now, in addition to this was the refereeing response, which made it seem very shady. Someone was lying, right? Because essentially Stewie is like, I was told I didn’t have a reset timeout. The referees are like, no, we told her that she had a reset timeout. So somebody is not being honest.

Alex: They backed up or doubled down saying, we don’t keep track of timeouts.

Caitlin: That’s on the scorer’s table.

Alex: Yes.

Caitlin: So it’s unfortunate, especially when a game is that close. I think for New York, I had had them going to four games in the series because I thought they would be able to sneak one out and that might have been the one. But again, we’ve been saying it all season, Chris DeMarco just kind of seems like he’s not quite sure what’s going on most of the time.

Alex: Yeah, I still don’t know if he’s watched a WNBA game at this point.

Caitlin: I don’t know if he has either, to be honest.

Breanna Stewart Carries the Liberty Without Support

Caitlin: All right, any other, I got a few other things on game two.

Alex: No, no.

Caitlin: So I think game two, Stewie came to play. We’ve been talking about this all playoffs, all end of the season. She scored 25 points in the first half on eight of nine from the floor. And she ended up finishing with 35. And we knew that the Liberty were going to go on her back or not. Like they weren’t going to go at all if she wasn’t carrying them, and that was the kind of performance that they needed from her.

Caitlin: Unfortunately, she’s not really getting the support that she needed. So they did get a great performance from Fauthoux. She came in, great minutes off the bench. She actually ended up playing over 30 minutes in that game off the bench. Pauline Astier barely played after a little bit. And so that’s wonderful. But they had inconsistent showings from Ionescu. Jonquel Jones is a baller. She did her thing. The battle between her and Reese was fun to watch. They didn’t get the production out of Fiebich in this series that we saw against the Lynx. And he didn’t really play his bench that much besides Fauthoux.

Alex: I didn’t even grab Sabrina’s stats.

Caitlin: Yeah, she had 10 in game two and 12 in game three, and her shooting percentage was quite low. She just seemed off all this season. So it’ll be interesting to see what happens with her. I’ve seen some speculation that maybe they try to trade her to get as much as they can now, and that maybe they need a different piece there. But free agency is something I get to talk about much, much later.

Dream vs. Liberty Game Three: Atlanta’s Defense Closes the Sweep

Caitlin: So we jumped a little bit ahead there because we started talking a little bit about the whole series, but fast forward to game three. We’re now in New York at Barclays. The Dream pull off an 85 to 83 victory. Another close game here. What were your thoughts?

Alex: I just don’t know if, I don’t know, we already kind of talked about it because we talked about some of the performances already, but like just not consistent enough from game to game, I think, for all of their players. Like we said it multiple weeks ago, you can’t just rely on Stewie to be the person scoring every point for you. You can’t do that.

Caitlin: Yeah. And I think what’s interesting to think about, we’ll flip over and talk a little bit about the Dream here in just a second, but what the Dream were able to do that the Lynx couldn’t do with New York. One, the Lynx aren’t as physical as the Dream, by any means, right? Two, the Dream’s defense was just hounding. It’s so disruptive. And the Liberty couldn’t figure out how to play through that and protect the ball. And then they didn’t shoot great. And so when you’re not making your shots, which we saw when they played the Lynx, that’s not a recipe for success, unfortunately.

Caitlin: So let’s talk about the Dream and that defense. So I think in game two, where that game was won by the Dream in my mind, even though it was a really, really close game, was points off turnovers.

Alex: That’s what I had.

Caitlin: 28 points off turnovers.

Alex: That’s what I had. To the Liberty’s.

Caitlin: To my main stat.

Alex: 10.

Caitlin: Yeah, sorry to steal your thunder. You know, I think we saw some incredible performances throughout that series from Jordin Canada. And Angel Reese.

Alex: Yeah, we talked about Jordin last week, I think. Just phenomenal.

Caitlin: So fast.

Alex: I think during game two or three, they actually put the miles per hour on her.

Caitlin: They’re like, we’ve got to watch this. One of the things that I love about what she was doing in that series was the Liberty would score, right? Obviously, these again, close games, it’s not like they weren’t scoring. It’s just they missed when they really needed. And the Liberty would score, Canada would get the ball out of bounds, and she’s not walking the ball up. She is sprinting the ball up. She gets past like three defenders and now it’s just her. And she can get to the bucket. And it’s like all of a sudden she’s scored and you haven’t even gotten back over half court, essentially. So she alone, honestly, in a lot of ways, sped the Liberty up. And that is not a game that they’re going to be good at. They’re very good at a half court set in a slower pace, slowed down game where they can either get it into Stewie for her moves, Jonquel Jones for her moves, or pop it back out to their three-point shooter.

Alex: They were able to beat the Liberty without I think the top scorer on their team, Allisha Gray, was out both, essentially both games.

Caitlin: Yes. And I actually personally think that’s why these scores were as close as they were. Because the Dream had to manufacture offense, and they got it from a lot of different places. I’ll talk about in game three, Isobel Borlase, the youngster. She came in, had a great kind of little burst for them. She scored 10 points on 85% shooting just in a really quick segment of the game that really shifted the momentum. They also had good production from Rhyne Howard in that first quarter of game three. So they pieced it together.

Alex: Yeah. I think I had one where Reese and Canada were like 21 of 23 from the line in game two.

Caitlin: Yes, free throws were huge.

The Borlase, Ionescu and Reese Sequence, and the Officiating Problem

Caitlin: One piece of controversy coming out of game three, because again, can’t be without controversy, right? Was this sequence between Borlase, as I mentioned her, and Ionescu, and then Reese. So just describing it really quickly: Isobel Borlase is driving to the basket, Sabrina Ionescu is defending her. Borlase clearly pushes off, it is clearly an offensive foul. I would 100% agree that that should have been called, and I would have been pissed if it had been me. They didn’t call it.

Alex: No.

Caitlin: Right. Borlase makes the basket. They’re coming back down. Sab is pissed. And she goes to set a screen on Borlase, who I think is guarding Fiebich maybe, or Fauthoux, and Fauthoux is going around. You can see, I could see it before it happened, that Sabrina lined this woman up and was like, I am taking you out. And to me, what it looked like was honestly, yeah, I’m pissed about the offensive foul not getting called, but it honestly was like a whole host of frustrations coming out in that one moment. Also very clearly an offensive foul, which got called.

Alex: It got called, yeah.

Caitlin: And then they went and looked at it for an upgrade. It didn’t get upgraded, but it was a very obvious foul. So that happens. It gets called. Sabrina starts walking away. Angel comes up to her right away and just keeps saying, you can’t do that. You can’t do that. You can’t do that. And then Rhyne Howard interjects, inserts herself, pulls Angel away. There’s some backs and forths and whatevers.

Caitlin: Okay. First of all, the refs messed this up. If you just call the offensive foul, none of this happens. So again, we’re back at the officiating garbage in this league, and it needs to be fixed. Two, how many times after this interaction happened, oh my gosh, did Rebecca Lobo say that Angel Reese should have gotten a technical foul?

Alex: Yeah, it was insane.

Caitlin: It went on for minutes.

Alex: She had to have said that’s a tech seven or eight times.

Caitlin: And we were playing more basketball after that, and they kept bringing the replay back up.

Alex: And they never went back to, to be fair, she did say in the moment, yes, absolutely, that was a foul on Ionescu. But then later in the game, it continues just to be, she should have gotten a tech for that.

Caitlin: She should have gotten a tech. She being Angel Reese.

Alex: She should have gotten a tech.

Caitlin: When you can very clearly see that Sabrina Ionescu is trying to impact the player. I don’t want to say hurt her, but she is very clearly trying to send a message, which whenever we’re talking about flagrants or technicals and some of the wording behind those, it’s usually the word intent. There was clear intent. I honestly don’t know how it didn’t get upgraded to a flagrant one. But the number of times that her and Ruocco continued to harp on it, and I know that a lot of fans who watch when they are commentating, there’s very obvious biases for certain players, certain teams and against others. Asinine. It’s really hard to watch as a viewer. I honestly don’t think that what Angel did warranted, in my view, a technical.

Alex: A tech, no.

Caitlin: She did not appear to be swearing or saying anything derogatory. She was just saying, you can’t do that, and standing up for her teammate after what was, again, very clearly a retaliatory move on Sabrina’s part. They should have both gotten upgrades. Now, I think earlier in the game, Reese did get a technical with Jonquel Jones. The two of them got a double tech. So officiating needs to be better. Commentating needs to be unbiased. It needs to be, let’s filter this through a lens of, we’re looking at everybody from all angles.

Alex: I mean, we don’t need to dig in too much more, but there’s a lot of times too where the commentators that they have are people who are involved with players on the court in some type of way, or previously on the team, whatever it is. And so it feels like for all sports recently, that’s gotten a lot more lax with who can commentate on what.

Caitlin: Yeah, like how do you keep your bias out of your commentary if you played for this franchise or you played with these players?

Alex: Which is fine for a local team, like local broadcasts, but not national, like what we’re seeing.

What the Dream’s Sweep Means Heading Into the Finals

Caitlin: Okay. So the Dream move on. I would say, despite the close scores, in my view, there was never really a doubt that they were going to win the series.

Alex: For sure.

Caitlin: And I think kind of once it came down to it, again, this team is rising to the moment. And I think that is going to be the big test for them as we move into this final series, which is a long series.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: At a minimum, both of these teams are going to play more games than they’ve played so far, right? And it’ll be interesting to see if the Dream can stay in their mindset, stick to their game plan. And I’ll mention it in a second because we’ll talk a little bit about the Valkyries, but this is like good on good for two defenses. Atlanta has more prolific offensive weapons when they are on. Rhyne Howard can light you up. Allisha Gray, if she’s back, which we don’t quite know. There’s like, I saw some things that maybe she had some surgery done on the finger, but that seems odd. I do not know that for sure, to be clear.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: Given that, I would think they’d want her back. And so that’s going to be really interesting. I think the other thing about these two teams, again, we’ll talk about it as we break down the Valks and the Aces, is the pace of play that they like to play, and how that lines up.

Valkyries vs. Aces: Golden State Sweeps Vegas

Caitlin: So let’s move on. We’ll talk about Golden State and Vegas. Game two was close. So Golden State came away with an 83-81 victory. And then game three saw another overtime game, with Golden State really pulling away in overtime, 87 to 77 over the Aces. So what are your thoughts?

Alex: Well, I think I actually missed most of game two because I had to go to bed early that night. I was just trying to look through my stat list here. I think I saw Tiff Hayes had 21 off the bench that night. Gabby Williams with 20, I think, is what I had. I mean, Tiff Hayes coming off the bench and scoring 21 is what you need in a game like this, right? I think the other interesting thing is, what was it, Stokes and Hayes both used to play in Vegas. So you’re kind of beating your old team with old members of your team, which I think is always fun to do.

Caitlin: Yeah, for sure. I think there’s good, probably good rivalry there, right?

Caitlin: Okay. So I actually went into this one, these games are a little later for us, and because the Dream and Liberty games on the national broadcast would always take precedent, I would be on that one and then you’d miss almost the whole first quarter, excuse me. So admittedly, I did not watch all of these series of games. I did watch a good amount of game two and a decent amount of game three. But I went in and I kind of started to pull some statistics comparing these two teams between what their performance was in this series and then how they were in the regular season. And there were some really striking differences for the Aces.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: So I’m going to talk about those and then I’m going to talk about my overall reason why I think the Aces bowed out. So field goal percentage in general, Golden State in that series shot 39.8% and the Aces shot 38.5. Those are low. At this point in the season, it’s kind of expected for those to start to drop, just as fatigue starts to set in and things like that. The Aces’ regular season field goal percentage though is 48.6. So you’re talking about 10 percentage points different, which is a huge factor. Now their three point percentage didn’t go down by that much, but they attempted far fewer three pointers than they do during the regular season. And so you’re not getting that double your money type situation on points. You’re having to work really hard for two point buckets, right?

Caitlin: The other thing here, the Aces were absolutely out hustled in this series. Rebounds, Golden State beat the Aces on the board, 41.7 rebounds per game on average to the Aces’ 28.3. Points off turnovers, Golden State 14, Aces 10. Points in the paint, Golden State 31.3 to the Aces’ 24.7. And the big one for me is second chance points. We talked about this after game one when Golden State had 17 offensive rebounds. 14 for Golden State to five for the Aces. So you’re almost tripling them up on average on those second chance points. And all that is, I realize I just rattled off a bunch of stats, but all of that is hustle. It’s hustle, it’s knowing your assignments, it’s knowing your rotations, and it’s putting in the effort.

Why the Aces Lost: Depth, Injuries and Minutes

Caitlin: So this comes to my thesis, right? This came down to the fact that the Aces were depleted. They had injury challenges and they did not have a very deep bench. They missed the hell out of NaLyssa Smith, like a hundred percent. Those rebound numbers, even the field goal numbers, y’all, she was shooting north of 60% throughout the season. And points in the paint and things like that, that doesn’t happen if she’s in the game.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: And we talked when we first found out that she was hurt that that was going to have an impact for the Aces at some point. And this was when it happened.

Caitlin: The other thing, on the flip side, we’ve talked about the Valkyries’ depth. They regularly play eight, nine, even ten players. No one on that team plays a full 40 minutes. You know who’s playing a full 40 minutes? Jackie Young, Chelsea Gray, right? They’re gassed at the end of the season. And so Golden State has this advantage of, you can throw everything you want at us. I’m just going to beat next woman up, next woman up. Is it Kaitlyn Chen tonight? Is it Tiff Hayes tonight? Is it Janelle Salaün tonight?

Alex: Kaitlyn Chen came in just ballin’.

Caitlin: 100%. Right, Veronica Burton is your starting point guard and she is fantastic on a normal day, but if she’s maybe a little off, you bring Kaitlyn Chen off the bench, let her shine. And what Natalie Nakase has built there, I think honestly is incredible, and a blueprint, probably, that doesn’t seem to be being used by many other teams, but I wonder.

Alex: I was just trying to compare them to what the Lynx do, and the Lynx kind of feel more old school.

Caitlin: Starter heavy.

Alex: Right. Then we’ll go to the bench.

Caitlin: Get your rest. Versus.

Alex: Kind of rotate them in a little bit differently.

Caitlin: Yeah. And the other thing, and I think this also comes from Coach Nakase, is this mentality of, it is that next woman up mentality, but there were moments throughout this series. So I think it was actually in the first series against Dallas. The Valkyries were down in game three, I think it was game three, by like 16 or something. It was, they were down by a lot. The team huddled together. This is like, you can go find the clips of this. They put arms around each other, a little team huddle, you know, as things are getting reset on an out of bounds or free throw. They do a collective breath. And do you know what happened after that? They went on some crazy run and ended up winning that game, right?

Caitlin: Another thing I saw, they were asking Gabby Williams about, she was having an off shooting night, I think in the last game of this series, and they were like, how do you kind of get through that? And she’s like, I’m paraphrasing, but she’s like, I remind myself that if I smile, then my shoulders lift, my head lifts, and that is what my teammates need to see from me, and then I start to believe that that next shot is going to go in. And so there is some mental coaching going on with these Valkyries that I have not heard or seen kind of that level.

Alex: They probably have someone good.

Caitlin: They probably have something good. So this all culminates in, like, so excited for this final series.

Alex: Yeah, I think it’s going to be so entertaining.

Caitlin: It will be this battle of wills.

The Finals Matchup: Highest Revenue Team vs. Lowest

Caitlin: Interesting factoid, right? You are pitting the highest attended, highest revenue generating team against the lowest attended on average and lowest revenue generating team in the Dream.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: And that’s not to say that the Dream are not on the upswing, but just historically, right? They have the smallest venue in Gateway Center. And I think we can talk about that a little bit. They had moved their first two rounds to State Farm Arena. They were having like 10,000 plus people show up for that. They weren’t opening the upper bowl. So to be clear, you couldn’t have 17,000 people in there. That wasn’t what they were offering. I think they could offer that for the finals.

Alex: They’d get it out.

Where Will the Atlanta Dream Play Their Finals Home Games?

Caitlin: There are scheduling conflicts during the finals with all three of their potential home games. And to me, one, someone didn’t think they were going to be playing in the finals, or someone just forgot to book it. I don’t know.

Alex: They sent out the email, but not the invite attachment or something.

Caitlin: Like, yeah, I didn’t put it on the right date.

Caitlin: Two, there’s been a lot of takes around what the right move is here. And I have a couple of thoughts. One, so one’s a concert. It’s a Zomboy concert, I don’t know. Somber music, but like, I think he’s pretty popular. Move the concert. The Valkyries got Doja Cat, who’s also very popular, to move her concert by a week. You can work it out with your tour. And frankly, you are going to gain a lot of fans. Women’s sports fans like to spend money and they like to rep brands. I realize you are not listening to this, but if you want to make a lot of fans really fast, you’ll move your concert. By a day, even, right? It doesn’t have to be a week, whatever.

Caitlin: The other two conflicts are with the Atlanta Hawks, who are playing early season NBA games. In my mind, I don’t understand why those can’t be adjusted on the schedule to give precedence and priority to your team that is in the WNBA finals.

Alex: Yeah, they’re in the finals.

Caitlin: I also do understand that these things do not get scheduled on whims. There are things that there are downstream and upstream effects to moving games like this. However, it happens all the time.

Alex: Yep.

Caitlin: So to me, this is a choice. Someone is choosing to, frankly, to me, we’re downgrading and immediately discrediting the women’s team by saying, no, we would not move for you. I don’t know how else you would have a higher priority than the finals of your league.

Alex: Something I just thought of is that I was thinking about how would this be handled with the Lynx, and it’s like the Lynx are one of the primary tenants of the Target Center, so it probably would not happen in this way.

Caitlin: Well, we moved a game earlier this season for the Timberwolves.

Alex: But I don’t think in the finals. I don’t know if that would happen as easily, that they’d move the Lynx out for the finals. I’m wondering if because they’re not officially tenants of State Farm Arena, that when they did look at the schedule at the beginning of the year, it’s like, well, they have their normal home venue that would be available no matter what, and that’s the only thing that whoever’s supposed to look at it looked at. Which is not probably the right way to look at it. But also then maybe don’t announce that you’re going to be moving to State Farm Arena a couple of days or whatever it was before you are about to not play in State Farm Arena for your finals.

Caitlin: Yeah, I mean, it just feels like a blunder all around. And it is disappointing. I think it’s disappointing for the fans down there. I think it’s disappointing for the players. You’re now talking about going from playing in front of 18,000 plus for two games in the Bay Area and Chase Center, to 3,500 at Gateway Center. And that is just not equivalent in any realm.

Caitlin: Also, the Atlanta games at State Farm Arena looked like they were popping. They looked crazy. They looked amazing. And you want that kind of energy, especially when you see a franchise kind of on this ascendancy that the Dream have been on this season. Like you’re leaving money on the table, and you’re leaving that, like sometimes the playoffs, I think the playoffs, right, where when you got hooked on the Lynx a couple of years ago, the playoffs can be that thing that brings in lifelong fans. And so they’re walking away from that because, again.

Alex: Less seats means more expensive seats and you can’t get in the building.

Caitlin: Pricing out.

Alex: Fans get priced out.

Caitlin: Right.

Alex: Can’t go.

Could the Dream Play at Mercedes-Benz Stadium?

Caitlin: Okay, I do have one other thing to say on this. Some people, and even we’ve spitballed this, have suggested, so Arthur Blank, whose group owns Mercedes-Benz Stadium, he’s part of the ownership for the Falcons and the new Atlanta United down there in the MLS team, I don’t even know what that team’s called, the Atlanta MLS team. They’re like, hey, what if we just move the game to Mercedes-Benz Stadium?

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: That would not be an advantage for the Dream.

Alex: That’s true.

Caitlin: So sight lines and depth perception in basketball is so incredibly critical, and putting a basketball, you’ve seen this when they’ve done it in college and they put a basketball court in a football stadium. It is, people cannot shoot. It’s so hard to judge depth and things like that. And I think the floor would be weird. I just don’t think it actually provides an advantage outside of the fact that you could have more fans there.

Alex: I think the only way you provide the sight lines in a stadium like that is if you do what they did when the Final Four was at the Metrodome many, many years ago, where it’s in the corner. It’s not in the center. It’s in the corner.

Caitlin: Yeah.

Alex: But then it’s the same thing. You’re probably only getting six or 7,000 people in there versus whatever.

Caitlin: Right. So I don’t think that that’s a great idea. I feel like there have to be other basketball arenas that are bigger than Gateway Center around Atlanta.

Alex: We talked about Georgia.

Caitlin: There’s Georgia Tech, which is right there. Georgia State University, I think, is right in nearer in Atlanta. There are some other options that are a little further outside of the city, which has pros and cons. But mostly I just think, yeah, step aside, Hawks. Step aside. You guys haven’t won anything for a long time.

Alex: All right, let’s move it on. We got some soccer. We got some sad soccer.

Caitlin: I, okay.

Alex: I mean, there was some upside, but we like to see a win.

USWNT vs. Spain: Diagnosing a 2-0 Loss

Caitlin: Yeah, but that’s part of our challenge as U.S. Women’s National Team fans, is that we are used to seeing wins and when we don’t see a win, we are immediately like, oh my God, burn it down.

Alex: It’s over.

Caitlin: And I have seen some reactions like that. And I’m like, you guys, I don’t feel that way.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: I told you right afterwards, I was like, look, it was a pretty shitty first 15 minutes. And then, could it have been better the whole game? Yeah, there’s a lot of things I have to say about what could have been better. But there are some good things that came out of this game.

Alex: We’ll get to it. But I quoted you on one of my positives. So just to recap here, we had a friendly versus Spain. We lost two nil, like we said, in headlines. And we have a rematch tomorrow, yesterday for you guys, on Tuesday the 13th. And so let’s see here. You had some comments about Hayes’ comments on Naomi Girma. Leading up to the game, or?

Caitlin: Yeah, I think I might come back to that a little bit because I think it has to do with some of my criticisms.

The USWNT Lineup Against Spain

Caitlin: I want to start with, A, there were over 19,000 people that came to this game, so all the no one watches women’s sports crowd, you guys can go sit down for now. They honored U.S. Women’s National Team legend Crystal Dunn before the game, which is fantastic. I can’t believe they lost on Dunn’s special day. But that was great. They were missing her in this game, let me tell you.

Caitlin: Starting lineup, we had Claudia Dickey starting in goal. We had a back line of Avery Patterson, Tierna Davidson, Kennedy Wesley, and Emily Fox. Those four have never played all together in a back line. Hard. Then in the midfield, we had Lindsey Heaps, Rose Lavelle, Lily Yohannes, and up top we had two thirds of the triple espresso, Trinity Rodman and Sophia Wilson, along with, they call her junior espresso, Alyssa Thompson.

Caitlin: So we also saw Giselle Thompson come on at half for Patterson in the back line. And then Ashley Sanchez, Mal Swanson, and Claire Hutton all came in around, I think it was the 60th, 65th minute somewhere in there. So we got to see good minutes from them. It was definitely fun to see triple espresso back on the field. This was Mal Swanson’s first time back playing in a game with the team. She was in the Brazil side, but didn’t see the pitch, in two years. And then obviously Sanchez has been out of the mix for quite a while too.

Emma Hayes, Naomi Girma and Chelsea’s Player Management

Caitlin: So you mentioned my comments on Hayes. She had some commentary leading into the match on specifically the management of Naomi Girma, but there are some significant injuries right now. We talked about those last week when we were doing our preview of this match. And she said that the way that Girma is managed at Chelsea needs to change and she’s going to do what she can to influence that, because she is consistently unavailable to play for the national team and she is arguably one of the best defenders in the world. And, another player that we very much missed in this game. So I think that’s interesting.

Caitlin: To watch her and Sam Coffey were both pretty late scratches to that roster, having been named to it. Coffey got injured in a game and ended up in a boot. That was kind of an acute situation, but Girma’s continues to be this kind of ongoing.

Alex: So I’ve been talking about it for many, many months now.

Caitlin: Yeah. Okay, do you want to share your thoughts on the game before I go all soccer coach on everybody?

The Positives: Resilience and Chances Created

Alex: I think the thing that I was going to quote you on is, and I think I saw this too, is that you said around the last World Cup period that this team would go down and they wouldn’t kind of fight their way back. And I think we saw them, they weren’t hanging their heads at all. They were fighting hard. I don’t remember what the exact stat was, but I think they had like 10 shots on target in the second half. It was insane. So I thought that was really interesting that you called that. They still were hitting balls. It wasn’t for lack of trying. It was just like lack of finish. I think that was even Hayes’ exact comments on it. So I thought that was interesting.

Alex: I thought the Lily Yohannes PK, my notes just say why. So I don’t know if that was just like, let’s give the kid a chance and see what she can do, or if there was some other motive behind that. There’s a lot of speed up the wing in that first half.

Caitlin: I remember seeing on the right side.

Alex: So I think those are a lot of my takeaways.

Emma Hayes’ Huddle Quote and the Gap With Spain

Caitlin: Junior espresso. Let’s start with this. First of all, I just want to reemphasize the brilliance of taking on this challenge at this moment. So there are a lot of managers, U.S. Women’s National Team managers past, but also managers of other international teams, who would not sign up to play at this stage. Right. Now, I do need to add, Spain was not in its top form. They had about five or six players out who are part of their like starting lineup regularly. To be clear, this was not like Spain. This was like Spain, right? Still, very good.

Caitlin: I’m going to read a quote from Emma that she gave in the team huddle. You may have seen this on social media. And then I’m going to get into my criticisms and my positives coming out of this. But what she said was, to the team, she said, it’s the details we give on a tactical level that makes the difference. All of these things that we’re teaching are for this opponent. And the reason I say that is because that’s our barometer of success, right? Spain is world number one.

Alex: Yep.

Caitlin: Back into the quote. It’s the quality in the last part of the pitch that would without question be a different outcome. But this is where when I say you have to own it, this is where you actually have to go harder into the little details that matter. So from her perspective, she went on to kind of say, what we just learned in this game is that the gap between us and Spain is not, you know, a big gap, just kind of using your hands. It’s small. And if we can close that gap on the details.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: And specifically in the final third, right? Would that be the case, right? Would we feel a little bit, obviously you’d feel better about it because you scored. And I do think that we get caught up a little bit too much in the result and the outcome of the game. Because I do think that that is accurate.

Caitlin: Now, there are a few other things that I do feel like I have not heard her address them, but I think need some addressing headed into World Cup qualifiers and the World Cup. So positives, tons of chances. Touch was off, to go to my comment to you about the resiliency. I think in the last World Cup cycle, we did not see, we saw a fight, but it wasn’t like, we are going to go take this game. It was like, can we just make it through this, and maybe create something. They were creating, right? There was a lot. Trinity Rodman probably had three or four opportunities to bring a ball down near goal and shoot and just, that first touch was failing her in that game. There were multiple times during the game where I yelled left foot at various players, because I think had they brought the ball down on their left, which seems like a crazy thing to be saying to the most elite professional footballers in the world. But here we are.

Caitlin: I think eventually in the game, we had stretches of dictating play against a team that is very hard to dictate play against. Spain only had three shots on goal. So they did not generate a ton of offense. The problem is they finished on two, right? So our defense, when it collapsed, collapsed spectacularly, or fully, right? And then the other thing that I wrote down is, and I said this when we were watching, Spain looked, at least that version of Spain, again didn’t have their full strength, right? But they looked very beatable. Their back line looks like a weakness area, and our speed up top looks like we have the ability to counter that if we can hold in possession and do a couple other things.

Where the USWNT Needs to Improve: The Missing Number Six

Caitlin: Okay, where do we need to improve? Ugly first 15, I already said that. New back line combo. So whenever you’re playing in the back line with a new set of people, that back line is intended to move and shift like one unit. We talk about this in basketball, right? Rotations on defense. Same thing happens on the soccer pitch. If you don’t know the on-field tendencies of your counterparts, you can create gaps in that connectivity. And if you’re playing against a team that is as good as Spain, those gaps are going to get exploited. If I were to get really specific, the second goal was a result of them getting too stretched, and across being able to come in and a player being unmarked because they were too stretched out, right?

Caitlin: The first goal, though, was fully a function of a very dysfunctional midfield. So where I am most concerned in watching that game is we showed, and I think continue to show with this team, that we desperately need a true, what’s called a six. So this is a defensive center midfielder, the person that sits right in front of that back line, and their job is to primarily focus on defense.

Alex: Yep.

Caitlin: We started with Rose Lavelle, who is very much a 10, an attacking center midfielder, right? And then Lindsey Heaps and Lily Yohannes were supposed to be playing what’s called a double pivot, right? So they’re kind of both playing a little bit of that six role and they’re sitting two in front of that line and they’re trying to take numbers up on the Spanish midfield. Okay, neither one of them are true sixes, neither one of them actually want to defend. So they drift.

Alex: They drift upwards.

Caitlin: They drift upwards, right? And then when they’re asked to come back down, they don’t know how to stay in this position, right? They don’t know how to, seems simple, but necessarily find a marker or understand the space that they’re supposed to be covering, because they are naturally inclined.

Caitlin: So how do we fix this, right? One is play a true six. I wrote down, and I don’t know if I said this out loud to you, but about 20 minutes into the game, I was like, put Claire Hutton on the field. I want Claire Hutton on the field. Because while she is young and inexperienced in these sorts of situations, she plays a six extremely well. And without Coffey there, her and then Jaelin Howell, who came in from, she plays for Gotham in club, but for Coffey, that’s kind of a backfill. I would love to see Hutton in that role.

Individual Performances: Sophia Wilson, Trinity Rodman and the Penalty

Caitlin: I’m going to talk about, I have one other thing on the midfield here, but I’m going to finish with that. We talked about touch and poise in the final third. I thought Sophia Wilson was fantastic. She just couldn’t find the back of it, but she did the one and it was offsides. She was so close on the other, like she was right there. She was a dog all game long. Trinity seemed off to me, like forcing things, just frustrated.

Alex: She gets to that frustrated mode or something like that. And it’s like, it doesn’t work.

Caitlin: Doesn’t contribute well.

Caitlin: Yohannes taking the penalty. At the time, I was like, what are we doing? And then I thought about it and I’m like, okay. This is a friendly, right? Like, you need to give players like that an opportunity. And I read after the fact, I think Yohannes has been 10 for 10 in like lower level. She doesn’t usually stutter step, and she stutter stepped.

Alex: Why?

Caitlin: I know. The rule of penalty kicks, y’all, is don’t change up your routine. Like don’t do it, don’t change the side you shoot to, stick with what you are good at. Learning moment, right? For her, that’s something that’s going to stick with her. And I think Hayes was, apparently it was predetermined that if a PK came up, Yohannes was going to be the one to take it. So it wasn’t a split second decision. She knew. But fine, that’s fine.

Claudia Dickey in Goal and the First Spain Goal

Caitlin: Claudia Dickey looked a little shaky at times to me. I did feel like on that first goal, well, Patri just ripped the hell out of that ball. It was from far enough out where I think Dickey, had she been anticipating a shot, which I don’t think she was, I think could have gotten to it. And this is me speaking as a goalkeeper, like from the angles I saw, if you’re actually ready to move, it was a quick two-step shuffle to her left or to her right and a dive. And I think she would have covered the post. So anyways.

Alex: It was like half she should have been in the position to get it.

Caitlin: But she wasn’t ready.

Alex: But also half an amazing shot. On someone who wasn’t in position.

Caitlin: Yeah. And then her distribution on the back was a little shaky. She played into pressure way too many times for me. And part of that was our midfielders. They did not, it was not great.

The Lindsey Heaps Question

Caitlin: I have said on this podcast before, I am not the biggest Lindsey Heaps fan.

Alex: Yep.

Caitlin: When it comes to how she plays. I did not like her in this game. And I do wonder if we did this in the last World Cup. We kept some players in the mix who weren’t actually going to be able to necessarily contribute to the game, but they were part of those teams.

Alex: Part of the leadership, the veteran leadership you have.

Caitlin: Yeah. I wonder if with the dearth of talent that Emma Hayes has at her fingertips, I think I saw somebody put it in a really succinct way where if the only reason you are keeping is that, is that really worth it? And again, lover for her leadership, but I think this game really exposed where some of her gaps in her game. She can’t, she doesn’t defend. Like she just doesn’t, she likes to just float and kind of do her thing. And it works really, really well against teams that are not as technical and tactical as Spain. But when it comes to winning a World Cup, you are going to face the top teams. And if your captain, whoever it is, is not able to adapt and adjust and play and give what you need in those moments. Now, to be fair, would that have looked different had we had a Hutton or a Coffey in, and Heaps and Lavelle were able to go and they weren’t playing the double pivot and whatnot?

Alex: Maybe.

Caitlin: But I just think it’s a question that I’m going to boldly put out there. I just think that we should be assessing all options. And I don’t like the idea of a coach like Hayes, who seems to do all the right things, getting blinded by a personal relationship or whatever it might be, that ends up impacting the outcomes for the team. Prove me wrong, Lindsey. I want to see it.

Alex: This is going to be like one of those reverse hexes we used to do on this show, where she’s going to go out and score two in this next one.

Caitlin: That’s right. All right, so that’s that. We shall see how it goes. You will have seen how it went by the time you’re listening to this, and you’ll be able to say, Caitlin, you’re full of crap. Or you were right. Or something in the middle.

Alex: Neither here nor there.

Caitlin: Neither here nor there.

What Caitlin Wants to See in the Second Friendly

Caitlin: What I would love to see in the second game is, can we score a goal?

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: Like, let’s just, we’ve got to score.

Alex: We’ve got to score.

Caitlin: Yeah, we’ve got to score. I also would love to see the hungry young guns who want an opportunity to play. Oh, Michelle Cooper came into the game too, by the way. I just remembered that. I don’t know that we’ll see, so for Trin, they played the full 90 plus. So I have a feeling that we may not see them at all, or maybe they’ll come off the bench. But I’m curious to see.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: She switches it up a lot.

Alex: It’s going to be kind of like the other game where they, like Brazil, they went like second game.

Caitlin: Yeah, completely different.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: So we’ll find out.

NWSL Playoff Race: The Table With Three Matches to Go

Caitlin: All right. You want to take us through? I just want to do a little recap. NWSL action will be back this coming weekend. We’ll probably have some of that in our what to watch, I’d imagine. And I think we just want to do a refresher to prepare you for where we are headed now with.

Alex: Yeah, I think we should do the table here, and then I’ll talk about just a couple games that are happening this weekend in what to watch when we get there. So we have Gotham in first, 55 points, San Diego in second with 51 points, Washington in third with 49, Utah in fourth with 46, Kansas City in fifth with 44, LA in sixth with 43, Portland in seventh with 43, North Carolina in eighth with 42, and then we’ve got Seattle at 40 points and Denver at 38. Those last two are outside looking in.

Caitlin: So very much outside looking in. Three matches to go for all of these teams.

Alex: So nine points remaining.

Caitlin: Max nine points remaining. And then just remember that when we’re talking about tiebreakers in the NWSL, because some of these teams have the same points or they’re close, it goes to goal differential first. So a team like Seattle, who’s sitting in ninth right now, two points out of playoff position, has a plus one goal differential. Like they are not.

Alex: Even if they tied North Carolina in points, they’re not moving on.

Caitlin: They’re not winning a battle there. And you even see the tied points between LA and Portland. What does this number say? LA has plus 16 to Portland’s plus 16. So that could become a factor down the stretch here. I think after that, what was it, like head to head? No, not head to head, that’s like fourth. It was like total goals. Maybe total wins.

Alex: Total wins.

Caitlin: Total wins, yeah, total wins, then total goals scored, and then head to head. So record and goals are important as we head into playoffs.

NWSL MVP Speculation and the Golden Boot Race

Caitlin: One final thing I want to throw in is there have been some early potential regular season MVP kind of speculation out there. I don’t think that these names will be anything that are going to be surprising if you’ve been listening to how we’ve been talking about this. Or if you follow the NWSL. So of course, Ashley Sanchez leading the league in goals, certainly having a career year at North Carolina. We also have Sophia Wilson, Trinity Rodman, Barbra Banda. But the name that I love in this list is hometown girl, Janine Sonis, playing for the Denver Summit near her hometown. She is, we talked about her last week, she’s got 12 goals on the season. She’s the only defender in the top, in the golden boot race. And she really, as we’ve watched that team as much as we can, she seems to be kind of the beating heart of that Denver Summit team. Had that epic goal that we didn’t see.

Alex: Because we left early.

Alex: I was actually wondering on these, how much of this, because I have not been around the NWSL long enough to know how the MVP voting works. With the WNBA, it’s very much like you’ve got to kind of be on a top team. You’ve got to be obviously probably one of the higher scorers, and that’s kind of like where the weight ends up. So I was kind of wondering with Barbra Banda being where she is, but Orlando being out, is that realistic or not?

Caitlin: Yeah, I think, I would say to me, Banda at this point is sort of like how we were just talking about a Paige Bueckers or a Breanna Stewart, right? It’s like, your team didn’t perform well enough for you to really be in the conversation, but you individually did, so we feel like we have to at least give you a shot.

Alex: And I pulled, I targeted her because one of the stats.

Caitlin: Targeting Barbra Banda.

Alex: One of the stats that I pulled was goals per 90.

Caitlin: Okay.

Alex: She is at 0.85, which is the highest on the list. The next closest is Ashley Sanchez at 0.77.

Caitlin: Oh, wow.

Alex: So.

Caitlin: I think her, I mean, put in those terms, right, her value to the team. And we talked about that throughout the season, right? If she scored, could their defense hold off on the other team scoring enough, or would she just have to keep piling them on? Obviously Banda too, and you could talk about any of the players who had to go play in African Cup of Nations, like had more limited time. And so what would have happened had she been in the full season. Yeah, right.

Alex: Yeah, for sure.

Caitlin: Anyways, we shall see.

What to Watch: WNBA Finals, NWSL, LPGA, Volleyball and Hockey

Alex: All right. What to watch?

Caitlin: Obviously it’s time. I’m starting to yawn.

Alex: Yeah, I’m starting to yawn here.

Caitlin: I did pretty good. That was pretty far into the show.

Alex: You did. I was yawning off mic all night. All right. WNBA finals, best of seven. Before next week, we’ll only have two games. So game one will be Saturday at 2:30 on NBC or Peacock.

Caitlin: I’m leaving the kids with my sister.

Alex: Yeah, reminder, this is the Dream at the Valkyries. So they’re in California here. Game two is Monday. Oh, this did not copy over. It says 2:30 PM on Monday. That can’t be right.

Caitlin: Well, I think it’s 7:30, because I think when I was trying to look at our potential, back when we were naively thinking we were going to be going to finals.

Alex: What happened there with my copy paste on the schedule? But yeah, those are the two games and then best of seven goes on from there.

Caitlin: Oh yeah, I was like, well yeah, there’s more, but that would be next week.

Alex: Yeah, it’ll be next week.

Caitlin: So that would be next week.

Alex: All right, NWSL. So I tried to pick out relevant games here. Somewhat relevant. Washington Spirit versus Gotham FC, Saturday at 11:30 AM on CBS and Paramount. The North Carolina Courage versus San Diego Wave, Saturday, October 17th, 6 p.m. on NWSL Plus. So that’s Sanchez going for potentially the record, I believe. And then we have the spot there is Chicago Stars versus Seattle Reign, with Seattle chasing that eighth spot.

Caitlin: Seattle could really use a pad on that goal differential.

Alex: Yes. And they could do it against Chicago.

Caitlin: I know, that’s what I’m saying. It’s possible. But they have not shown a proclivity for scoring goals this season.

Alex: All right, LPGA, we got the Buick LPGA Shanghai. This is like Wednesday evening through Sunday early morning.

Caitlin: Saturday night.

Alex: To early Sunday morning on the Golf Channel, because they’re obviously in Shanghai. And then NCAA volleyball, the only ranked matchup that was kind of the big one was number 16 Purdue at number one Nebraska. That was today’s rankings. There’s a poll that comes out.

Caitlin: Well, Nebraska is still number one.

Alex: Yeah, I came out today after I did my research. So there might be a little bit different in the rankings there, but that’s on Saturday on the Big Ten Network and the time is still TBD on that. So waiting to get an announcement there.

Alex: And in NCAA hockey, number two Ohio State versus number three Minnesota, Friday at six and Saturday at two. I believe that’s probably on ESPN actually.

Caitlin: I believe it is.

Alex: You go to that.

Caitlin: No we can’t, we’re going to be gone.

Alex: I didn’t put it on there because they’re not ranked anymore because they had the week off, but our alma maters are also playing this weekend.

Caitlin: I know, the Mavericks are playing Wisconsin, in Wisconsin, in Madison. I did see that. We can’t go to those games, we’re out of town.

Volleyball in Nebraska and Teaching Kids the Game

Caitlin: Nebraska, okay, I watched a little bit of the Nebraska-Wisconsin volleyball game with our youngest. It is hype in whatever gym, I don’t know what it’s called, that’s the reason why I’m saying whatever gym Nebraska is playing in, like sold out, so loud. And obviously they’re playing, I don’t know, Wisconsin was number three, I think, at the time, like it’s a big matchup. Man, they love their volleyball down there in Nebraska. It’s cool to see.

Caitlin: It was cool because our little one was asking all kinds of questions. She did not understand why the teams don’t come together, like why they’re on opposite sides.

Alex: Oh, yeah, they have to.

Caitlin: Yeah, she’s used to soccer, basketball, where the teams intermix, right? So she was about it. She’s like, mommy, those girls can jump so high.

Alex: They can.

Caitlin: They can, they’re very athletic. Also very tall. And then she was asking what the libero does. She was like, why does that girl have a red jersey on and her teammates have black?

Alex: I hardly know, so.

Caitlin: Well, we’re going to learn a lot about volleyball. Once Major League Volleyball and League One Volleyball comes back online, we will hook y’all up, hook ourselves up with some knowledge.

Momentum and Setbacks: Officiating, Venues and Two Finals Teams

Alex: All right, momentum, setbacks.

Caitlin: You said you have yours. I don’t want to say the same thing.

Alex: Well, setbacks, I think, is just, we’ve talked about it since the very first episode of this podcast, I think, WNBA officiating.

Caitlin: Oh, I didn’t expect you to even go there.

Alex: They did the whole thing last year with the task force or whatever it was. And I mean, we talked about it tonight, just not consistent. Here we are. We didn’t talk about this during the WNBA segment, one of the Liberty games where there was like 26 fouls in the first half.

Caitlin: Oh my gosh, yes.

Alex: And then they like swallowed their whistles the second half.

Caitlin: I think they realized that, yes, it was game two.

Alex: They’re like, we’re going to foul out every person on this team if we keep calling this.

Caitlin: It was game two, yeah. That was crazy.

Alex: I mean, you play 20 minutes of basketball in the first half. Every 45 seconds.

Caitlin: Yeah, they were calling fouls like crazy. And this is the same crew that I think they were saying had called 53 fouls in a game earlier in the season. The game is 40 minutes long. That is nuts.

Alex: Yeah, that’s crazy.

Caitlin: So yeah, that’s a good one. That’s a good one for a setback.

Caitlin: Mine is, man, I actually have a couple issues. I am actually really frustrated by the whole, where are the Atlanta Dream going to play in the WNBA finals. This is the kind of, I said this to you earlier, and I am going to soapbox a little bit here, this is the kind of stuff that when women get frustrated, or men who enjoy women’s sports get frustrated about, like having the opportunity and having the kind of respect that is warranted. Like, there is a choice being made here. There is a choice being made to not cede space or go find a better solution, right, to accommodate the hype around this team. And it seems wild to me that you wouldn’t want to lean into that.

Caitlin: And again, I’m saying this as just purely putting my opinion out into the world. I don’t know all the ins and outs. Maybe they are trying to figure something out and they’re going to change it up last minute.

Alex: Yeah.

Caitlin: But the fact that a team can make it to the finals and are starting their week of prep not necessarily knowing where they’re going to play their home games seems egregious in my mind. And it really emphasizes a conversation that we’ve had a lot on the podcast about the need for women’s teams to have their own spaces. Because inevitably, I feel like even in your scenario you mentioned with the Hawks and the Dream, if they shared that venue, I still feel like there might be arguments for primacy or what have you. Like, well, we’ve been around longer. Like we were here first. Like, come on, there has to be some. Your women’s team is in the finals of the WNBA. Like, how does that not take precedent? And I know how, you don’t have to tell me. I understand how. I understand how the structures have been built for the men. I get it. But I just find that first.

Alex: Yeah. Momentum?

Caitlin: Also the Dream. The Valkyries, everything, I don’t know.

Alex: I literally had the Valkyries and the Dream as both my momentums, because second year as an expansion team, and then you have the Dream, first final since 2013, where they’re on this upswing. Angel Reese is getting kind of her due.

Caitlin: Yeah, agree. I just think the Valkyries are an incredible story. They’ve been a challenge since they started last year. They were always kind of this team that was like, oh my gosh, they’re good. They made the playoffs their first year. Now they’re in the finals. And I think that’s really, really cool.

Caitlin: I think my momentum is the U.S. Women’s National Team. I realize that that may not be the feelings of everybody else, but I think that we learned a lot from that game. And I think the objective of these friendlies was to learn a lot. What I hope is that that translates into actions, right? And like changes or adjustments or what have you. So I’m excited to see how that game goes tomorrow. And then obviously we’ll be off to qualifiers in November. So yeah, I think that’s my momentum for now.

Where to Find Us

Alex: RTG underscore pod on Instagram, Threads, and YouTube, rtgpod.com, and raisingthegamepod at gmail.com if you want to email.

Caitlin: All right. And hopefully you’ll be here next week.

Alex: Bye.

Caitlin: Bye.