Sunday Notes, Week 16: Let’s talk about the future with Indiana, Phoenix and more

Note: The Sparks’ firing of Curt Miller this past week moves them from a four-star Hope Rating to a two-star Hope Rating. Good luck to whoever will have to deal with that level of upper management impatience and unreasonable expectations.

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Atlanta Dream

Bright spots: 

• Atlanta keeps churning out solid defenses
• Naz Hillmon has developed into a starting-caliber big
• Jordin Canada is still hitting open spot-up threes
• A lot of cap space

Concerns: 

• Rhyne Howard is clearly not a primary scorer and Allisha Gray could not maintain last season’s level of efficiency and usage
• Tanisha Wright’s rotations have only gotten more confusing over time, and she has not made schematic or stylistic adjustments in a playoff series
• Howard’s development seems to have plateaued
• Haley Jones and Laeticia Amihere, the team’s two 2023 first round draft picks, barely played after the Olympic break
• The team’s two biggest offseason signings, Nia Coffey and Aerial Powers, were both among the worst players in the WNBA this year
• You still can’t build an efficient offense around Tina Charles
• No 2024 first-round pick

In her postgame press conference following Atlanta’s season-ending Game 2 loss in New York, head coach Tanisha Wright cited the injuries her team dealt with as a significant reason for its underperformance relative to expectations this season. But to focus on the Dream’s health is to miss the structural issues that are plaguing them; Canada missed half the season with hand injuries and Howard missed 10 games with a lateral ankle sprain, but when the two were healthy, the team went 8-8.

Atlanta’s other injuries actually helped it. Losing Powers for 22 of the last 24 games of the season to a calf injury forced Wright to reshuffle her lineups while replacing those minutes with a healthy Canada, and missing Cheyenne Parker-Tyus for the final 15 pushed Hillmon into nearly 30 minutes a night. It is concerning that it took so long for Hillmon to jump Parker-Tyus in the power forward rotation and that there were not more adjustments made before Canada’s return. After the Dream’s one-dimensionality caused plenty of issues last year, Wright should be under the microscope in 2025 if they struggle again.

Assessing the roster independent of Wright’s scheme is tricky, since Howard and especially Gray continue to play up a position from what players of their size and skill set tend to do in 2024. Making up for that would require a level of careful roster-construction that so far has not happened in Atlanta. Instead, the front office has loaded up on non-shooting bigs and defensive guards, neither of which are archetypes that benefit from Atlanta’s atypical lineup. Such a strategy relied on Rhyne Howard making a leap this year that she did not end up making. With five of the team’s six playoff rotation players under contract for next year but ample cap space, how do the Dream adjust?

Hope Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ ½ ☆

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Indiana Fever

Bright spots:

• Caitlin Clark
• Aliyah Boston very quickly developed as a roller and passer
• Freed of primary creation responsibilities, Kelsey Mitchell is unstoppable
• Temi Fagbenle fit right into the system
• Plenty of cap space

Concerns:

• NaLyssa Smith has not gotten any better defensively and her rookie 3-point shooting looks increasingly aberrant
• No one in the cadre of guard and wing depth has been good enough to crack the team’s rotation in big games
• For as decent as Clark was defensively, is it possible to build a good defense when she and Mitchell are starters?

The three Fever stars are either on rookie-scale contracts or can still be cored for two years. The two good role players down the stretch, Lexie Hull and Fegbenle, are under team control for another year or two. Between Kristy Wallace and Grace Berger, someone is probably going to be decent next season. Even if the team’s two free agent additions floundered a bit and the former 2022 No. 2 pick probably should be traded, Indiana has cap space to make up for that.

Truly, the only way for the Fever not to continue improving would be to get complacent.

Hope Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

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Phoenix Mercury

Bright spots:

• New practice facility
• Brittney Griner adapted perfectly to a space-and-pace four-out system, putting up one of the best offensive seasons of her career
• Tibbettball™ also worked wonders for the role players without diminishing the core stars
• This Could Be It

Concerns:

• Kahleah Copper should not be handling 30% usage
• Griner had maybe the worst defensive season of her career in what seems to be a downward trend for her in recent years, and is a free agent
• Swapped first-round picks with the New York Liberty this year, sent their first-round pick to the Chicago Sky next year
• How many players from the back of this rotation are confidently WNBA-caliber players?

The Mercury are locked into a starting lineup of Natasha Cloud, Copper and Rebecca Allen right now and cannot pick higher than No. 12 in the draft for the next two years. Their only other player under contract is a quality sixth player. Where do they go from here?

That is the issue facing Phoenix as it potentially moves into a post-Diana Taurasi era. Having such a significant part of the depth chart already secured, the needs at the 2 and the 5 are at least pretty clear, though the possibility of Griner leaving in free agency is daunting. Having to add several rotation pieces in free agency will require careful roster construction. On the bright side, the Mercury were in competition for and won some of the best players on the market last year after many winters of not being in those races. But it may be harder to fill their specific top-end needs, especially compared to a team like Atlanta.

Hope Rating: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆

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Seattle Storm

Bright spots:

• Ezi Magbegor is really that good defensively
• Jordan Horston is really that good defensively, and might be the best cutter in the league
• Still a premier destination in free agency

Concerns:

• Jewell Loyd has been one of the least-effective players in the WNBA since Breanna Stewart left Seattle
• It really, really should not have been this hard to build a playoff-caliber offense out of this roster
• Their roster building approach should’ve been informed by whether they could play Gabby Williams and Horston together, but they didn’t seemed concerned with finding that out
• Horston rebuilt her 3-point form and still couldn’t hit from deep
• Traded away Jade Melbourne

Where Seattle goes from here hinges on a couple of questions. The most straightforward is whether Nneka Ogwumike returns or signs elsewhere, with many expecting her to inaugurate the Golden State Valkyries. Less clear is how they resolve the currently untenable relationship between Loyd and this offense. Since Stewart left, Loyd has gone from the secondary scorer to the primary option in the Storm offense, and it has gone horribly: a 42.8% effective field goal percentage and 51.2% true-shooting with a 31% usage rate. But head coach Noelle Quinn made little adjustment as this season wore on, aside from emphasizing the two-player game between Skylar Diggins-Smith and Ogwumike.

Given Diggins-Smith’s ceiling as a primary scorer and Magbegor’s issues with shot-creation, Seattle needs Loyd to be effective at getting her own shot for things to click. That happened during her prime, when she was running more second-side pick-n-rolls, coming off of more screens and attacking more often off the catch. Now, Loyd has turned to isos and scoring primacy, to much worse effect. Replacing Horston’s cutting with Williams’ negative-value offensive game only made things tougher on Loyd.

Aside from Ogwumike and Williams hitting the market, the Storm are losing all four of their consistent backups. Seattle needs to improve their bench, but there won’t be a ton of financial flexibility to do so. And even if they do run back the starting lineup, with most of their starters playing 30 or more minutes a game down the stretch, where is improvement going to come from?

Hope Rating: ⭐⭐⭐½☆