There is a worrying sense at the moment, present across a worryingly large swath of public life, that everything is shrinking. It is not a matter of any of those things dying so much as they are just kind of diminishing and getting worse, either out of simple neglect or as a reflection of cockeyed ideological preference or just due to your more familiar capitalist sadism. In your more speculative or spammy sectors, this is unsurprising; the people in charge of all that are not what you'd call nurturing, and get bored quickly. This feels bad, but it makes the few places where there is undeniable growth happening stand out that much more. In the case of the WNBA, which is growing fast and preparing to grow faster, it stands out doubly because so much of the discourse surrounding the league suggests that it is actually somehow in crisis. It's confusing. Thankfully we had an expert near at hand, and she had a podcast mic.
It is a cool thing to work with the best WNBA writer going, and cooler still that Maitreyi Anantharaman is willing to suffer our remedial-level questions about what is going on in the WNBA, and where it is going, and whether people might ever stop being so weird about it. With the exception of a brief dip into the Funbag at the end and a touching story from Drew about being busted by his family for smoking weed on vacation and then clowned on for it, that is pretty much what this episode is: us learning about the WNBA from someone who knows and cares about it a lot. And also some stuff on the Detroit Tigers, and on best practices re: lying to children.
The WNBA rundown touches on how good the good teams are, and why the bad teams are bad, and why the Dallas Wings are a different kind of bad than the other bad teams, but eventually we get into deeper water. After sharing a bit of treasured site lore in which the entire staff (and members of the Multitude team) were seated for the absolute worst game of Breanna Stewart's career, we talked a bit about The Caitlin Clark Discourse as it manifested through Christine Brennan's long-running crashout, and why the WNBA always has to be At Risk and In Crisis. Where does the idea that everything that happens in the WNBA is a negative indicator come from? We do not quite answer that definitively, but the short version is "from the same place as most other dumb cultural stuff."
After the break, and after a brief and baffled consideration of Becky Hammon's personal vibe, we talked about the WNBA's future, from the great watering-down that will come with the league's expansion binge to the ways in which the league's new influx of money and popularity might benefit its players and shape the next generation of WNBA coaches and executives for the better. Some moderately respectful things get said about Bill Laimbeer; Drew's dream of a Kim Mulkey WNBA Arc is tidily dismissed. It's good stuff.
Before turning to the Funbag, we took a moment to consider the Detroit Tigers, whose team is good and touching it, and whose fans are upset all the time regardless, and whose division is back on its bullshit. Maitreyi diagnosed the fan fetish for screaming managers and shared her tips for spotting middle relievers at the coffee shop. It made for a decently depraved segue into the Funbag, where we faced questions about when youth hockey players start fighting and considered a hypothetical scenario in which you must go through a normal workday while everyone around is screaming gibberish at the top of their lungs. This might have felt less than hypothetical to Maitreyi after 50 minutes of being on our podcast, but she was too nice to mention that.
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