What Happened To All The WNBA Coaches?
In late August, the Chicago Sky killed off Sky Man, their unsettling superhero mascot of 18 years, and launched followers to Skye the Lioness, a mascot “chosen to embody strength, feminine power, grace, and the courage to overcome obstacles, qualities that the Chicago Sky consistently showcase.” Skye’s identify permits for an excessive amount of confusion: the crew identify, plus a silent vowel? Additionally, she is wack and badly dressed.
Ellie the Elephant, the New York Liberty’s mascot whose runaway success Skye was little question meant to breed, dashed off some dismissive tweets on the day of Skye’s launch. However insofar as she emerged from a course of missing in imaginative and prescient and one step behind everybody else, Skye actually does embody the Chicago Sky’s qualities. A month after the change at mascot, the crew fired head coach Teresa Weatherspoon, not a full yr after hiring her. Basic supervisor Jeff Pagliocca stated at Chicago’s observe facility groundbreaking occasion a couple of weeks later that the Sky “just felt it was time to make a change.”
Since then, 5 extra WNBA groups have fired or “parted ways with” their head coach. The Weatherspoon information truly created the second teaching emptiness of the offseason. By only a few days, the Los Angeles Sparks beat the Sky to asserting that their second-year head coach Curt Miller wouldn’t return. Seven of the league’s 12 groups—the Sparks, Sky, Washington Mystics, Atlanta Dream, Dallas Wings, Indiana Fever, and Connecticut Solar—presently haven’t any head coach in place. (One of many vacancies is perhaps faux; former Solar coach Stephanie White was discussed as a candidate for the Fever earlier than the job even opened.) Three groups—the Mystics, Wings, and Las Vegas Aces—are additionally hiring new common managers. A thirteenth WNBA crew, the Golden State Valkyries, will start play subsequent season, and former Aces assistant Natalie Nakase has been named head coach of the growth crew. Nakase, who has not coached a single recreation, will probably be at most the sixth-longest tenured head coach within the league.
As I’ve written earlier than, teaching is tough for me to guage. I can scrutinize hiring bulletins (see: Nate Tibbetts), and I feel I can inform when the locker room vibe is means off (see: Vanessa Nygaard). However it feels bizarre to observe video games and parcel out credit score such that Participant A is 70 % accountable for the crew’s success and Coach B is 30 % accountable, so subsequently Participant A’s crew could be X a lot better/worse in the event that they employed Coach C. Admittedly, the work of sportswriting is arranging some set of details to go well with a narrative. Nonetheless, as an outsider, I don’t like drawing huge conclusions from one eyeroll in a huddle or an animated sideline chat. So many WNBA groups are carelessly constructed that it’s additionally arduous for me to declare in these instances that teaching, and never one thing else, is the issue.
This weblog shouldn’t be about whether or not sure WNBA coaches “deserved” to get fired or not. If you wish to debate Eric Thibault’s late-game lineups, go for it. To me, a extra productive dialogue asks what entrance workplaces are pondering proper now, and whether or not the firing spree hints at some broader shift in how WNBA groups are being run.
Homeowners and entrance workplaces make teaching adjustments after they suppose another person can do a greater job. Quite a lot of them doing that without delay would possibly imply:
- The means homeowners see groups has modified or sharpened
- The pool of “someone elses” accessible has grown
- The job itself has turn into completely different
Some homeowners have certainly learn the final yr’s price of headlines and scores knowledge, seen the cash pouring into girls’s basketball, and abruptly remembered that they personal a WNBA crew—like discovering a $20 invoice in your coat pocket. In a Los Angeles Times column this season, Invoice Plaschke blasted “the Sparks’ dud owners” for being “the least involved with the team as any sports owners in town.” Magic Johnson, who has certainly been a hands-off proprietor of the Sparks, was interviewed for the column and didn’t disagree with that evaluation. “I’m going to get more involved,” he advised Plaschke. “It’s probably been my fault that I’ve let [Sparks managing partner] Eric Holoman make all the decisions and us as the owners, we’ve been sitting back a little. I think I have to get more involved, and I’ll do that, that’s a commitment to the fans, that I will get more involved and be part of it more to help bring the Sparks back to a championship level.” 5 days after Plaschke’s column ran, the crew fired Miller.
For a very long time, the Sparks gave second probabilities to an clearly underperforming coach. Derek Fisher alienated his crew’s elite expertise however solely ever amassed extra accountability. (After a horrible first-round playoff exit in 2019, he was promoted to GM.) If possession neglect saved Fisher in his function for therefore lengthy, perhaps Curt Miller’s firing is the flip aspect: possession attentiveness, and motion for motion’s sake. Sparks followers could be proper to ask questions. Was firing Miller meant to keep away from one other Fisher-like mistake, or is it a feint towards change, an alternative to the actual, pricier investments the Sparks might want to make to draw prime expertise and construct a contender? It was good to see that Dallas, a catastrophe franchise whose each scout ought to be arrested, is restructuring its entrance workplace and changing Greg Bibb as common supervisor. It was much less good to see that Greg Bibb is main the seek for the substitute and can stay the crew’s CEO.
The new cash and a spotlight in girls’s basketball also needs to be rising the pool of obtainable teaching expertise. The league’s current wave of NBA hires suggests this has been occurring for a couple of years already: Becky Hammon, Nate Tibbetts, Weatherspoon, and Nakase all acquired the majority of their teaching expertise as NBA assistants earlier than making the change. Hammon and Tibbetts are reportedly the 2 highest-paid coaches in WNBA historical past, every incomes no less than $1 million in wage. “On the front office side and the coaching side, there is no salary cap,” Aces proprietor Mark Davis said in 2022, explaining his resolution to offer Hammon her record-breaking contract.
When Tibbetts was employed, l questioned whether or not the brand new cash on the entrance workplace and training aspect might truly find yourself shrinking the variety of black girls and former gamers in head teaching roles, the identical means Title IX had made jobs teaching girls extra interesting to males. The league and gamers’ union have labored particularly on that situation for years, permitting groups to hold extra assistant coaches and making it simpler for WNBA gamers to take jobs on NBA benches. Six of the WNBA’s coaches had been black within the 2022 season. Of the 5 employed non-expansion head coaches now, 4 are girls, and three are former WNBA gamers, however only one is black: Seattle’s Noelle Quinn.
Most WNBA jobs nonetheless pay lower than prime NCAA jobs, so don’t anticipate school basketball to be a significant WNBA teaching feeder anytime quickly. However a number of the circumstances that made WNBA jobs much less interesting than school positions—the journey, the pay, the smaller staffs and fewer assets—are bettering. And as many huffy college coaches will let you know, school teaching is getting tougher, too.
If school coaches have gotten de facto common managers, their jobs now extra targeted on participant recruitment and retention, the WNBA would possibly hopefully transfer in the other way. These previous WNBA Finals supplied many events to recollect James Wade, Weatherspoon’s predecessor in Chicago, a now-divisive determine within the league after he dealt away the Sky’s essential draft picks and left for an NBA job in the midst of the 2023 season. Wade’s items had been simple: He led the franchise to its first WNBA title in 2021. He drew up beautiful ATOs and had an amazing eye for professional scouting. He introduced Alanna Smith again stateside and acquired competent level guard play out of Courtney Williams a yr earlier than they joined the Lynx.
Is Wade accountable for taking the Sky out of two essential draft lotteries? Sure. However in a simply world, in a league and franchise that labored usually and gave good head coaches the help they wanted, he would not have been coach and common supervisor. He might belief his crew’s possession to retain expertise—to build a real practice facility, to treat players right, to do every thing the Sky have not done by most accounts—and deal with the issues he was good at. The issues he was unhealthy at—the big-picture technique points that may come up, given his teaching mandate to win as many video games as potential—could be left to another person.
This drawback plagues a variety of WNBA entrance workplaces, which is why the teaching carousel will not be as intriguing because the GM turnover. Former Aces common supervisor Natalie Williams gained two championships in three seasons earlier than she was fired; her third season confirmed that having A’ja Wilson won’t be sufficient anymore. A crew constructed by way of the draft might need to start out constructing in different methods, too. The Minnesota Lynx confirmed of their playoff run {that a} crew can compensate for lack of measurement or star energy with versatility and depth. These qualities take somewhat extra work to search out and domesticate.
Accordingly, future WNBA coaches should be smarter about rotations and bench improvement. A steadily increasing schedule means extra minutes, which hopefully means extra reps for extra gamers, and extra relaxation for the celebrities anticipated to play huge playoff minutes. It’s typically perplexing to see Arike Ogunbowale or Diana Taurasi trotting up and down the courtroom within the fourth quarter of a blowout. (Sarcastically, Hammon, educated within the land of load administration, is perhaps the league’s worst offender.)
When the Sky employed Weatherspoon final yr, Annie Costabile of the Chicago Sun-Times reported that she was “the top candidate from the start of their coaching search,” and that the events had been in talks for months. The crew Weatherspoon was employed to teach, helmed by Kahleah Copper, ended up being very completely different from the crew she did coach, which was constructed round two non-shooting rookie bigs and a guard who panned out however did not take any threes. By the top of the season, the Sky had traded away their solely actual three-point shooter at her request, and accidents had killed the crew.
Costabile wrote that Weatherspoon’s inexperience had proven all through the season, however Weatherspoon was in fact inexperienced. Anybody who had taken that job would have been a brand new coach accountable for a weird-ass roster at a crew that had lengthy struggled to maintain good gamers round. Whether or not Weatherspoon’s unhealthy rotations or the locker room “disconnect” Costabile references had been worthy of firing is as much as Pagliocca, however a training change is basically a guess that you are able to do higher, and bets will be dangerous. The hasty firing of a coach would possibly sign critical enterprise or excessive requirements. It may also inform good, certified teaching candidates precisely what it’s prefer to work for the Chicago Sky.