The Storm played twice on the WNBA’s opening weekend and started their season 1-1. They lost by 11 to Golden State on Friday night, but then beat Connecticut by seven on Sunday in a road game that tipped at the always-rough hour of 10 a.m. Pacific time. The Storm looked good for long stretches of both games, which was nice to see given that their only returning starter is out injured and their #3 overall draft pick hasn’t reported to the team yet.
The Storm have a relatively soft schedule to start the season, with only two of their first 10 games against teams that made the playoffs last year. This could give them the opportunity to rack up some wins even while the players are still learning each other and their new offense. It even opens up the possibility of Ezi Magbegor returning and Awa Fam entering the rotation before things get tougher in June. I still don’t have them picked as a playoff team, but I do think it’s in play. They could easily go 1-1 next week to finish out their first road trip at 2-2 overall, and then come home for a pair of games against a Sun team they just beat in Connecticut with a chance to get a couple of games above .500.
More importantly, multiple players are taking advantage of the opportunities they’re getting so far. All 10 of their healthy players got at least 17 minutes of playing time across these first two games, and nine of them got at least 31 minutes. Everyone scored at least twice, and everyone got a rebound. In an even bigger testament to the egalitarianism of the rotation so far, the starters have only outscored the bench players 88 to 81.
Dom was the best player in their first game, though a lot of her 21 points came late as the Storm cut a large deficit down to a medium-sized one. Lexie Brown may have been their best player in the second game as she caught fire in the third quarter and single-handedly carried the team to a 12-0 run that put them in front for good. Four possessions and four three-pointers that touched nothing but the bottom of the net (and 17 points on 6-for-7 shooting overall) had people remembering the reputation as a sharpshooter that she was developing before she started having health problems a few years ago. If she’s back to that form, she could really help this (or any other) team. Meanwhile, rookie Flau’jae Johnson is leading the team in points scored with 28 but seemed most proud of leading the team with four steals.
Tied with Flau’jae at 28 points is my pick for the Storm Player of the Week: Jade Melbourne. Jade brought tremendous energy off the bench in both games, and she leads the team in assists in addition to points scored. Her first step is incredibly fast, but then again so is her second step, and her third. Against Connecticut, they had no answer for her drives other than fouling her. Or maybe it was that Jade figured out the refs were giving the offensive player the benefit of the doubt on all contact and she just kept driving. Either way, it resulted in a career-high 11 free throw attempts for her. (Flau’jae also figured this out and got to the line for 10.)
My real image of Jade from this week, however, will not actually be her game but instead her toughness. She chipped a tooth Friday night when a Valkyrie landed on her while she was face-down on the court chasing a loose ball. She got up, picked up her tooth, handed it to a trainer, and then kept playing. Who does that?! It looked like the same tooth she had chipped last year (when she took an elbow from Chelsea Gray that resulted in some amazing “bloody smile” pictures), so it may have been “merely” a veneer, but still. By the second half of Sunday’s game, Jade was still missing half of her front tooth but was supplementing that look with a bloody lip, a skinned knee that was actively bleeding, and a gash on her chest. And she was smiling the whole time, like you would expect from an Australian player who grew up playing Aussie Rules Football (even winning awards in a boys’ competition before she eventually shifted her focus to basketball).
This sets up as a potentially very important year in Jade’s career as she’s 23 now with a couple of years of experience under her belt, and it’s time for her (and the league) to figure out if she can be the starting point guard on a good team, or just a rotation piece. So far, so good. It’s only been two games, but with Dom limited significantly by foul trouble in the second game, Jade has been arguably our best player.
Roster Update
The Storm waived Rennia Davis and Jaelyn Brown on Wednesday, one day before the deadline to get down to 12 players. Neither was a surprise, but there was one surprise in that the team kept 13 players instead of 12, and rookie third-round pick Grace Van Slooten made the team coming out of camp (she is the lowest-drafted player to make any team this year). They could do this because Awa Fam hasn’t finished her season in Spain yet and hasn’t reported to the team. Because the Storm had plenty of space under the salary cap, they can afford to pay all 13 contracts for now, and they don’t have to decide on their final cut until Awa reports to the team (after Valencia gets eliminated from the Spanish league’s playoffs). With Valencia winning their semifinal this weekend by one point (thanks in large part to 17 points from Fam), she’s not going to be showing up for at least another week or two.
This week’s rant: fouls are good, actually
One of the biggest developments as the 2026 season cranks up has been a significant increase in the number of fouls that are getting called. Traditionally, the WNBA has been an extremely physical league, but last year a consensus evolved among both players and coaches that things had gone too far. The product on the floor was becoming worse as players beat each other up, and the injury risk was very real, culminating in a play during the playoffs where four-time All-WNBA player Napheesa Collier injured both her ankles (and still hasn’t returned). The league finally acknowledged that there was a problem and committed to forming a committee and reviewing the issue in the off-season. No one was sure how much of that actually happened since all the off-season attention was on the CBA negotiations and then the mad scramble to get the season started on time. However, now that games are getting played and referees are blowing their whistles, it is clear that things are being called differently.
I went to the Storm preseason game against Portland and watched slack-jawed as the teams combined to shoot 83 free throws. 83!! The Storm were whistled for 30 fouls and the Fire for 31. Last season, teams averaged 17.7 fouls per game. On opening night, things were a little better with the Storm called for 23 fouls and Golden State for 22, but that’s still 27% more than last year’s average game, and it wasn’t just the Storm: the other two games on opening night both had more fouls than ours. (Hat tip to Tyler DeLuca from No Cap Space WBB, who was the first person I saw point out this statistic.)
What should happen now that the referees have established what is and is not going to be called a foul this year is that the players adjust their play, and we shouldn’t have to watch this many players make this many trips to the line all season long. The buzzword I keep hearing is “freedom of movement”—in other words, players should not be allowed to prevent other players from moving where they want to go. In particular, this refers to off-ball situations, for example, a defender trying to navigate a screen. Last season, the offensive player setting the screen could get away with a lot of physical contact, and refs very rarely called fouls for moving screens. Another example is when an offensive player is trying to cut into open space. In addition to just being bumped, last year they would often be openly grabbed. Personally, I agree that the game would be better off without this level of physicality. The game is not better off when more fouls are called, and especially not for ticky-tack/incidental contact, but the intention seems pretty clear at this point: the refs are attempting to make sure players have more freedom of movement. Hopefully, the players get used to this new level of enforcement quickly and we don’t have to suffer through too many games that turn into a free throw slog.
While this effort to make the game a better product is not currently making the game a better product because of all the whistles and stoppages, I really hope the refs do not give in to people complaining about the volume of fouls. They should continue fighting the good fight even if it takes a while. Honestly, I also think they should take away the sixth foul. Players only get five fouls at the collegiate level and in international play, and they all learn how not to foul out in those competitions, so why do they need six in the W? I know the NBA uses six, but they also play 48-minute games whereas the W just plays 40. Somebody years ago wanted to make it less likely that stars would foul out, but at this point, I think that decision is doing the league more harm than good. (Hat tip to Sue Bird, who expresses this opinion on demand whenever the subject comes up.)
On Friday night, the Storm were called for fully five offensive fouls, and I believe all five were on screens (not charges). Each moving screen is a fairly painful call as it immediately ends the possession, and those five turnovers were the entire difference in team turnovers (the Valks led 9-14, and scored seven points more off turnovers than the Storm in a game they won by 11). Four of those five were in the first half, so maybe the Storm were starting to understand what’s going to be allowed this season. Some of the problem was that the guards weren’t always waiting for the big to get fully set before trying to use the screen, but the team was also clearly surprised by several of those early whistles. The real problem for the Storm in game one was that Golden State hit 41% of their three-pointers, and on high volume too (fully half of their shot attempts were from three-point range). Last year’s Storm team would have been happy with the 9-for-26 performance the Storm put up from three, but it paled in comparison to the Valkyries, who went 15-for-37.
Foul trouble was an even bigger deal in game two, though this time it was traditional shooting fouls. Malonga played only four minutes in the first half as she got two quick fouls, sat down as a result, and then got her third in the first minute she played of the second quarter. Dolson and Holmes each had three in the first half as well and left the Storm extremely thin in the front court. This left Brittany Griner licking her chops and she quickly put up 10 points, but luckily for the Storm, she picked up a third foul of her own and sat the rest of the half. Things calmed down a bit in the second half with no one on the Storm side fouling out, but Connecticut did lose Diamond Miller, plus they only got 28 minutes out of Griner as she ended on five fouls. More importantly, Seattle got to shoot 33 free throws and hit 25 of them. With Connecticut going 16-for-22 from the charity stripe, you could argue that that’s where the entire margin of the 89-82 Storm win came from.
I wrote most of this “fouls are good, the refs are fighting the good fight” rant after watching just Friday night’s games. After watching more games on Saturday and Sunday, I have to admit I do not feel as good about this take. I still think the basic logic of it is right, but all the games are now taking a good 10-20 minutes longer than they took last season, and lots of the fouls just look like the refs are whistling any random contact rather than explicitly focusing on freedom of movement. (Also there are more ref-initiated video reviews, and they’re taking way too long to resolve.) Mostly I hope the WNBA refs are up to the challenge of consistently moving the line on physicality without turning the games into free throw shooting contests. The players will only be able to adjust to the new enforcement guidelines if the refs can be consistent with their whistles. Hopefully, this all resolves in days or weeks, rather than months of slogging through the mud.
Around the W
Each week I suspect I will have assorted thoughts about the other teams in the W that I want to get out of my brain. This week I’m going to commit my season predictions to the record so I have something to look back on four months from now and see how I did.
Coming into the season I see the league as divided into three tiers:
- Five lottery teams (Fire, Sun, Tempo, Mystics, Storm)
- Four legitimate contenders (Aces, Liberty, Fever, Dream)
- Six teams competing for the other four playoff spots.
That last category is the most interesting one as two teams are going to wind up disappointed when they ultimately wind up missing the playoffs, and there’s no consensus about which teams those are likely to be. The Sparks, Sky, and Wings all missed the playoffs last year but got a LOT better. The Mercury and Lynx met in the semifinals last year but have both lost key players and will be worse this year … but how much worse? Then there’s the Valkyries, who surprised everyone by making the playoffs last year as a first-year expansion team and added arguably the best free agent to change teams this off-season (Gabby Williams). Any one of these teams could easily evolve into a true contender (especially the Lynx if Collier comes back healthy, or Dallas if all the great new faces can gel quickly, or Phoenix if this year’s crop of random European players that we Americans have never heard of are as good as last year’s crop). Any one of these teams could also wind up missing the playoffs. I guess my picks to miss would be Phoenix and Chicago, but what I know for sure is that whoever winds up missing is going to be very disappointed as all of them seem to expect to be good this year.
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