Welcome to the WNBA Hype Era

This year’s WNBA draftees are poised to make a unique impact on the sport, and there’s a chance Chicago will be at the center of it all. 

The WNBA is twenty-seven years old, already known for transformations made possible by outspoken players, like Tasha Cloud, Brittney Griner, Layshia Clarendon, and Sue Bird, who together have torn away at a thicket of gender inequity while advocating for higher pay and better conditions league-wide. Now, just ahead of the 2024 WNBA season, attention on the league is mounting. But that’s largely because of a new group—a cohort of twenty-two-ish-year-olds with generational talent and unprecedented cultural relevance—the 2024 WNBA Draft class.

This class emerged from the 2024 NCAA Tournament, which instantly broke viewership records. The central storylines included a thrilling rematch between LSU and Iowa in the Elite Eight; one of the most storied program in women’s basketball history—the UConn Huskies—as an unlikely underdog; internet chaos around a so-called hit job of a profile on LSU coach Kim Mulkey and her history of problematic behavior; and an undefeated South Carolina team hungry for dominance. 

And, of course, there was the absolute star-power of this year’s senior class: Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Kamilla Cardoso, Cameron Brink, Rickea Jackson, Nika Mühl, and so many more.   

March Madness ended on April 7 with the South Carolina Gamecocks defeating the Iowa Hawkeyes to cap off their 38-0 season with a national championship trophy. It was a team win, a statement win, a got-you-back win after the Gamecocks’ loss to superstar Caitlin Clark and the Hawkeyes in the 2023 NCAA Semifinals. Not this time. Dawn Staley’s team managed to shut Clark down with the kind of dogged defensive pressure possible only when seeking the ultimate revenge. 

The WNBA Draft took place just eight days after the NCAA championship game (and two days after Clark’s appearance on Saturday Night Live because, yes, that’s the kind of wild attention she’s getting right now). The pivot from March Madness confetti to the draft’s stage lights is unthinkably quick, but that’s nothing new for women’s basketball players, who are accustomed to being denied such common amenities available to their male counterparts, like time. 

What’s more novel is that despite the continued inequalities marking the WNBA, the 2024 draft class embodies a striking confidence. These young people were all born well after the league began in 1997, growing up with professional women’s basketball as a fact of existence. Their generation is known for using TikTok and Instagram instead of Google. Many college basketball stars have shared popular social media content with thousands of fans before ever getting broadcast on national television. 

This is all part of a world in which college athletes like Reese can make millions of dollars off paid contracts after rule changes by the NCAA allowing endorsement deals for name, image, and likeness. They already have nicknames, brand deals, and hundreds of fans who watch them eat fast food and talk shit when they go live for hours on end. 

In other words, when it was go time on April 15, the 2024 WNBA class came ready. That day, I joined the flood of fans for the live draft in downtown Brooklyn. When I arrived, swarms of people were lined up outside just for the athletes’ walk from the tinted tour buses to the front doors for the traditional WNBA orange carpet. 

The players wore knock-out looks: head-to-toe Prada, teeth jewels, gradient sunglasses, statement accessories, tailored pantsuits, Cartier jewels, and custom-made designer gowns with slinky sparkles and dramatic asymmetrical cuts. It was a far cry from the outfits of ten years ago when players were encouraged to wear stiff business casual styles, and it left many downright emotional. Under the dramatic dome of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, I think everyone sensed it: that wonderment, the knowledge that things without words were coming into existence, anew. We were watching the future arrive.

First came the much-hyped number one overall draft pick, when the Indiana Fever selected Clark. I love Clark (yes, I’ve said it) but she also has the makings of a true Chicago rival: a Midwestern foe siding across state lines, now an Indiana prodigy who can shoot impossible threes and has a tendency to argue with the referees. Not only that, but her dialed-in intensity was matched best by Reese, with whom she traded the most infamous non-verbal trash talk of the 2023 NCAA season.

It happened as the seconds wound down on LSU’s 2023 NCAA tournament victory over Iowa. Reese stared ahead while waving her hand closely in front of her face, stealing Clark’s signature gesture, an act that means, “You can see me, but you can’t guard me.” The moment exploded across basketball fandoms and cemented Clark and Reese as longtime rivals. (Though they’ve also expressed the kind of mutual respect and admiration that makes me love women’s sports so very much.)

Then came number two overall pick, Brink, drafted by the Los Angeles Sparks, who immediately broke down crying. “I’m so proud of all of us,” Brink said under the bright lights next to ESPN’s Holly Rowe. “Look at all we’ve done. I’m so proud of us.”

Then, finally, came Chicago’s turn. 

In that packed auditorium in Brooklyn, we soon heard their names: Kamilla Cardoso, third overall pick and newly minted national champion from the University of South Carolina, and Angel Reese, seventh pick and self-defined “Bayou Barbie” from Louisiana State University, a worldwide celebrity in her own right. 

The crowd screamed, and I screamed with them. 

We screamed because the Sky had selected arguably the most recognizable and marketable players remaining in the draft—and rivals at that. (They went head to head in the SEC tournament, not to mention in high school, staring each other down after stuffing the other’s shots, back to back, in the championship game.)

We screamed because Cardoso, who just the day before had celebrated South Carolina’s national championship win, left her home in Brazil at fifteen to pursue her dreams of being a professional basketball player at a high school in Chattanooga, Tennessee. On the night of the draft, her mom and sister watched from the auditorium floor while Cardoso spoke to the cameras, saying, “I had a goal to be here tonight and give my family a better life, so I’m just so thankful that I was able to be here.”

We screamed because this is Angel Reese’s world, and we’re all just living in it. Reese is impeccably tough and resilient. After winning the 2023 NCAA championship, she told reporters, “This is for the girls that look like me, that’s going to speak up on what you believe in. It’s unapologetically you, and that’s what I did it for tonight.” 

We screamed because we’re hungry for more than one star: We want women’s basketball to reflect the talent of all who play, to champion the Black players who make up more than 70 percent of the league. We screamed for the inspiration that both these women bring to future generations, to Black girls, to women’s basketball, to the Wintrust Arena in Chicago’s South Loop. 

And while I’m not sure about the others, I screamed because something was clear in these draft choices: The Chicago Sky must keep rebuilding, not just their roster, but their infrastructure as a whole. Because though other WNBA ownership groups have brought an influx of capital to teams like the Las Vegas Aces and New York Liberty, including new practice facilities and somewhat scandalous chartered flights, the Sky have caught flack in recent years for not even providing their players with lockers. In fact, Chicago’s team continues to practice at the Sachs Recreation Center in Deerfield, which has 3.8 stars on Yelp and was once, “in simpler times,” a place where the Bulls practiced in 1987. For home games, Sky players must commute in traffic from the suburbs to play downtown. 

And while the front office has said building a dedicated practice facility is a priority for the franchise, nothing speaks of the absolute necessity for change like drafting Cardoso and Reese. These two are stars with stock on the rise. In fact, Reese brings her NIL deal, valued at $1.8 million, along with her to the league, and both attract widespread fanbases and parasocial followings. Their popularity creates a new kind of pressure and has the power to usher in change. 

Fandom around women’s basketball has been steadily growing. “It’s one of the most authentic and energetic celebrations of female physical power that you can go to,” said Chicago Sky fan Isa Vázquez, who purchased a season ticket package after the Sky’s championship run in 2021. “Anytime I run into another Sky fan it’s like an instant connection—we’re cosmically drawn together.”

That energy has been magnified tenfold with the draft class of 2024. The arrival of new fans was marked by a swell of outrage around Clark’s base rookie salary, which like all other WNBA rookies is roughly $76,000. “If you’re new to the party, welcome,” says writer and podcaster Chris Pennant, reflecting on the trending outpouring of anger around the WNBA’s embarrassingly low wages. He described the prominent feeling toward newcomers: “You’re welcome here, please come. We’re glad you’ve finally caught on.” 

But “here” has not always felt like this. 

Historically, loving the WNBA meant taking pride in a league that often induces eyerolls and shrugs and downright hate following its mention. As a college student, I actually wrote an undergraduate thesis about this, stalking the corners of early Twitter for typical comments like, “Women’s basketball…it’s just like watching men’s basketball, if men’s basketball were played in three feet of water.” 

I was particularly obsessed with the hatred inspired in men by Brittney Griner, who at the time was a 6’8’’ superstar at Baylor University known for dunking since high school. Those tweets, comments, and even headlines about Griner were so vile that I wouldn’t dare repeat them anywhere. 

In 2013, Griner made history by coming out as a lesbian as she entered the league, at a time when no one had ever done that before. She also later revealed in her memoir In My Skin that Kim Mulkey, her former coach at Baylor, had actually prevented her from coming out during college. “We just can’t have that stuff out there,” Griner recalled Mulkey telling her, behind the closet door of her office, referring to a message of love and acceptance by an LGBT group that Griner had tweeted out. 

Ten years after Griner came out, the WNBA has transformed into a league known for being audaciously queer, inclusive, and overwhelmingly led by Black women who continue to boldly advocate for social change, in large part because conditions still have not changed. Pennant put it this way: “We’ve seen how attuned the players in this league are with social issues and some of that, for better and for worse, comes with the fact that they’re not making as much money.…I think that makes them more aware of what’s right and what’s wrong, about morality.” 

And it’s true: the league is still shaped by a kind of advocacy and resilience necessary in the face of basic inequality. To this day, the WNBA is a league known for its players flying commercial to away games, where the salary cap is $1,463,200…for an entire team. And there are only twelve of them. In fact, there are so few roster spots in the WNBA—144 in total—that the draft is something of a false summit; while the league drafted thirty-six players in 2023, only fifteen actually made it onto their team’s final roster by opening day. 

WNBA fandom is full of highs and lows, laced with heartbreak, shadowed by histories of suppression, and alive with the possibility of change. Women’s basketball has always been something tenuous and imperfect and dear, regardless of whether others understand. It’s been something for us.

In October of 2021, the Chicago Sky franchise was at a high point: clinching their first-ever WNBA Championship with the leadership of Candace Parker, who’d returned to her hometown with the single-minded focus of winning a title for Chicago.

But the era of Sky glory soon ended. After failing to return for a second WNBA championship series in 2022, the all-star veterans left, one by one, including Parker. Former head coach and general manager James Wade traded away the team’s 2024 first-round pick and 2025 first-round swap with the Dallas Wings in exchange for Dallas guard Marina Mabrey. 

Then things got worse. Halfway through the 2023 season, with the Sky scraping by, Wade abruptly announced his departure from the team—and the league—in favor of an assistant coaching position for the NBA’s Toronto Raptors. 

In the off-season came more departures, including a trade of the Sky’s franchise player Kahleah Copper to the Phoenix Mercury, reportedly by her own request. “It was bleak,” Sky fan Isa Vázquez told me, recalling that time. Many were growing despondent.  

But by that time, in October of 2023, the franchise had hired a new head coach in WNBA legend Theresa Weatherspoon and Jeff Pagglioca as her general manager. The two set their minds on a “true rebuild” for the team, looking to build momentum on the third overall draft pick acquired from Copper’s trade to Phoenix. And just a day before the 2024 draft, the Sky also traded to acquire the seventh overall pick from the Minnesota Lynx. With two picks in the first round, the franchise had clearly hinged its future on the talent of the incoming draft class, with Carodoso and Reese as the new faces of the team.  

Of course, this is still the WNBA. Even with stars like Reese and Cardoso, even with exponential growth in viewership, the league will stumble: No anecdote makes that more evident than the fact that the Chicago Sky’s first preseason game against the Minnesota Lynx on May 3 was completely unwatchable for anyone outside of Minneapolis’ Target Center. As fans seethed with anger across social media channels, they shared rumors about the cause: limited broadcast contracts, WNBA app errors, the league unprepared for such an influx of attention. 

Then, the narrative started to shift. 

A fan known only as @heyheyitsalli began streaming the game on their cell phone via X, formerly known as Twitter. The grainy footage has been watched millions of times. Just days later, in response to fans’ backlash and committed cell phone viewership, the league announced Chicago Sky’s next preseason game would be livestreamed on their app for all to see. (The game featured Reese less than twenty-four hours after attending the Met Gala on her twenty-second birthday.) That same day, even more incredibly, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert told reporters that the league planned to invest $25 million for all teams to take full-time chartered flights this season. By the time of Chicago’s first home game at Wintrust Arena on May 25, who knows what other seismic shifts could occur. 

And for a league leading with outspoken advocacy and the full-throated support of its fans, change is not just possible, but necessary. Otherwise we could see a new kind of reckoning, and nowhere would it make more sense than here in Chicago (or Deerfield). As Pennant told me, “This is the league where, if something doesn’t happen, if ownership is not committed to bettering the conditions, this is the league where we could see a strike.” 

So “Welcome to the W,” as we say when a veteran player knocks a rookie to the ground, then asks if they’re okay. It’s a kaleidoscopic moment in women’s basketball history: all at once beautiful, kind of trippy, and colliding into the new.

Maya Goldberg-Safir is an independent writer and audio producer based in Chicago (and sometimes Oakland, where she was born and raised).