{"id":66248,"date":"2025-08-13T23:36:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-13T23:36:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/66248\/"},"modified":"2025-08-13T23:36:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-13T23:36:10","slug":"locked-on-womens-basketball-cameron-brinks-new-level","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/66248\/","title":{"rendered":"Locked On Women’s Basketball: Cameron Brink’s new level"},"content":{"rendered":"

The conversation started with a quick analysis of Tuesday night\u2019s game, which Merchant attended in Los Angeles. You can learn more about Brink\u2019s return from the ACL injury that interrupted her rookie season in recent articles from Michelle Smith<\/a> and Cameron Ruby<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just been so delightful to watch her come back and be the same defensive monster that we\u2019ve come to know and love from her Stanford days, and even those first dozen or so games that she played with the Sparks in 2024 before tearing her ACL,\u201d Merchant said. \u201cYou can tell the way she not just deters shots, but makes people second-guess wanting to go to the rim in the first place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Want even more women\u2019s sports in your inbox?<\/p>\n

Subscribe now to The IX Sports<\/a> and receive our daily women\u2019s sports newsletter covering soccer, tennis, basketball, golf, hockey and gymnastics from our incredible team of writers. That includes Basketball Wednesday from founder and editor Howard Megdal.<\/p>\n

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In later segments, Merchant and Megdal took a look around the league, discussing everything from the reveal of the new Golden State Valkyries mascot Violet, to their WNBA coach of the year candidates, which included Natalie Nakase (Golden State), Karl Smesko (Atlanta) and Nate Tibbetts (Phoenix).<\/p>\n

\u201cI think [Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase] would be my coach today, right now, just the level of difficulty of coming in with an expansion team immediately crafting your identity,\u201d Merchant said. \u201cKarl Smesko has obviously done great things in Atlanta. I think he just had a better talent base to work with starting off, no disrespect to the Valkyries roster, like, yeah, a lot of good players in Atlanta.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Locked<\/a><\/p>\n

Tune in to Locked On Women\u2019s Basketball<\/p>\n

Here at The IX Basketball, in addition to the 24\/7\/365 written content our staff provides, we also host the daily Locked On Women\u2019s Basketball<\/a> podcast. Join us Monday through Saturday each week as we discuss all things WNBA, collegiate basketball, basketball history and much more. Listen wherever you find podcasts or watch on YouTube.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Make sure to subscribe to the\u00a0Locked On Women\u2019s Basketball podcast<\/a>\u00a0to keep learning about the WNBA, women\u2019s college basketball, basketball history and much more!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The conversation started with a quick analysis of Tuesday night\u2019s game, which Merchant attended in Los Angeles. You…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66249,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,52579,52580,52581,52582,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-66248","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-basketball","11":"tag-cameron-brink","12":"tag-karl-smesko","13":"tag-natalie-nakase","14":"tag-nate-tibbetts","15":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66248","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=66248"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66248\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66248"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66248"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66248"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}