Here at \u201cSports for Dummies,\u201d we are unequivocally feminists.<\/p>\n
We watch women\u2019s sports with the same fervor as finance bros watching the stock market \u2014 anxiously, obsessively and with the creeping suspicion that someone somewhere is being robbed. We believe in equal pay, equal coverage and the equal right to become completely unhinged watching a woman do something on a basketball court that makes the crowd lose their minds and makes you, a person who learned the rules 30 minutes ago, lose your mind too.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Which brings us to the WNBA Draft \u2014 an annual event that, if you are not already watching, you should be. It is chaotic. It is joyful. And it is occasionally heartbreaking \u2014 in other words, it is everything sports are.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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How does the draft work?<\/p>\n
The WNBA Draft is how professional women\u2019s basketball teams acquire new players, duh \u2014 and per a 30-year USC and Purdue study published in 2021, it happens in a sports media landscape where women\u2019s athletics receives approximately 5% of total television coverage.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Five percent. Let\u2019s sit with this for a second.<\/p>\n
Three rounds. Fifteen teams \u2014 including two new expansion franchises this season, the Portland Fire and the Toronto Tempo, because the league is thriving and you should be paying attention.\u00a0<\/p>\n
This year, in the WNBA\u2019s historic 30th season, 45 players were drafted, the most since 2002. Teams pick in reverse order of their previous season\u2019s record \u2014 the league\u2019s polite way of telling struggling franchises, \u201cHere\u2019s your consolation prize, please do something with it.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
The truly mysterious part is that being drafted is not the same as playing. Some players get selected in the first round with full confetti-cannon fanfare and then spend their rookie season warming a bench. Others slip through the draft entirely, get signed as free agents and become starters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Love in the air, the court<\/p>\n
Lots of coverage on this draft led with the same name, and we are not above that. UConn guard Azzi Fudd was selected No. 1 overall by the Dallas Wings \u2014 and before you ask, yes, the same Dallas Wings that selected Paige Bueckers No. 1 overall last year.<\/p>\n
Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd \u2014 the most glorious women-loving-women couple in the sports limelight. They are going to play together. Professionally. In actual televised games.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Fudd shoots the ball the way some people parallel park \u2014 not either of us, though \u2014 with a calm, unhurried confidence that makes everyone watching question whether they have been taking life seriously enough. She shot 44.7% from 3-point range for the Huskies this past season \u2014 eclipsing the marks of most WNBA players from the field.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Bueckers, meanwhile, had a WNBA rookie season so absurd it reads like an article from The Onion someone forgot to make believable \u2014 19.2 points and 5.4 assists per game, a record-breaking 44-point performance shooting over 80% from the field and a Rookie of the Year award she won by a 70-2 vote, which raises the question of who those two people were and what they were thinking.<\/p>\n
Putting them on the same court is either a stroke of organizational genius or a war crime against opposing defenses. Possibly both. But undeniably, this is the most romantic thing to happen in sports, possibly ever. The games are almost beside the point.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Kara Dunn situation, which we are not over<\/p>\n