From the Antipodes to the Abyss: Sandy Brondello’s Quiet Reign Over Global Women’s Hoops By Dave’s Locker Foreign Desk There’s a special flavor of irony in the fact that the most influential Australian in world sport right now is a soft-spoken coach who still sounds like she’s ordering a flat white even when she’s drawing…
The Minnesota Lynx—officially the “MN Lynx” to anyone who’s ever tried to cram a Midwestern tongue-twister into a 280-character tweet—have, for reasons no algorithm can fully explain, become a minor Rorschach test for the rest of the planet. On paper they’re merely a WNBA franchise that plays in a city so cold its airport sells…
A’ja Wilson and the Quiet Art of Global Domination From the vantage point of a crumbling press box in Belgrade—where the Wi-Fi wheezes like a chain-smoker and the coffee tastes of geopolitical betrayal—the name A’ja Wilson keeps pinging across continents with the same calm inevitability as death and push-notification taxes. While the rest of us…
Dijonai Carrington and the Geopolitics of a Three-Pointer By Our Correspondent, still recovering from a press-box hot dog in Belgrade PRAGUE—While the planet’s attention was fixed on more traditional forms of brinkmanship—tank exercises in the Taiwan Strait, central bankers playing Russian roulette with inflation, or Elon Musk rebranding another social-media platform into oblivion—an unassuming 5-foot-11…
**The Curious Case of Veronica Burton: How One Woman’s Basketball Career Became a Global Metaphor for Everything Wrong (and Right) with Modern Sport** If you’ve been anywhere near a sports bar in Ulaanbaatar lately—and honestly, who hasn’t—you’ve probably overheard heated debates about Veronica Burton’s defensive rating. The WNBA guard’s journey from Northwestern University standout to…
From the upper deck of Target Center—an arena whose corporate naming rights have been traded more times than a crypto-punk’s profile picture—one can see the Minnesota Lynx doing something subversive: winning with consistency in a country that treats women’s sport the way a dieter eyes cheesecake—publicly virtuous, privately indifferent. On any given game night, the…
WNBA Scores: A Tiny Pixel in the Planet’s Fever Dream By Our Correspondent, filing from somewhere with worse Wi-Fi than you The final buzzer sounded in Brooklyn at 22:47 GMT-4, and with it the New York Liberty edged the Las Vegas Aces 93-87, a scoreline that will ricochet around the encrypted group chats of Filipino…
The Alyssa Thomas Doctrine: How a Basketball Bruiser Became a Geopolitical Metaphor By the time Alyssa Thomas slammed her 2,000th WNBA rebound through the rim last week, the ball was technically in Turkey. That’s because the Connecticut Sun’s resident freight train was in Istanbul, guest-coaching a clinic for teenage girls whose parents still remember when…
Jackie Young and the Quiet Art of Winning While the Planet Burns A dispatch from the end-of-days desk, somewhere between the Eurozone and the next recession The name Jackie Young doesn’t scream geopolitics. It isn’t chanted in Davos corridors, whispered in Brussels backrooms, or hashtagged by tinfoil influencers predicting the collapse of fiat currency. And…
PARIS—While delegates at UNESCO politely clapped for yet another PowerPoint on “sport as soft power,” Skylar Diggins-Smith was 7,500 kilometers away in Dallas, draining a contested three over two defenders and reminding the planet that soft power sometimes wears size-10 Nikes and has a mean crossover. The box score will tell you she logged 25…
The Las Vegas Aces are not a basketball team; they are a geopolitical weather balloon released above the Mojave Desert, drifting across time zones to see who on Earth still believes in fairy-tale endings. On paper they’re merely the reigning WNBA champions, but in the grand casino of international soft power, they’ve become a high-roller’s…
Tina Charles, the 6’4″ walking referendum on American exceptionalism, has just reminded the planet that gravity remains a negotiable concept—provided you possess a 34-inch vertical and a passport thick enough to double as body armor. While the rest of us were busy doom-scrolling through supply-chain memes and energy-crisis cosplay, Charles quietly collected her fourth EuroLeague…
