The 10 Biggest Women’s Basketball Moments of 2024

From Caitlin and Angel to Geno and JuJu, 2024 was a watershed moment for women’s hoops. We look back at our favorite on-court moments from a year to remember.

For women’s basketball, 2024 was cacophonous, transformational, and nearly impossible to make sense of. The Caitlin Clark Effect, along with shattering television ratings, helped women’s basketball crash the mainstream lexicon, bringing with it enthusiastic new eyeballs alongside an ugly undercurrent of racism, misogyny, and homophobia. The off-court machinations of the game, with WNBA players opting out of the Collective Bargaining Agreement, the entry of a new expansion team, and the ensuing arrival of Unrivaled, are shifting. Lost in all of that, far too often, was the game itself, and this list hopes to serve as a corrective. 

In chronological order, here are my favorite moments from the year that was; the records that were shattered, and the shots that—beyond swinging games, series, and titles—will always bring me back to this time and place.

JuJu Watkins Drops 51 on Stanford

Whether you pray to the shrine of hoopers or basketball players, JuJu Watkins has something for you.

Her game is an amalgamation of the prettiest bags of the 2010s: Imagine Maya Moore’s fadeaway fluidity in Candace Parker’s body, with the latter’s do-it-all defensive omnipotence, too. Or a player whose movements and silhouette offer reminders of Carmelo Anthony’s jab-step jumper; the mid-post, pump-fake chicanery of DeMar DeRozan; and Paul George’s pull-up 3s. In the open floor, her eyes are locked in on one thing: the basket. No one in college basketball is more unstoppable in transition.

Even as a freshman, her game was simultaneously too layered and too raw, too unwieldy, to fit all of her potential into one 40-minute span. But on one magical February night at Stanford, after a frustrating loss to Washington that had her in the gym in the wee hours all week, her abilities all came together. 

The 51-point flurry not only broke Cheryl Miller’s USC freshman scoring record but also Cherie Nelson’s single-game school record of 50 points. Watkins didn’t leave a single region of the court untouched. And it took her only 34 minutes to do it. That’s 1.5 points per minute. 

Last season, Watkins attempted more free throws than any woman in Division I, and the most for any freshman since at least the 2009-2010 season, per HerHoopStats. Nineteen of them came against a Stanford team that had no answer for her, despite having to traverse through the limbs of Cameron Brink (who was, if you’re into this kind of small-sample-size stuff, the WNBA’s rookie leader in blocks per game this season) and Kiki Iriafen, a likely lottery pick next year. 

Watkins eschewed the opportunity to play for Stanford in hopes of building her own powerhouse at USC, just eight miles from where she grew up in Watts, and her performance was apparently sufficient enough to draw Iriafen to the Trojans this past spring. That has offered Watkins a different kind of challenge, one that has required getting off the ball. But in her freshman year, Watkins operated like Carmelo in a heliocentric context, leading the NCAA in usage (minimum 20 minutes played, per HerHoopStats) and finishing second in shot attempts (behind only Caitlin Clark), getting deep into a bag that offers an infinite range of possibilities for the future. 

At 19, her good kid, m.A.A.d city era is yet to come. This was her Section.80.

Caitlin Clark Breaks the NCAA All-Time Scoring Record

At the 7:47 mark of the first quarter of a February game against Michigan, Caitlin Clark raced up the court eyeing history and pulled up from 35 feet, right between two logos where her number is now forever inscribed onto the hardwood. 

For two seconds, the ball floated in the air, alongside the words of announcer Zora Stephenson: “How will she go for history?”

It was fitting: One final moment of anticipation for a moment we’d long been waiting for, made more extraordinary by its nearing inevitability. 

Because Clark, as it happens, always knew how she was going to break the record. Deep down, maybe we did, too.  

“Y’all knew I was gonna shoot a logo 3 for the record, come on now,” Clark said after the game. 

The fact that she actually did it is what separates Clark from other great athletes, what made her not only a star but also a folk hero. By some measure of accuracy, audacity, and focus, Clark’s diagonal, cross-court passes and 30-foot moon shots offered the closest approximation we have seen in women’s basketball to consistent, recurring magic tricks. 

In hindsight, what’s interesting is how removed she feels from something that happened just 10 months ago. Now with the Indiana Fever, she’s bigger, stronger, smarter, and more controlled, both in her style of play and her self-presentation. 

Cupping her ear and flexing at booing crowds has given way to a smile with her tongue hanging out of her mouth, and an “aw, shucks” routine in front of the cameras. Her composure has improved in service to her game, but at times, I get the sense that it’s a function of brand management. 

In her rookie season in the WNBA, that midwestern, fuck-around-and-find-out, passive-aggressiveness usually only came out when the cameras seemed focused elsewhere. The reality, of course, is that some camera, somewhere, is always trained on Clark, offering up such gems as “stop crying” and “I wanna fucking punch her in the fucking face.”

Whatever you want to call it, it’s a key aspect of what makes her personality unique, and we see a little less of it these days. 

All of which made that moment—and really, the years leading up to it—more special.  Clark was, in the months before and after that shot, making the transition from college folk hero to corporate entity. This was Caitlin Unplugged and unvarnished, in the height of the mania but before her public image and the discourse surrounding it became something weighty that had to be managed and performed. 

Kamilla Cardoso Keeps South Carolina’s Undefeated Season Alive

Kamilla Cardoso played 2,500 minutes and hoisted 924 shots in her college career. Only two of them were 3s, and only one of them went in. But it was a big one. With 1.1 seconds remaining in the SEC tournament semifinals against Tennessee, in the only game all season that the undefeated South Carolina Gamecocks even came close to losing, Cardoso banked in the unlikeliest of game-winners:

South Carolina associate head coach Lisa Boyer had worked with Cardoso on expanding her range. But head coach Dawn Staley instead cited scripture in the moment, leaning on her pet phrase: “Uncommon favor.” The truth is, players spend years honing their touch from beyond the arc before attempting, letting alone splashing in, a game-winning 3-pointer. (And God doesn’t care about basketball.)

There is something about Staley’s belief, though. After South Carolina’s triumphant win, Staley rattled through the scenarios going through her mind as she told her players what to do in the midst of a makeshift timeout between inbounds plays. “I really wanted [Ta-Hina Paopao] to be in a position to catch and shoot, but they did a great job on Pao all night long. So I was skeptical about getting her the ball. Then I told Raven [Johnson], throw it high to Kamilla, Kamilla pass it to Pao, then I’m like ‘no, they’re not gonna let Pao get any daylight at the end.’ I told Kamilla, yelled at her and said shoot it. I added some more words to that, but I can’t say it here.”

Cardoso would be wide open. She had been all game, all year, from that spot. For good reason. But Staley decided she was their best chance at having a chance, and sometimes a chance is all you need.

“In these situations,” Staley said after the game, “I really don’t stress out, because I’m gonna be able to handle whatever.”

The agony on Tennessee coach Kellie Harper’s face was only matched by former Lady Vol Candace Parker, who FaceTimed A’ja Wilson in hopes of gloating.

The moment was part method, part miracle, and part madness, illustrated best by the team tackling Cardoso to the floor after the ball hit the backboard and banked in.

Angel Reese Leads the Sky’s Comeback Against the Fever

On June 23, about 2.3 million people tuned in to watch the Indiana Fever’s third clash of the season against the Chicago Sky, making it the most viewed WNBA game since 2001. 

It was also, after the Chennedy Carter shove and ensuing take-pocalypse (which I wrote about at the time, and mercifully will not be discussing here), a palette cleanser that showcased the best of Caitlin Clark’s playmaking ability (she finished with 13 assists, then a career high) and Angel Reese’s unique combination of athleticism, motor, and intelligence. 

Not only did Reese become the first rookie since A’ja Wilson to finish a game with at least 25 points and 15 rebounds—19 of those points came in the final 12 minutes of a 15-point comeback—but she also made subtle defensive plays that fueled Chicago’s 88-87 win. 

Reese, who made the Sky more than 10 points per 100 possessions better defensively when she was on the floor, doesn’t get enough credit for her basketball IQ. It’s when the cerebral fuses with her athleticism that Reese is at her most dangerous on defense. Watch Reese long enough, and you discover something intensely hypnotic about her game. It’s not aesthetic in the way we traditionally understand it, but there is a kind of beauty in its resourcefulness, a triumph of resolve and desire. I know Clark’s the Swiftie, but when I watch Reese, I often think of the line, “I’ve never been a natural, all I do is try, try, try.” 

She reminds me of Dennis Rodman, not only in the way she elevates rebounding, often an afterthought, into a craft worth examining, but in the way she refuses to be nailed down, owning both her bravado and her vulnerability, taking on the role of the villain without suppressing her sadness or her joy. Last year’s Chicago Sky were an apparition of the “Bad Boys” Pistons, making some fans and commentators fall on their fainting couches over their brutal style. But that’s simply what Reese’s teams do: ratchet up the physicality to a place where few can stand it. 

But for most of the season, the very freneticism that makes her such an all-world rebounder and defender hurt her when she needed to slow down, relax, and find the right angle for a layup. Despite that, she was a walking double-double and All-Star in her rookie season. And as she put it on Twitter recently, this is the worst she’ll ever be.

It is this point that draws me back to the game against the Fever, which provided a blueprint for what a more polished version of Reese could do on a regular basis, and drew admiration from new Chicago coach Tyler Marsh, then an assistant with the Aces.

“I was efficient tonight, finally,” Reese said after the game. “I didn’t get in foul trouble, finally. I got some rebounds, I turned the ball over three times but I feel like I’m just getting better. I’m gaining confidence. I’ve watched film with [Teresa Weatherspoon], I’ve watched film with David [Simon]. He’s showed me every shot I missed around the basket and that’s why I tried to take my time today and finish around the basket.”

As early as January, when Reese was still a senior at LSU, Marsh would identify the solution Reese keyed into that day. 

Reese’s new coach also seems as committed to nurturing the team identity that has formed around her as Weatherspoon was, albeit in a more tactically focused way. That night against Indiana offered a window into  what the future could hold. 

Caitlin Clark Becomes the First WNBA Rookie to Notch a Triple-Double

It’s hard to boil Clark’s transformational WNBA debut season down to one moment. Thankfully, Molly McGrath created an archive of all her record-breaking accomplishments, which includes the rookie scoring record, and the single-season assist record. 

If there’s one moment that stands out to me, though, it was her first triple-double, notched against the New York Liberty in Clark’s first win against an elite team—both because it shattered another rookie milestone and it showcased the versatility that makes her so special.

Clark either scored or assisted on 14 of Indiana’s first 19 points, in one of the first games in the Gainbridge Fieldhouse where the energy reached an Iowa-esque fever (sorry) pitch, erupting when Clark grabbed her 10th rebound. She roused the crowd early, opening with a big 3, while the freneticism and spontaneity of her risque, contagious passes kept the audience buzzing.

The game also highlighted one of Clark’s underrated skills: rebounding, in which she led her Iowa team as a senior. She was also second in the WNBA among guards, behind just 6-foot-4 DeWanna Bonner, in rebounds per game. In this context, the fact that she would go on to notch another triple-double should come as no surprise. I wouldn’t be entirely shocked if Clark ended her career as the WNBA’s all-time leader in triple-doubles—a record that Alyssa Thomas, who is certainly not finished piling up huge stat lines, currently holds with 11 in the regular season and four in the playoffs.

The WNBA’s increasing pace, and high-powered, free-flowing offenses have also contributed to a general uptick in triple-doubles since the league’s inception, a trend that Clark will both benefit from and accelerate. 

A’ja Wilson Breaks the WNBA’s Single-Season Scoring Record 

The game was billed as a clash of potential MVP’s, with the future taking on the present, but at this point in the season, A’ja Wilson was only chasing history.

Towards the end of the first half of the September clash against Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever, Wilson caught the ball, jabstepped to the left, dribbled right, and unfurled her deadly lefty midranger. The work-a-day quality of Wilson’s record-breaking shot was counter-intuitively understated, but that’s Wilson for you: call her style dull if you want, but repetition and consistency is the key to her dominance. She’s hit that midrange shot hundreds of times, including her first six buckets against the Fever. It’s a part of the game she has tirelessly, incrementally mastered.

As a rookie, Wilson shot just 41 percent on the exact kind of non-rim paint shot she drilled to break the record, and likely worse when she drove with her non-dominant right hand. In the last four years, that number has incrementally climbed from 42 to 44 to 49 percent, before hitting 50.2 percent last season—a figure that makes that shot just as efficient as a 3-pointer shot at league-average (33.8 percent, according to HerHoopStats) accuracy.  

Her face-up game reminds me of a cross between Joel Embiid and Tim Duncan. It’s so hard to double her from the center of the court, creating impossible quandaries for the defense because she shoots it well enough from that spot to make it into one of the most efficient shots in basketball. 

There’s Michelangelo-chipping-away-at-the-stone quality to Wilson’s incremental development, and this season was her David: nearly bereft of imperfections or inefficiencies. She broke the all-time records in total points, points per game, total rebounds, and win shares. She was second all-time in PER, and committed a career low 1.3 turnovers despite posting a career high in usage, taking home the WNBA’s second unanimous MVP.

It’s a shame the Aces players around her, coming off two titles, were too burnt out to make it the promised land. Next year could be even harder. Las Vegas is down two assistants and a GM, and they just lost Kate Martin to the Valkyries. Alysha Clark, 37, and Tiffany Hayes, 35, are only going to be a year older (if they return as free agents), and the future of Kelsey Plum, a free agent, hangs in the air. 

All of which is to say: A’ja could simply do this all over again next year, and one day vie for Diana Taurasi’s career all-time scoring record.

 

Courtney Williams’s Four-Point Play Helps Send Game 1 to Overtime

Courtney Williams missed the first triple, but she’s never one to get rattled. When Alanna Smith pulled down the biggest rebound of her career and the ball found its way back to Williams, the Minnesota Lynx guard looked down at her feet to make sure she was behind the 3-point line—giving Sabrina Ionescu just enough time to over-contest the shot—and let it fly. As the ball dropped through the net, the ref blew the whistle.

After hitting one of the biggest shots in WNBA history, Williams capped it off by making her free throw in one of the most pressurized situations possible: on the road, to give Minnesota its first lead of the game, with 5.5 seconds left in regulation.

Breanna Stewart then split two free throws, sending the game to overtime, where Napheesa Collier would deliver the Lynx home (more on that in a second).

Williams, afterwards, stole the show on SportsCenter, resplendent, brash and confident, flashing the perpetually huge smile that long-time WNBA fans knew well. The word is overused, but this is a player oozing with aura. 

After the game, watching Williams’s unshakable confidence bounce off Cheryl Reeve’s practical, down-to-earth, gruffness offered a fascinating peek into the Minnesota locker room, where Williams brought a necessary electricity and edge.

A reporter asked Williams about the many nicknames fans were giving her, like mistress of the midrange (where she hit more shots than anyone else in the league).

The curmudgeonly Reeve had one word: “Seriously?”

Williams oozed positivity: “If you show me love, you can call me whatever.”

Napheesa Collier Hits the Game-Winner in Game 1 OT

It was the constantly churning, locomotive brilliance of Napheesa Collier that put Williams in a position to cap off the 18-2 run that put Minnesota in a position to clutch victory from the jaws of defeat. Collier notched six rebounds, three steals, and blocked three shots in the final 12 minutes of regulation and overtime. She also hit five of six shots, none more important than the eventual game-winner.

Collier initially posted up on the left high block, with a mismatch on forward Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, that Kayla McBride missed. There was nothing, despite the critique of her aggressiveness, passive about this moment. She did what every coach tells post players to do: demand the ball. And her unusual agility in the paint allows her to seek out more openings and angles than just about anyone else in the game. Finally, she caught the ball on the low right block, guarded by Jonquel Jones, who has five inches and over 40 pounds on her. Collier dribbled backwards and to her left, then stepped through the right, before spinning back around and unfurling a pretty turnaround fadeaway that fell through the hoop with eight seconds remaining in overtime.

The shot was a perfect encapsulation of the pliability, skill and touch that makes Phee one of the most slippery covers in the WNBA. She is quick yet never in a rush, precise and reliable.

On the Ringer WNBA podcast, Collier and Alex Bazzell—her trainer and husband—told me that when she was in college, and the WNBA game was more traditional, people pressured her to lean into the rim more than lean away. Her propensity for fadeaways, at the time, was seen as the symptom of meekness. At 6-foot-1, and despite her 6-foot-6 wingspan, scouts saw her as a tweener, and she fell outside the lottery in the 2019 WNBA draft. 

Bazzell and Collier kept plugging away, though, and as the league has modernized, those very traits have become strengths. She is making a case, as the game evolves and becomes faster, requiring more flexibility, fluidity and versatility on both ends, as not only the future but the present of the WNBA, always moving a half-step faster than her opponents.

Sabrina Ionescu Steals Game 3 for the Liberty

One possession before nailing the biggest shot in Liberty history, and the most important logo 3 in a career full of them, Sabrina Ionescu missed an easier shot: A one-dribble pull-up just behind the arc. 

Ionescu, who prays at the Mamba Mentality altar, can occasionally conjure visions of the Dion Waiters quote at her worst (she went 1-19 in Game 5, for example), but that unshakable confidence is admired by all elite athletes. It’s the hardest thing to acquire, and a skeleton key to betterment in an increasingly omniscient, jabbering, critical sports media culture.

And it’s probably a part of the reason why, after that miss, she calmly nailed a 28-foot dagger in the face of Kayla McBride, Minnesota’s most rugged perimeter defender. 

“A great player made a good shot,” said McBride. “I guarded her for 40 minutes.”

It was the final frame, in what had been an up-and-down game for Ionescu, that mattered the most.

Ionescu wore her green and yellow Sabrina 2’s, drawing inspiration from her alma mater’s football team, the Oregon Ducks, who’d just come off a gritty victory. “A lot of things didn’t go right for them and they just continued to fight and stay together and grind out a really big win.”

She did too, and in this game, it wasn’t by way of trying to shoot herself out of a slump but by leaning on the less flashy aspects of her game that she had spent the season honing: driving, defense, floaters, physicality. She shot 33 percent from beyond the arc in the regular season, 11 percent worse than the year prior, but still had the best season of her career—a testament to her growing versatility. 

“Just continuing to stick with it,” she told Holly Rowe afterwards. “That’s what sport, that’s what life is, continuing to just grind through the tough times and we did that today.”

Now that the dust has settled and the Liberty are champs, it’s fair to say Ionescu’s triple was not only the biggest shot in Liberty history, usurping Teresa Weatherspoon’s miracle half-court heave in Game 2 of the 1999 WNBA Finals. It’s also just one of the greatest shots in league history, up there with Maya Moore’s Game 3 buzzer-beater in the 2015 WNBA Finals.

There is a strange synchronicity to how the shots mirror each other. Both were in Game 3 of a series tied at 1-1, with the score tied at 77-77. Moore pump-faked, dribbled to her right and nailed a 3 to give Minnesota the victory. Ionescu, conversely, stepped back and left, handing Minnesota the loss. That her season, buoyed by everything but logo 3’s, came down to the shot that originally put her on the map, made it feel all the more full circle.

Geno Auriemma Becomes the Winningest Coach in NCAA History

When UConn trampled Farleigh Dickinson at Gampel Pavilion, an arena that didn’t exist prior to his arrival 40 years ago, Geno Auriemma notched his 1,217th career victory, passing Tara VanDerveer on the all-time list.

During a moment in which the Huskies’ program faced a crossroads, adapting to a more competitive landscape and the recruiting implications of NIL, this was a night that fused the past (both UConn and the WNBA’s) with the future. Legends like Maya Moore, Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, and Rebecca Lobo, alongside a literal goat, trekked to Storrs, Connecticut, to celebrate the man who pushed, admonished, and nurtured them. Of the 160 players he coached, 47 were drafted into the WNBA. Nineteen went on to win championships. Last season, each WNBA roster featured at least one UConn player.

After the game, Geno’s voice, throaty and heavy, accumulating the weight of gravity as it has accumulated experience, cut through the static of the dead air in the press conference with a quip. “I was shocked,” he said of his former players showing up, “because they had to pay their own way. If you know any of these guys, they all have their holy communion money.”

Then he got emotional. “This is what I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to have. Not every coach—actually, not any coach in America—has had the good fortune and the privilege to have the players I’ve had.”

It’s hard to imagine anyone ever having it again. The coaching carousel rotates more quickly now. In an era when stars can leverage the threat of entering the transfer portal, only a coach with a built-in legacy could operate with his gruff, sarcastic, coaching style—despite the fact that young players still gravitate towards it. And the competition has leveled up, likely making UConn’s 111-game win streak from 2014 to 2017 another unbreakable record. Auriemma was a product of his environment, and he elevated it to a place that will ensure there will never be another coach like him.

And Before You Go, Here’s This:

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