The 2024 WNBA season will forever be a flashpoint in the league’s history. Caitlin Clark and the 2024 draft class have brought with them an exhilarating infusion of talent, eyeballs, and interest. Hierarchies are shifting. New stars are shining. And with just three weeks left until the postseason starts, the playoff picture is emerging.

Clark and the Indiana Fever are ascendant. Angel Reese and the Chicago Sky are barely hanging on to their playoff spot. A’ja Wilson is transcendent, but her Las Vegas Aces, the back-to-back champs, are stumbling. Minnesota, Seattle, and Connecticut, all coming for the Aces’ crown, made win-now acquisitions before the trade deadline. Last season’s runner-up, the New York Liberty, has been the league’s most consistent team.

With so much action, here are seven observations as we head into the final stretch of the most talked about WNBA season since the league’s inception.

1. Caitlin Clark is once again the best show in basketball.

On Thursday, Sports Illustrated compiled all the records Clark has broken in her young career.

The post, after Clark broke the single-season record for 3-pointers made, is a familiar, understandable impulse that we lean on a lot in sports: stacking together accomplishments, records, and awards in the futile hope of capturing the gravity of a moment that can only be seen to be understood. Rookie of the Year almost feels like an afterthought at this point, after Clark has averaged 22.6 points, 7.8 assists, and 5.4 rebounds since the Olympic break and the Fever have gone 14-8 since their jarring, horrendous 1-8 start. Clark leads the WNBA, and rookies all time, in assists. She’s 11th in scoring in the league and leads all current rookies in steals. She was an All-Star, and she’ll likely make an All-WNBA team—along with Rookie of the Year, a triple crown also achieved by her hero Maya Moore, whose jersey was retired in front of Clark and the Fever earlier this week. Life often offers such synchronicities for blessed, young legends like Clark. Yet accolades seem beside the point.

The only thing that comes close to doing this moment justice is the number of people witnessing the Clark phenomenon. A record 3.44 million viewers watched the All-Star Game. The previous record was 1.44 million in 2003. The Fever’s game against the Storm on August 18 drew 2.2 million, an ABC record.

The 1-8 start now feels like a distant memory. It’s hard but instructive to think back on how ugly and borderline unwatchable those games were, if only to appreciate the speed with which Clark has assimilated to the next level.

“Joy,” said Fever coach Christie Sides after their first win against the Sun since 2021, “is something we couldn’t find a lot of early. I preached that from the beginning, that you’ve gotta have fun playing this game. That joy is so important. When we came out of the Olympic break, there was a different feel out there. There’s this joy, this excitement, and it’s created this new, different feeling around the team.”

What we have also witnessed as Clark has adjusted to the physicality of the modern game in the past few months is the substance and mettle of a quick response: She’s been in the weight room, and it shows in her improved defense, screen navigation, and screen setting. Her rebounding (an underrated facet of her game at Iowa, where she led the team in rebounding her senior season) has translated, allowing the Fever to immediately turn defense into offense. She worked on her in-between game during the Olympic break. Her efficiency has improved. The turnovers haven’t. She’ll always be more Dionysus than Apollo, and it’s part of the reason she’s a box office hit.

2. A’ja Wilson is trying to do the impossible.

Watching Wilson try to lead the Aces to a three-peat has been fun, stressful, and revelatory. On Wednesday, she scored a season-high 42 points on 22 shots, only for the Aces to fall apart against the 8-22 Dallas Wings, dropping Las Vegas to 2-4 since the Olympic break.

On the Aces’ final two offensive plays, Wilson was doubled and was denied the ball, while her teammates failed to locate shooters from behind the arc, including a missed game-tying opportunity with Kelsey Plum wide open in the corner:

The sequence was in lockstep with so much of this strange, disorienting Aces season: the bumbling, fatigued disintegration of a once well-oiled machine, while its most important piece shines brighter than ever.

Wilson, who was on track to become the WNBA’s first unanimous MVP before the Olympic break, has been on an absolute tear. She’s on pace to break Diana Taurasi’s single-season scoring record for points per game by nearly a two-point margin. Her 32.1 usage rate, second in the league and 11th all time, is the highest it’s ever been. She leads the WNBA in free throws, blocks, and defensive rebounds, and she’s second in steals. If she does indeed take home her third MVP, it’ll be a testament to her greatness and the Aces’ overreliance on her. As the Aces continue to struggle, it looks increasingly possible that one of the best single seasons in WNBA history won’t end with a ring. It’s like if the Bulls had their ’89-90 season after Michael Jordan led them to two championships.

Watching Wilson in particular navigate all of this has been fascinating because she’s never shied away from the vulnerability that fuels greatness. Talking about how much she loves her teammates drives her to tears. The final chapter of her memoir is about the nauseating panic attacks she had after winning her first MVP. Three years later, she’s fresh off leading Team USA to Olympic gold; then she flew home and geared up to help the Aces make a run at a third championship in a row, an exhausting attempt at sustained perfection that only the now-defunct Houston Comets have pulled off in the WNBA, right at the turn of the millennium. In the NBA, the Los Angeles Lakers were the last to do it. It’s fitting, then, that her phone screensaver—according to an interview with Uproxx’s Megan Armstrong—is a quote from Kobe Bryant: “Rest at the end, not in the middle.”

The Aces season has featured fatigue, injuries to key players like Chelsea Gray, opponents who are more familiar with them, an impending lawsuit, and increased competition across the league. The Lynx shored up their front line at the trade deadline, in part to combat the kind of foul trouble that comes from dealing with Wilson. The Sun, tied with the Lynx for the league’s best defense, traded for Marina Mabrey to help their spacing and shot creation. The Liberty are now the betting favorite to win it all. The Storm signed Gabby Williams, giving them another elite perimeter defender who can create. The Aces are 4-6 against these four teams, all of whom are ahead of them in the standings.

Wilson herself is facing more defensive pressure. Opponents have responded to the Aces’ inconsistent guard play by either doubling Wilson or forcing her to beat them herself. Against the Lynx last Wednesday, she had a season-high six assists. Her range is better than ever. Her shot attempts have gone up. The season has demanded an increase in her responsibilities and an evolution in what she’s capable of, all at once.

Compared to the history of women’s basketball, the WNBA is relatively young, so GOAT debates precede its creation. Many of the players Wilson is in competition with, like Cheryl Miller and Nancy Lieberman, aren’t on the league’s all-time leaderboards. Others, like Candace Parker, Sheryl Swoopes, and Maya Moore, are. But to achieve a three-peat by the age of 28 would put her ahead of the pack. It would also, in a career full of achievement, be the most impressive thing she has done to date.

3. The Minnesota Lynx are the hottest team in the WNBA.

If not for the historic nature of Wilson’s season, the run Napheesa Collier has been on since the Olympic break would have tipped the MVP scales: 23.3 points on 62 percent shooting from the field, with nine rebounds and 3.7 assists. The Lynx, in that time, have scored a scintillating 112 points per 100 possessions and gone 6-0, fueled by a system that’s as efficient as its star player.

In Cheryl Reeve’s offense, Collier can screen, post up mismatches, roll, handle the ball, drive, shoot, and make plays. She is the crown jewel of the league’s most versatile, interchangeable frontcourt, which features players like Alanna Smith, Bridget Carleton, and Diamond Miller, who can shoot, create, cut, and defend. That group now also includes Myisha Hines-Allen, whom the Lynx dealt for at the deadline to combat the foul trouble their frenzied, aggressive defense—anchored by Collier, the front-runner for Defensive Player of the Year—gets them into.

The Lynx are second in the WNBA in points off turnovers, behind only the Sun. They also lead the WNBA in 3-point percentage, owing in part to a pick-and-roll attack that forces most opponents to guard three-on-two. The simple gambit creates impossible choices and often ends in open shots. The Lynx lead the W in assisted field goal percentage, and every starter is having either their best or second-best season in assists.

After the Fever, the Lynx are playing the most entertaining brand of basketball in the WNBA. They execute until you make a mistake, and they aren’t afraid to use the whole clock. It’s death by a thousand handoffs, cuts, slips, screens, and flares. The Lynx are sophisticated and synchronized. Their offense looks difficult yet natural, complicated yet intuitive. And most importantly, it’s completely unguardable.

4. The Indiana Fever are finding themselves.

In the first nine games of the season, the Fever had the worst offense in the WNBA. Since returning from the Olympic break, they have the second best, behind only the torrid Minnesota Lynx. After some tinkering from Sides and almost a full season of reps, the core of Clark, Aliyah Boston, Kelsey Mitchell, and Lexie Hull is emerging.

After a rough start, Boston has averaged 15 points, 10 rebounds, and 3.5 assists over the past 20 games. In the past two weeks, she’s had two eight-assist games, emerging not only as the perfect pick-and-roll partner for Clark but also as a playmaking release valve in the short roll.

Mitchell, a great cutter with elite downhill speed and creation ability, has emerged as the perfect foil next to Clark, who has assisted on 58 of her 209 made shots this season. Mitchell scored 20 points or more in five consecutive games, a Fever record. When Clark rebounds the ball and looks ahead, it’s usually Mitchell darting toward the opposite rim. When Clark picks up her dribble in the paint, it’s Mitchell who speeds to the rim from the corner as an escape hatch. And when Clark gets trapped at half court, it’s Mitchell who is tasked with perimeter creation. She also leads the Fever in clutch points this season on 50 percent shooting from the field.

Here, she turns an Iverson cut into a perfectly executed side pick-and-roll with Boston:

Hull, who moves and thinks quickly and rebounds tenaciously, has entered the starting lineup. NaLyssa Smith, who has struggled to adapt to the Fever’s breakneck style, may be the odd woman out. Against the Sun, she rode the pine while Indiana finished with Temi Fagbenle, whose rim protection and motor gave the team a perfect alchemy of spacing, speed, creation, defense, and rebounding.

The question now turns, as it did in Iowa, to how far the Fever can go. They’re six wins from clinching a playoff spot, and with a top-three net rating coming out of the break, they’re a team nobody will want to face in the postseason.

5. The Chicago Sky are going through growing pains.

Some drop-off was to be expected after the Chicago Sky traded away Mabrey, but their 1-5 slide has been disconcertingly hectic.

The drama started a few days before the end of the Olympic break, when tweets surfaced showing that Chennedy Carter had liked posts giving her credit for Chicago’s rise instead of Angel Reese, whose historic double-double streak has garnered a lot of buzz.

Complicating matters for the Sky is the fact that Carter, who is combustible but important to the Sky, had a point. Despite playing alongside Kamilla Cordoso and Angel Reese, the 5-foot-9 Carter leads the team in points in the paint. More importantly, the Sky were 2-7 in the clutch before Carter entered the starting lineup. They’ve been 6-7 since, with Carter carrying most of the offensive load and scoring 40 clutch points this season so far—top five in the WNBA.

After a loss against the Sun, echoes of lockers being slammed in frustration leaked out into the press room. After they lost their next game, this time against the Aces, the manager for Dana Evans—who was benched for Carter—called the team out on Twitter.

To make matters worse for the Sky, Carter missed the next game, a loss to the Mystics, with an illness that seems to be going around the team.

The lone drama-free bright spot has been Cordoso, who put up a career-high five blocks against the Aces and followed it up with a career-high six assists against the Mystics in Carter’s absence. The team has struggled to jell offensively after Mabrey’s departure, but Cordoso could provide a solution as an offensive hub in the middle of the floor, especially as she attracts more and more double-teams.

There is a natural pathway here for the trio to work together well, with Cordoso as the offensive hub, Reese as the defensive anchor, and Carter as the closer. In front of the microphones, they’ve all said the right things. But it’ll take some tinkering and some rearranging of Chicago’s shot distribution toward Cordoso.

Before the break, the Sky looked like a collective of misunderstood, fiery players building a sustainable identity around toughness, under the care of Teresa Witherspoon, a coach committed to that endeavor. But right now, that identity looks shaky.

6. The Connecticut Sun still need more firepower.

The Sun traded for Mabrey before the Olympic break in hopes of giving a boost to their offense. The early returns have been promising but spotty, in part because they’re still figuring out exactly how their rotation should shake out.

The Sun have played three different starting lineups since the return from the break, with Dijonai Carrington, Tyasha Harris, and Mabrey each taking turns coming off the bench and each giving the team a different look.

Carrington, for instance, is an All-Defensive Team candidate with incredible anticipatory skills. Her ability to intercept perimeter passes should be studied in a lab. She has great instincts, IQ, and quickness. Take this jump ball in the third quarter of the Sun’s loss to the Fever. Below, Carrington uses her eyes to tell Veronica Burton to prepare for the tip, giving her a head start to get an easy transition layup:

Flanked by Alyssa Thomas, the duo can execute just about any defensive pick-and-roll coverage you ask of them, from dropping and switching to trapping. But Carrington is a non-threat on offense, making less than half her shots in the restricted area and less than 30 percent of her 3s, on a team that’s already short on shooting. It doesn’t help that DeWanna Bonner is also having a down year from beyond the arc.

Mabrey provides the Sun an entirely different look. She’s easily their best floor spacer. Her playmaking and willingness to get off the ball quickly also help grease the wheels for an offense whose assist percentage has jumped by 12 percent since her arrival.

Stephanie White has experimented with playing Mabrey and Carrington together, which has led to beautiful sequences like this one:

But if the playoffs started today, I’d still hesitate to take the Sun over their conference rivals the Liberty, in large part because I doubt they can go shot for shot with the most elite contenders.

7. Can the Liberty hang on to the no. 1 seed?

The Liberty, who have star power, continuity, championship experience, and the collective pain of a recent Finals loss on their side, have had a steely determination about them all season. But as of late, they have leaned into some of their worst habits.

Their offense, led by Brianna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu, is normally well balanced and explosive, but when they get bogged down in the half court, they tend to force the issue and turn the ball over. Earlier this week, they dropped a game against the tanking Sparks, putting them just 2.5 games ahead of Minnesota, whom they play on September 15, a week before the postseason begins. That game could very well determine who gets the no. 1 seed. In a title race that’s particularly tight, that edge could be the difference.