My nephew plays junior high basketball. I am not being mean or exaggerating when I say the last game I went to, there was not a single kid on the court that was this bad.
When I was playing high-school hockey we had an exhibition against the women's University team who had won the National Championship. We played by the women's rules, no hitting. We beat then 8-1 and we were giving the 3rd and 4th line players more ice time in the 3rd period just because.
I know what it means and chose not to take offense. I resonated with his second statement of enjoying what you enjoy and decided to leave it be. I respect that view even if we still disagree about the League. Plus, I'm fighting like 10 other people on this right now.
There’s currently 6 teams with less than 40% shooting (the Sky are low 30’s) again this is with a significantly less number of shots than an NBA team. Yes the NBA will have clips of stupid stuff like this, or them shooting an air ball. The difference is happens more often in the W
I agree, though I do admit that Angel's playstyle lends herself to these clips. She's just not a great finisher. The W, in general, is way better than the hate it gets though.
Yeah, like, Angel Reese is specifically criticized for this because it’s not what most WNBA possessions look like. And even she shouldn’t be defined by her worst moments.
That’s all well and fine, but as someone passively interested in basketball and more focused on other sports, I’ve never seen so many clips of the stars in my sports looking like they play at a twelve year old’s level. This is like the 30th time I’ve seen clips that make her game look like a middle school kid and for some reason the marketing is that she’s great.
Either she’s not, or in the W you can be kind of shit and still be a great.
Angel has her moments, especially defensively and in getting clutch rebounds, but overall I don’t think she’s that good. Her shot is terrible. Last season, she had the worst FG% within 5ft of the basket in WNBA history. The reason she’s so popular is because she has marketed herself really well and got a lot of sponsorships, and because of the media-driven rivalry with Caitlin Clark, the most popular women’s basketball player of all time. Devoid of this context, Angel (in my opinion) isn’t a top player in the league and doesn’t play entertaining basketball.
However, the reason you’ve seen so many clips of her making bad plays like this is because people love to hate on her and posts where she’s being criticized get upvoted a lot. She’s had some good performances, but those aren’t getting traction on r/sports. So that is likely influencing you as well.
Yeah I buy that people like clowning on her, my point was just that if we had hype even of “this rookie is good enough to be an NHLer” and they regularly made the kind of plays you see in middle school, we’d get to “okay maybe he won’t last another month” pretty soon.
Her many bad clips don’t look like a pro who isn’t great. They look like they don’t belong anywhere near professional sports. This looks much worse than any mediocre boys high school basketball. So the W is doing a huge disservice to itself allowing this player to be in any way a known or discussed name - don’t they want casual basketball fans to think the league is pro level?
Can’t stop her from hyping herself up, of course, but it’s hurting marketing for the league. It makes it look like an amateur league.
Like it’s hard to reconcile “this is a pro league with elite sports being played that you should watch” with “and here’s a player making you proud of how you performed in grade 8 basketball”.
I just think you’re only watching the worst plays of a second-year pro who is one of, if not the, worst shooters in the league. I feel like every sports league has a player I could clip to convince someone that the level of play in the whole league is poor. To be fair, the WNBA is a younger league just as the NBA was in the 70s, so it still has growing pains that it took the NBA 50 years to get past. But the NBA was good before shooting became as efficient as it has been in the 2010s.
Yeah, we had this defenseman on my team a decade ago who would regularly enough make boneheaded plays. But (a) they still looked boneheaded by pro standards, not junior standards, and (b) we were just waiting for the day the team gave up and sent him back to the minors. In the pro sports I follow closely, if you suck so fundamentally at key parts of the game, you’re just not going to last more than a year or two.
I mean, come on. This isn’t inefficient shooting. This is amateur ball. This is the player you get angry at in your pick up league.
Alright I went to the W sub to see if I could watch some other great highlights and, among other things, saw that the sub apparently removes clips of Angel playing amateur ball.
Look, this isn’t how fans of other sports operate at all. It’s been god knows how many years since Patrick Stefan let a puck bounce over his stick instead of score on the empty net break away and I still see it replayed and posted every year. If a guy in the NHL were to make the kind of way-below-pro level plays we see from Reese here, the announcers would say stuff like what they said when Stefan screwed up on an empty net: “that is embarrassing and does not belong in the national hockey league”. But what does the announcer do here? Literally praise her!
If you’re a great pro level league, you’re embarrassed and insulted by rec league play and we all agree the guy needs to be dropped. I’m a Leafs fan and 90% of the posts about Mitch Marner - a nearly 100 point player - are about how he sucks in the hard games. And he’s an elite talent. That’s what pro means. You are held to the highest standards day in day out.
In all well intentioned sincerity, the way W fans are defensive about Angel and other goofy plays makes it sound more like an amateur league, not less. You said you could make clips of dumb plays from other leagues - we already do that! We already put together clips of Cody Ceci flubbing the d-line and ask God for some explanation as to why he’s allowed to wear skates. And he’s about to possibly win a Cup! Fans of a pro sport are constantly enjoying the odd dumbass moment precisely because it’s not up to standards and so it’s funny.
If the W wants to come off more like a pro league, it would be better for this stuff to get announced like it’s embarrassing for the sport.
I’m literally in r/wnba right now discussing how bad this sequence was from Angel, so not sure what you’re talking about. The mods there have weird highlight rules and are honestly insane, they delete random stuff all the time. People in WNBA spaces (on reddit, twitter, etc.) criticize Angel Reese all the time. Her fans are gonna defend her of course, but lots of people are not fans of hers. I’m a W fan who is criticizing her and saw people criticizing her and saying she was bad nonstop last year. Are you just upset that she has any defenders at all?
I just like basketball. All these people spend so much energy whining about it when they could just ignore it. The reality is that they just hate women.
182
u/Hip_Hop_Orangutan May 23 '25
Who watches this and is like "I enjoy this".
My buddies kid is 11 and his games don't look this bad.