As the WNBA finals kick off Saturday in San Francisco, the pro-LGBTQ+ sports fanbase push a message of inclusion in the face of anti-trans attacks

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At Wilka’s Sports Bar in lower Manhattan, a crowd of mostly LGBTQ+ fans was fired up during a WNBA playoff game between the New York Liberty and the Atlanta Dream. When the Liberty’s Jonquel Jones blocked the Dream’s star forward Angel Reese at the basket, then chest-bumped her – leading teammates to separate them – the bar erupted in cheers. One fan quietly joked: “Now kiss!”

“I love strong women, and I love supporting strong women,” said August, a trans organizer and Liberty fan who asked to go by their first name for privacy reasons.

With the season approaching its climax, we look at the players who have perfected the art of smack talking through the years

Today, even the most casual of WNBA fans have watched some of the league’s biggest stars talking trash on the court. But while the snarling convos look heated, most of the time, they are good-natured, competitive fun.

Still, we wondered, who are the best trash talkers in the game? Which players over the years have turned talking smack into an art form? Let’s explore.

• NBA star wore jersey during 1998 NBA finals

• Jordan memorabilia has attracted huge attention

A jersey worn by Michael Jordan during the 1998 NBA finals has been sold for $14m, an auction house announced on Monday, in what it said is the highest price ever paid for a piece of basketball memorabilia.

Hunt Auctions said Miami real estate investor Ron Firman had bought the jersey in a private sale. Jordan wore the red jersey in Game 2 of the 1998 finals; he and the Chicago Bulls beat the Utah Jazz that night to even the series at a game apiece. Jordan and the Bulls would go on to win the series in six games, the sixth and final title of his Hall of Fame career. That 1997-98 season was the subject of the Last Dance documentary series, which became a hit on Netflix in 2020.

• Mavericks star dazzles in return from ACL tear

• Irving scores 17 points in Dallas’s 132-115 win

• Dusty May hails nine-time All-Star as an ‘artist’

Kyrie Irving waited nearly 600 days for his return to the NBA. The Dallas Mavericks didn’t keep him waiting any longer for his welcome-back basket.

Irving scored a reverse layup on the game’s opening possession on Sunday night, setting the tone for a team-high 17 points in the Mavericks’ 132-115 pre-season win over the Houston Rockets in Macau.

The sports-mad city has embraced its new superstar, even as he choppers in from Manhattan and makes no secret of the fact that Philly was never his first choice

Philadelphia has always had an instinctive affinity with athletes who embrace the grind over the glamour. In a place where sports mean a little too much, commitment has traditionally counted for more than celebrity. What it demands above all, sometimes unreasonably, is the sense that they have bought in, that the city and its fortunes matter to them as much as they do to the people who devote their lives to backing its teams.

Few embodied that ethic more completely than Lane Johnson, the Eagles’ revered right tackle and best player for more than a decade, who abruptly announced his retirement Tuesday after 14 seasons, two Super Bowl titles and a career spent neutralizing some of the most freakish physical specimens to walk the earth. Johnson’s quotidian greatness on the offensive line was almost perversely workmanlike. According to Pro Football Focus, he allowed just 10 sacks across close to 7,000 pass-blocking snaps in the last 13 years, going entire seasons without letting his man bring down the quarterback. The Eagles won nearly two-thirds of their games when he played and lost nearly two-thirds when he didn’t.

After years of mockery and doubts about her game, Reese has helped carry Atlanta to the WNBA’s biggest stage. Her critics might want to start forming an apology queue

A lot of folks owe Angel Reese an apology after Friday night. They should probably form an orderly queue.

Not that the bad-faith take merchants who have spent three years gleefully circulating her missed layups, likening her occasionally awkward footwork to “Bambi on ice” and marveling at the supposed comic genius of “mebounds” are likely to join it. The right-wing culture warriors who turned one of the WNBA’s most naturally gifted rebounders into a joke were never particularly interested in an honest assessment of her basketball abilities. But after Friday the punchline has never worn thinner.

• Aminata Seck released on $2,500 bond after two months

• Chinese player Qingfang Pang detained since September

• Mississippi Valley State express concern for player

A Kentucky State University women’s basketball player from Senegal who was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been released after spending two months in custody.

At a hearing on Tuesday, a judge granted Aminata Seck a $2,500 bond, which was posted on Wednesday after ICE declined to appeal, according to Hishem Alsalman, managing attorney of Alsalman Law Office.

Some of the biggest names in European football will bid for a franchise in ESL-style league, now due to launch in 2028

The launch of NBA Europe will be delayed 12 months until 2028, with a pre-qualifying competition planned for next year to find four temporary members to join the 16-team league’s inaugural season alongside 12 permanent franchises.

The NBA is planning to invest about $10bn (£7.6bn) over 10 years in what sources have described as the sporting world’s biggest-ever startup competition. It is understood to have received multiple offers for the 12 franchises that exceed their targets, with prices expected to range from $500m to more than $1bn for the London franchise.

Teams have always symbolized division within America. And the Fever have come to prominence during a time of dark political intensity

It’s over for now, but no professional sports team spent more time receiving and drawing attention to itself than did the Indiana Fever this season. The Fever has broken, the team eliminated by the defending champion Las Vegas Aces for the second straight season, but Indiana succeeded in being the WNBA’s canary in the coal mine, embodying both the obvious and unintended consequences of rapid growth, while also allowing themselves to be a season-long distraction: part-time professional basketball team, part-time right-wing culture war centerpiece. Less than a decade ago, Atlanta and Minneapolis were praised for their unified political stances. Today, Trumpism has replaced social justice as the defining characteristic of the league – and as the curtain closed on the 2026 WNBA regular season, Indiana stood at its epicenter.

The Fever were the most polarizing team in professional sports, known less for their basketball than their culpability in pulling the league from its old cultural identity as a Black/queer league into its current climate of political divisiveness – a calculated and dangerous path to popularity. This season, there was the basketball of the WNBA, and then there was the Indiana Fever, the league’s Maga-friendly option.

This article originally appeared on Howard Bryant’s Substack. You can subscribe here.

The Mohegan Tribe made the Sun the first Native American-owned franchise in pro sports. Fans say the team’s move to Houston echoes centuries of erasure and displacement

When the Connecticut Sun played their final WNBA game last month, fans at Mohegan Sun Arena came together in an act of collective celebration and grief. The beloved franchise was leaving after 24 seasons, sold to a new ownership group in Houston, in a process so controversial that the state of Connecticut is considering legal action. The end of the Sun is a loss for the entire New England region, which is now without a WNBA team.

The Sun entered the league in 2003 and brought professional women’s basketball to Connecticut, which is considered the “Basketball Capital of the World” – at least, according to signs along the state’s highways. The Sun were the first independently owned WNBA team, and the first Native American-owned pro sports franchise.

• Indiana GM said team’s fans were unfairly attacked

• Former player Brianna Turner says fans are an issue

• Kelsey Mitchell says some fans do not like her

Indiana Fever players past and present have pushed back on an assertion that the team’s fans are not an issue.

On Saturday the Fever’s general manager, Amber Cox, defended Indiana’s fanbase after a series of criticisms over their conduct this season.