feature image photo of the StudBudz via Twitch
Back in May when I dropped my WNBA season preview, I wrote, “this feels like one of the most unpredictable seasons in the WNBA’s 29 year history” and, as it turns out, I was kinda right about that. Pretty much everything else, though? I got it all so very wrong (note to self: don’t try predicting the unpredictable).
I was wrong about Chicago (Angel Reese was right, though). I was wrong about Indiana even before the injury bug cannibalized their roster. I really overestimated Seattle and, until their recent turnaround, thought I’d overestimated the Aces. I might’ve been right about Phoenix but woefully underestimated Alyssa Thomas’ ability to power them past their weaknesses. And, of course, I was wrong about Golden State…though, in fairness, everyone was wrong about Golden State.
But despite being wrong about a lot of things, I’m relishing the memories of the 2025 regular season. The future is filled with so many unknowns: We don’t know if the Connecticut Sun will move to Houston or Boston or stay in Connecticut. We don’t know if negotiations on the new Collective Bargaining Agreement are going anywhere — though reports are not promising — and/or if there will be a work stoppage (Pay the Players!). Without a CBA, there’s no framework for expansion drafts to build the league’s new teams in Portland and Toronto, so we don’t know how/when those teams will come to fruition. And even if all that manages to sort itself out, we still don’t know where anyone’s playing next year since damn near everyone is a free agent.
So with the playoffs on the horizon, I thought I’d take a moment to highlight the highs and lows of our gay WNBA faves from the 2025 regular season.
A Record Breaking Year for AT (Again)
In 2023, Alyssa Thomas took her place among the WNBA’s best. She finished the season as the league leader in assists, rebounds, and double-doubles. Over the course of the season’s 40 games, there were just six games where Thomas didn’t have a double-double or a triple-double. It seemed as though every night, Thomas was finding a new WNBA record to break. It was an MVP caliber performance and, though she was ultimately denied the award, Thomas actually finished with the most first place votes.
“I had a season you’ve never seen in this league, and probably won’t see again unless I do it,” Thomas said at the time.
Just as she foretold, Alyssa Thomas has done it again. Despite playing in a new city for the first time in her career and playing under a new coach, AT continues to do AT things. She leads the league in assists (again). She’s the first player in the W to have a 15 rebound/15 assist game. She’s exceeded her triple-double numbers from 2023 and become the first player in WNBA to put up a triple-double in three successive games. She continues to put up more triple-doubles in a season than other players have done in their entire careers. She got her last triple double faster than anyone else in the W has ever gotten one. She’s improved her shooting and efficiency over that 2023 campaign and is carrying yet another team into the playoffs.
Oh, and did I mention that she’s doing this at 33 years old with two torn labrums? Her shoulders don’t even work and she’s still out there putting up these type of numbers?! C’mon! It is astounding to watch Thomas continue to push the boundaries of what’s possible at her position — her being a prototype for what Angel Reese could become leaves me salivating — and equally frustrating to feel like, once again, she won’t be recognized for it.
Season (Career?) Ending Injuries for “The Face of the League” and CVS
Both Sydney Colson and Courtney Vandersloot joined new teams in the off-season and came into the year with something to prove. After winning two championships in Las Vegas and being a central cog in building the Aces’ culture, Colson took her talents to Indianapolis. The move opened up the possibility of more playing time for Colson and she could help establish a culture on a team with a young core. Likewise, Vandersloot left a championship team in New York to return to Chicago, in hopes of getting more playing time and building a winning culture around Angel Reese and Kamila Cardoso. Both franchises hoped that Colson and Vandersloot would be stabilizing forces to their respective teams after coaching changes.
We never really got a chance to see those plans come to fruition. Just seven games into the season, Vandersloot tore her ACL and was sidelined for the rest of the season. Two months later, Colson went down with the same injury. It is always difficult to see a player go down to injury but for when a players’ in the twilight of their career, injuries feel more consequential. You wonder these two seasoned vets — the last two active players from the 2011 draft class — have the wherewithal to battle their way back from a season-ending injury.
We haven’t heard definitively from Colson about whether or not she intends to come back. I hope she does: the Fever needs someone in their locker room that can cut through all the outside noise and be a strong voice. Plus, Colson’s been such an incredible ambassador for Athletes Unlimited that it’s hard for me to imagine it without her. That said, anyone who watched The Syd & TP Show or who have tuned into the duo’s new podcast, Unsupervised, knows that Colson’s talents extend far beyond the basketball court. During All-Star weekend, she performed her second stand-up set; is this a window for her to invest more in her creative pursuits?
Vandersloot has already announced that she intends to return. It’ll always be my preference that players — particularly those with careers as storied as CVS — get to leave the game on their own terms, so I hope we’ll get to see her on the court again. That said, I hope Vandersloot returns with a better understanding of what the Sky need to move forward than her (and her wife, Allie Quigley’s) recent comments suggest. Contrary to Sloot’s claims, it’s not about age. Tina Charles is older than Sloot and her announcement that she’d play another season was met with cheers. It helps that the Connecticut Sun can still count on her to get a double-double. Nneka Ogwumike is just a year younger than Sloot and her performance this season should have her in the All-WNBA conversation. This is about performance and, if we’re being honest, Vandersloot isn’t performing at the level she once did…and it’s hard to imagine an ACL tear not furthering the gap between her and other WNBA point guards. I’d love to see Vandersloot return with the focus less on her legacy — which is already secure — and more on building Chicago’s future.
The Future is Here: Paige Bueckers
Over the course of her college career at UCONN, Paige Bueckers lost just 17 games. Her Dallas Wings squad would eclipse that total just 70 days into her professional career. It’s part of the rough transition that welcomes #1 players to the league. Learning how to adapt to the losing is just as important as adjusting to the W’s pace and physicality and, if not managed correctly, it can a toll on rookies (see: Candace Parker’s rookie season).
If you want evidence of how good Paige Bueckers is, go back and watch the Wings’ August 20th game against the Sparks. It is a stand-out performance, one that slammed the door shut on the Rookie of the Year debate. Bueckers was outstanding — 44 points on 17-21 shooting, including 4-4 from behind the arc — and lived up to every bit of the hype that accompanied her arrival in the league.
But the thing that impressed me is what happened just after the buzzer: Bueckers allows herself a moment of disappointment, after the Wings lost by just one point, but then she spots her teammate, Aziaha James — who missed the game’s final shot — and rushes over to comfort her. I knew what kind of player Paige Buecker would be but I was less certain about if or how she’s step into a leadership role, given the veterans that surrounded her. But she continues to step-up, even after her 31st loss of the season.
“I remember Steph Curry, before the Warriors became the Warriors, he tweeted out, ‘just stick with us… We’re gonna figure it out,'” Bueckers told reporters following a 22 point loss to the Atlanta Dream. “That’s the message…the people we have here and the belief that I have in, like, the core and the pieces that we’re building and how we’re doing it, I just have this undying belief in it. I know that we continue to do things the right way, we continue to believe in each other, continue to invest our whole lives into this basketball thing, the results will come.”
It’s hard to see through all the losses and the lackluster coaching in Dallas, but Bueckers has turned me into a believer.
Candace Parker Jersey Retirement (x2)
When the history of the game of women’s basketball is written, there will be people who have scored more points, who have won more accolades, who finish with more championships than Candace Parker. There will be someone who breaks her records, who proves themselves to be the greatest two-way player the game has ever seen. Maybe there will even a rookie that matches what Parker did in her inaugural season: winning both Rookie of the Year and MVP simultaneously. If I squint, maybe…just maybe…I can imagine all that.
What I can’t imagine though is someone changing the game in the way that Parker did. Her versatility was unmatched: Parker ushered in a new era of position-less basketball that fundamentally changed the way the game is played. She was gifted with a guard’s skills in a post-players body and, increasingly, that’s become the expectation of today’s power forwards. The greats of today’s game — Breanna Stewart, Jonquel Jones, Napheesa Collier and A’ja Wilson — are great in part because they’ve been molded in Candace Parker’s image. So, if there was ever a player who deserved to see her jersey retired in two cities in the same year, it is Candace Parker. Her jersey deserves to hang in the rafters, alongside the championship banners she brought. May they serve as a persistent reminder of the game changer she was.
Sue Bird Immortalized in Bronze
The first points Sue Bird ever scored as a member of the Seattle Storm were on a layup: the first points in Seattle’s 2002 season opener against the New York Liberty. The last points Sue Bird ever scored, in Seattle, as a member of the Storm were on an layup: blowing past her Las Vegas Aces defender to get to the cup, just past the outstretched arms of A’ja Wilson. The career that spanned between those two shots — the one that brought four championships back to Seattle — is now enshrined in bronze in front of the Storm’s home at Climate Pledge Arena.
It’s hard to argue that Bird doesn’t deserve the honor. Aside from the aforementioned championships, Bird is a 13 time All-Star, a 8-time All-WNBA team selection, and the league’s all-time assist leader. Simply put, she’s the greatest point guard to ever play in the W. But beyond all the stats and accolades Bird collected on the court, there’s something else that stands out to me: six years after Sue Bird arrived in Seattle, her Storm team became the only professional basketball in town. The MNBA’s SuperSonics couldn’t get Seattle to agree to the public financing of a new stadium so they took their ball and headed to Oklahoma City. For the next 14 years, it was Bird who shaped what Seattle basketball was. She set the standard for Seattle sports and every other franchise is just trying to reach the bar she set. Sue Bird s synonymous, not just with this team, but with this city…and it’s beautiful to see that relationship immortalized.
Bird is the first WNBA to be honored in this way but, hopefully, she won’t be the last.
The Rise of the Studbudz
Back in 2022, ESPN’s Katie Barnes wrote an incredible profile on WNBA superstar, Jonquel Jones. It was, in part, a recounting of Jones’ rise — from a kid growing up in the Bahamas to a star at George Washington to an MVP in the W — but it was also a lament: a frustrating acknowledgement that no matter what heights Jones ascended to, her earning power would be limited. Both then and now, marketing opportunities for black players are limited. But for black masculine of center lesbians? Virtually nonexistent. Jones’ experience was corroborated by her then-teammate, Courtney Williams.
“It’s hard to get at that table, being yourself, being Black, being gay and being unapologetically yourself, especially if you’re not willing to conform and do certain things that they want you to do,” Williams told Barnes. “And it got to the point where I’m like ‘Man, I’m not doing it. It is what it is.’ I’m just going to have to figure something else out because I can’t change who I am just for a couple of dollars. I can’t do that.”
This year, Williams figured out what that “something else” was. Instead of waiting for a seat at the table, she and her teammate/twin, Natisha Hiedeman, built their own table. The duo launched the Studbudz channel on Twitch and slowly built a following by just being their authentic selves. Williams and Hiedeman are hilarious together and their chemistry — honed from years as teammates in Connecticut and Minnesota — radiates through the screen. The early streams were great — Williams and Hiedeman recounting moments from games and offering commentary on things happening around the league — but then they took it a step further: a 72-hour stream live from WNBA All-Star.
My Top Five Favorite Studbudz Moments:
- “Pink Pony Club” Sing Along with Napheesa Collier and Kayla McBride on the way home from All-Star
- “Shut up, you still like me” – T recalling an in-game confrontation with Seattle’s Skylar Diggins
- Court trying to get the DJ at the Sports Illustrated party to step his game up; not realizing the DJ was Diplo
- T walking around with a cow at the Minnesota State Fair
- Alanna Smith trying to figure out why the Internet thinks she’s gay; T compares her to Ms. Frizzle.
A time was had in Indianapolis and the Studbudz stream gave audiences a front row seat to all of it. So much of the media narrative about the WNBA season had been around the competitiveness, physicality, and the players’ presumed hatred of each other, but the Studbudz stream humanized the players in a way that the league has never been able to. And while the Studbudz stream gave everyone the chance to shine, it was Williams and Hiedeman who were the undeniable stars of the show; their charm and charisma carried the weekend. Their stars have only continued to rise since All-Star Weekend, and the sky is the limit for the Studbudz.
“We’re going to be at the Met Gala, at the Grammys,” Williams told SLAM magazine for their recent Studbudz cover story. “We were like, ‘Yo, we’re the first ones to do this in the space. We gotta turn up.’ We got to go up here. We were saying that from day one, like, ‘Man it’s about to be a movie ’cause nobody ever did it like how we about to do it.'”
At this point, we’d be crazy to doubt them.
The official bracket for the 2025 WNBA Playoffs presented by @Google is set 🚨
Round 1 begins Sunday, September 14! pic.twitter.com/h591q7gCt1
— WNBA (@WNBA) September 12, 2025
Those are my most memorable (gay) moments of the 2025 season, what are yours? I think I’m going to stay away from making predictions about the rest of the season — it’s clear that I’m not very good at that — but you should feel free to weigh in on who you think will win the WNBA championship this season in the comments.
