No Offseason Newsletter 🏀 | This is The Athletic’s women’s basketball newsletter. Sign up here to receive No Offseason directly in your inbox.Good morning! It’s FIBA World Cup time. Coming up:
Planned Pause: Wait, what happened to the WNBA?WNBA fans are accustomed to the league taking a break every four years for the Olympics, but this is the first time the league will press pause for the World Cup, which tips off this week in Berlin and runs through Sept. 13. As a result, the WNBA won’t pick back up until Sept. 17, when every team begins a four-game sprint to finish the regular season.The league has previously been able to squeeze its schedule in before the World Cup, but with an early start date and a longer WNBA calendar (for reference, the 2022 tournament began on Sept. 22, when the WNBA schedule was 36 games instead of 44), 2026 required some creativity.However, this is the last time that the WNBA will be inconvenienced by FIBA scheduling, as the 2030 World Cup has already been slated for November. The WNBA may not have had enough clout in previous years to bend the world’s calendar to its will, but it does now: More and more of the world’s best players suit up in this league, European leagues are moving their fall/winter seasons to end before the WNBA begins and even FIBA is moving its world championship to accommodate the W.Here are the FIBA World Cup basics, but we’ll look at the field in-depth now …World Cup Preview: Team USA is the heavy favoriteThe U.S. is a heavy favorite to capture the gold medal for the fifth consecutive tournament at this year’s World Cup. Seven of the team’s 12 players were All-WNBA selections in 2024 and/or 2025. No other country’s roster has even one All-WNBA player. However, the U.S. roster no longer includes reigning back-to-back MVP A’ja Wilson, who opted out of the tournament due to health reasons, along with Kelsey Plum. The Americans plugged in two All-Stars in their place (Kiki Iriafen and Sonia Citron), but it’s hard to replace Wilson, the best player alive who led Team USA in scoring at the last three major international competitions.
