Olivia Miles, the rookie point guard for the Minnesota Lynx, wears a pair of bug-eyed sports goggles, black and bulbous, sometimes held in place by a thick strap that runs through her luxuriant Afro. They’re nobody’s idea of cool but hers, which has made them the coolest thing in the W.N.B.A. right now. She wears them for the usual reasons—she got her first prescription as a young child—but also because they suit her. They tell a story, not only about a young person who does things her own way, irrespective of what’s expected, but also about her singular court vision.
Lynx fans have taken to calling her the Spectacle, which is the perfect nickname for her. She has retro playground tricks and a modern unicorn’s hyperefficiency—an ability to create a good shot, whether for herself or for a teammate, from beyond the three-point arc or in the paint, anywhere on the floor. When you watch her, that’s what stands out: the uncanny anticipation, the in-stride no-look passes, the pick-and-rolls that make defenses reel, the quick shivers that shake defenders to make space for a three-pointer, the drives past astonished bigs in the paint—ending with a basket that looks less like a traditional layup than a ballerina’s jeté.
She’s big for a traditional point guard—five feet ten—and is a dynamic athlete, a former star soccer player in high school. She has one of the best handles in basketball. But her game is built around her eyes. She uses them to guide her teammates into space, to misdirect defenders, to drag her opponents into screens. Miles sells glasses, literally—she has an endorsement deal with GlassesUSA—but she also sells the idea of glasses. Her goggles clarify her game. They make it easy to see.
Miles has a shot at becoming the first rookie to win M.V.P. since Candace Parker did it in 2008. She already has a case for being the best player on the best team in the league—and, night after night, is the most fun to watch. So why isn’t she the biggest story of the league this season?
Professional sports exist to tell stories, and those stories exist to sell things. The fact that sports leagues are businesses is what makes possible their professionalization, and what allows for business is the exchange of money.
Perhaps that should be uncontroversial. But the stuff that sports sells—the jerseys, the Coca-Colas, the sweatshirts—is ancillary. Play, by definition, doesn’t produce anything tangible or useful. (If it did, it wouldn’t be play.) What games produce instead are experiences, ever-shifting kaleidoscopes of feelings. And it’s hard, and maybe wrong, to put a price on feelings, or to decide whose feelings are worth the most. That’s one reason there are so many arguments over the value of a team, or an athlete, or sports more generally, as more and more money chases something essentially priceless—or misappropriated, depending on your view.
Sports stories, after all, are endlessly interpretable. Someone’s win is another person’s loss. Mercilessness can look like grace. One person’s opportunity is another person’s obstacle. Contact is malicious or tough, clean play. Joy comes with pain, community with division. Arguments over fairness are constantly renewed. This is true everywhere, in every sport. But lately the arguments seem particularly loud in the W.N.B.A., a league that seems to be discovering, in real time, the tension between value and values, and between different values that don’t easily coexist or coincide. Attention is easier to measure. But attention doesn’t always feel good.
The W.N.B.A. has always prided itself on representing more than sports. For years, its players and agents and team officials and fans have argued that its professional athletes are, by their very existence, activists. It is majority Black, very queer, entirely female, performing an activity traditionally coded as male. For a long time, the players were underappreciated and underpaid. But their marginalization gave them a coherent story. Now the league has widespread attention, which has made it easier to tell more stories, and to sell more things to more people. But it has also made those stories harder to control.
In the past couple of years, the league, for a host of reasons, has lost the plot. Maybe the league never dictated it in the first place. Feelings, after all, are ultimately ungovernable. But instead of narratives about explosive growth, or about A’ja Wilson, who might just be the greatest player ever, still in her prime, or about the thrilling resurgence of Caitlin Clark, who is making her own M.V.P. case, we have the Summer of Sophie Cunningham, an Indiana Fever role-player whose comments in an ESPN profile about keeping trans athletes out of women’s locker rooms roiled the league. There are trolls sitting courtside, provoking the women they claim to protect. Some people in and around the league seem quicker to fight than to make a clear case for their convictions. Every hard foul has become a referendum on racial injustice. No one trusts the referees. Revenues are up, player salaries are higher, viewership is growing, and team valuations are soaring. Many of the games are great. But the stories? Not so much.
Maybe it’s too much to hope that Miles can bring some measure of sanity to our fevered times. It’s a lot to ask of a rookie. Miles has bad days from time to time. She missed sixteen of her first eighteen shots from three this season. (She’s now among the best three-point shooters in the league.) On Monday, facing the stifling defense of the second-place Golden State Valkyries, Miles shot three of twelve from the field and gave up four turnovers. (She ranks in the top ten in points and assists for the season.) And her relative value can be debated. Unlike some other M.V.P. candidates, she is not carrying her team; she has one of the savviest coaches and best supporting casts in the league.
But just watch her. Even her own veteran teammates are delighted and baffled by what they see. The team’s longtime leader, Napheesa Collier—herself a perennial M.V.P. candidate—is back from ankle injuries that sidelined her for the start of the season. Collier recently called playing with Miles “the biggest adjustment” she’d had to make since her return. She meant it as a compliment. “I’ve never played with a player like her before,” Collier added. When visionaries appear, sometimes it takes a little while for the world to catch up. ♦
