The WNBA has attracted grifters who care little for basketball – and whose latest stunt exposes the hollowness of their supposed concern

I regret to inform you that yet another dildo has hit a WNBA court. The Chicago Sky v Golden State Valkyries game was sullied by sex toys being chucked on to the playing surface on Friday. Aren’t we tired of all this yet? To paraphrase the Sky’s Natasha Cloud, it takes a lot of effort to bother with such a juvenile act.

This is yet another controversy for the WNBA, a league that up until a few years ago, most media observers ignored. The WNBA is full of incredibly talented players and has a rich history, but most sports fans treated all but ignored it for the majority of its 30-year existence. But when Caitlin Clark went pro, the league surged. Ratings, attendance, and interest exploded. But not all attention is good attention.

• Transgender woman has never played in the league

• Engelbert says league being used as ‘political football’

The WNBA commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, has denounced people she said are trying to “sow divisiveness” as the league grapples with a debate over transgender athletes.

Engelbert made the comments on Thursday before the Indiana Fever’s loss to the Dallas Wings at the home of the Dallas Mavericks. Demonstrators showed up outside American Airlines Center, as they have at other venues since the Fever’s Sophie Cunningham voiced support for barring transgender girls and women from girls’ and women’s sports.

• Kai Spears incorrectly linked to death of young mother

• Times says it had not lost libel case in more than 50 years

An Alabama jury has awarded $9.25m in damages after finding that the New York Times defamed a college basketball player by incorrectly reporting that he was at the scene of a fatal shooting.

Kai Spears, who played for the University of Alabama men’s team, sued the Times in 2023 after it published a report, citing a person familiar with the investigation, that said he was a passenger in a car involved in the shooting. The Times reported that the person had spoken “on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive matters.”

Bob Iger and Josh Kushner’s $12.5bn bid to buy the Lakers shows that NBA teams are no longer family dynasties, but quick flips for private equity sharks

For years, the NBA was built on the alliance of patient money and marketing pizzazz, and no team captured that curious mixture better than the Los Angeles Lakers. Through Showtime in the 1980s and the dominance of the Shaq-Kobe years, the Lakers became the benchmark for a league and a sport intent on global conquest: charismatic, ambitious, and flashy, a sporting-cultural amalgam in which athleticism and celebrity held equal rank. Through careful front office recruitment, savvy coaching, and the harnessing of Hollywood’s star power, the Lakers evolved from a team into a “brand,” establishing a template that virtually every other outfit in the NBA has felt compelled to mimic in the years since. But the razzle-dazzle on the court – the Laker Girls, Magic flinging no-look passes, Shaq smashing the glass, Jack Nicholson smiling his Joker smile in the front row, all eyebrows and mischief – depended on a far more staid and stable arrangement off it. Real estate investor Jerry Buss bought the Lakers for $16m in 1979, and remained the majority owner until his death in 2013, when his children assumed control of the franchise.

When Jerry Buss died, the Lakers were valued at $1bn. Now, the team looks set to be sold to former Disney CEO Bob Iger and venture capitalist Josh Kushner, the brother of Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared, for $12.5bn. The sale is still under negotiation and will need to be approved by the NBA’s board of governors; the Buss siblings are also now bickering over whether to join the stampede and sell their minority 17.8% stake in the franchise to Iger and Kushner, which has added a subplot of Shakespearean family intrigue to proceedings. But in the likely event it goes through, the sale would make the Lakers the most valuable franchise in basketball. It would also signal an acceleration in private equity’s scramble to get its claws into the world of sport.

• Jeanie Buss wants to remain as controlling owner

• Family were set to sell stake to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner

Jeanie Buss is reportedly challenging her siblings’ attempt to sell the family’s remaining stake in the Los Angeles Lakers.

Hours after the Buss family released a statement revealing their ⁠intention to sell their 17.8% ownership of the franchise to Bob Iger and Josh Kushner, CNBC and ESPN reported that Jeanie Buss’s lawyer sought to halt her siblings’ sale on ⁠legal grounds.

• NBA is looking into claims of salary cap circumvention

• ESPN says league has no proof owner funneled money

• Steve Ballmer denies allegations; Leonard trade on hold

The NBA has disputed an ESPN report on the league’s investigation into possible salary cap circumvention by the Los Angeles Clippers.

On Monday, ESPN reported that, after an 11-month investigation, the NBA was not able to show proof that Clippers owner Steve Ballmer funneled money to Kawhi Leonard via team sponsorships to bypass the salary cap. The outlet also said the two sides have been “negotiating a resolution to the investigation”.

The 12-time national title-winning coach discusses Connecticut’s time on top, his bond with Paige Bueckers, the Pat Summitt rivalry and why he isn’t retiring just yet

Let’s get one thing out of the way right from the jump: UConn Huskies coach Geno Auriemma says he isn’t retiring anytime in the “foreseeable future”.

That may come as a relief to fans of the program who have never known anyone else to be at its helm. Though he declined to promise an exact timeline, Auriemma made one thing clear while speaking to the Guardian last week: he’s going to be sticking around.

As ESPN cuts expert voices and rewards viral argument, fans who want to understand basketball are building a smarter conversation elsewhere

After the Phoenix Suns dumped the Golden State Warriors out of last season’s play-in, Stephen A Smith settled behind the First Take desk to explain why Steve Kerr might have coached his last game. Midway through the burial, he claimed the Warriors hadn’t “been to the playoffs since that championship in 2022” – a four-year drought in his telling – before grumbling that Golden State could pay someone far less than $17m a year to miss the postseason.

Cool. Except the drought never happened. Golden State reached the conference semi-finals in 2023 and again in 2025. ESPN anchor Shae Cornette, who had command of the basic facts, tried to smuggle that inconvenient reality into the discussion. It went nowhere. Apparently, nobody on an ESPN set is permitted to correct the franchise “star”. Only weeks earlier, Smith had been inducted into the National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame for his work in media.

The 1996 US women’s Olympic team enter the Hall of Fame on Saturday after giving momentum to the WNBA and re-launching an era of American dominance

For the US women’s basketball team, the 1996 Olympics weren’t just about winning gold in front of their home crowd.

It was about the future of women’s basketball in America. The US women were knocked out of the 1992 Olympics in the semi-finals by the Commonwealth of Independent States – a stunning and embarrassing defeat. Heading into the 1996 Games, which were held in Atlanta, turning around the program was a top priority not just for USA Basketball, but the NBA as well, which was looking to start a women’s league that would become the WNBA.