LAS VEGAS — You are what you accept. Or so says legendary college basketball coach Geno Auriemma, who chimed in on the hottest topic of the 2025 WNBA playoffs — whether referees allow too much physicality.
Auriemma doesn’t pin it on any one zebra.
“I don’t think it’s the people who are actually officiating the games,” he said earlier this week. “It’s what’s either in the rule book or what’s accepted as the style of play they want. Because if they didn’t want that style of play, they wouldn’t have it.”
Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve shared something similar after losing her best player to a collision in the semifinals. She was fined $15,000 for, among other transgressions, charging the official who didn’t blow the whistle.
“This is the look that our league wants, for some reason,” she said at the postgame news conference.
That line flew under the radar amid her f-bombs and callouts of specific officials, but it’s quite the assertion.
Why would the league want a rough-and-tumble product, when everyone knows audiences prefer fluid basketball? The league did not respond to a request for comment, but instead pointed the Sun-Times to the officiating points of emphasis this season, which include “freedom of movement” for players.
In other words: the rulebook is not supposed to allow a slugfest.
So, let’s first try to answer the question: How physical are today’s WNBA games, really?
Aces coach Becky Hammon, who got her start in the NBA, said that the physicality in her team’s semifinals series would have never flown in her former league. Auriemma has heard the same.
“I’ve had a lot of NBA people and former WNBA players tell me that what goes on in a WNBA game is way more physical than what happens in an NBA game,” he said.
It’s not unreasonable to expect differences: NBA referees work full time for the league, while the WNBA still employs part-time officials who often work college games too.
Still, that alone doesn’t settle it.
So let’s ask in a different way: Is the WNBA becoming more physical over time?
Front Office Sports reported last week that several sources believe more physicality has been allowed in recent years, but there’s far from a consensus.
“I wouldn’t say [physicality has] increased or decreased,” Aces point guard Dana Evans told the Sun-Times on Friday at shootaround.
To Evans, inconsistency rather than rising physicality is the issue.
“Some games you can’t bump or grab, but other games you can,” she said. “That’s really on the referees.”
She went on to echo Auriemma’s maxim that you are what you accept.
“If you allow us to grab and hold, we’re gonna grab and hold,” she said. “We’re gonna do whatever we can to win.”
Overall, Evans’ view is similar to Lynx star Napheesa Collier’s. Collier has been harping on inconsistency all year, telling The Washington Post that it’s the biggest problem — and that it’s getting worse.
“Everyone can see there’s a problem,” Collier said during exit interviews earlier this week. “Accepting that is the first stage. Like in any support group you go to, acceptance is the first stage.”
The league, however, had never publicly admitted it had a problem. The company line had been that officiating can always improve, that the game is evolving and officiating needs to keep pace — but they stopped short of calling it a pain point.
Until now. Speaking before Game 1 of the Finals, commissioner Cathy Engelbert said that “change is needed” in officiating.
She announced a “state of the game” task force that will “take a hard look at what the proper line should be for a good, aggressive play that we recognize has evolved into rough play.”
The league, it appears, has entered the first stage.
You are what you accept.