While a lot of the talk about women’s Olympic basketball rightfully has been about Team USA, there is another country building a pretty strong team: Canada.

After a disappointing early exit at the Tokyo Olympics, the Senior Canadian Women’s National Team redeemed themselves with a historic fourth-place finish at the FIBA World Cup in September 2022. Yet, their Olympic hopes were nearly dashed in February when they almost did not make it out of the Women’s Olympic Qualifying Tournament in Sopron, Hungary. It took a more than 20-point comeback victory from Spain to help Canada squeeze into the Olympics.

Now that Canada is going to Paris, they are more motivated than ever to do well. There are many returning players, as well as the potential for some new faces to make the squad. And though the final roster has not yet been officially announced, the WNBA’s four Canadians are all but a lock to make the team.

Bridget Carleton, Kia Nurse, Aaliyah Edwards and Laeticia Amihere are still with their WNBA teams, but will most likely join Canada closer to the Olympic Games.

Bridget Carleton (Minnesota Lynx)

Bridget Carleton is having a fantastic year with the Minnesota Lynx, and the guard out of Chatham, Ontario is in peak form heading into the Olympics.

She scored a team high 23 points in the Lynx’s Commissioner’s Cup Championship victory, shooting 6-for-8 from 3-point range and helping Minnesota secure the win over the New York Liberty. She’s recently shifted into the starting lineup for the Lynx, and their head coach Cheryl Reeve has emphasized time and time again how much trust she has in Carleton.

Carleton is shooting 44 percent from 3 this season, something that will surely come in handy heading into the Olympics. The thing that Canada struggled with in the Olympic Qualifying tournament was shooting, especially from distance. Carleton’s hot streak will help get them going once she joins the team.

As she gets a little more professional experience, Carleton’s responsibilities on the national team increase as well. She is a part of the next generation of veterans on Canada’s team, and in Paris she will hopefully show off her leadership.

Kia Nurse (Los Angeles Sparks)

Photo by Juan Ocampo/NBAE via Getty Images

Kia Nurse has been having a good season with her new team in LA. With a young roster, Nurse has stepped up as one of the Los Angeles Sparks’ vet leaders—something she has been on the Canadian team over the past few years.

Now a few years post-ACL recovery, Nurse is looking more like herself, shooting well from 3-point range and being a strong defensive presence for the Sparks. She sat out of February’s Qualifying Tournament with an injury, which was one of the reasons the team struggled. They missed her defense, her shooting and her on-court leadership. Heading into the Olympics, Nurse will be a huge part of the effort.

Aaliyah Edwards (Washington Mystics)

Photo by Emilee Chinn/Getty Images

The Canadian rookie has been balling in the DMV this season. Aaliyah Edwards was drafted No. 6 overall to the Washington Mystics in this year’s draft, and with Washington’s lengthy injury list, she has been playing a lot of minutes.

Fans who have followed Edwards from her days at UConn and with the Canadian national team knew that she would be pro-ready immediately. Now, fans of the Mystics are getting to see for themselves how Edwards can be a huge presence in the paint.

She is averaging 8.8 points and 6.3 rebounds per game as a rookie, and will be a two-time Olympian when she joins Canada to head to Paris. While she did not get too much playing time in Tokyo in 2021, she will have more responsibility on the team now. Edwards still will likely play behind vets like Natalie Achonwa and Kayla Alexander, but she will provide a great source of depth for Canada.

Laeticia Amihere (Atlanta Dream)

Photo by Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

Laeticia Amihere gets limited minutes for the Atlanta Dream, but that doesn’t mean she is not a hooper. The South Carolina graduate and 2022 NCAA national champion can make an impact with her speed and driving ability, and her length helps her get past her defender.

When she plays for Canada, she often makes an immediate impact on the stat sheet. She’s high-energy, active and feisty—all things that lend well to FIBA-style basketball. International basketball can get gritty, is refereed differently and rewards players with strength. It’s unfortunate that Amihere isn’t getting more minutes in the WNBA, but there ins’t any doubt she will be ready when her name is called for Canada.

There are high hopes for Canada heading into the Summer Olympics. The Canadian team has a lot of talent, but also a lot to prove. It may be the last ride for some iconic Canadian hoopers as well, ones who have been a huge part of the growth of this program.

For now, these four WNBA players are still with their squads, but once they join Canada, it’s game on!

Simone Biles is headed to her third Olympics, headlining a Team USA that includes a number of familiar faces.

Joining her are Suni Lee, Jordan Chiles, and Jade Carey — both Lee and Chiles were on the Olympic team three years ago, while Carey competed as an individual qualifier in Tokyo and won gold on floor. Teenager Hezly Rivera is the team’s only newcomer. 

“This is definitely our redemption tour,” Biles said at the US Olympic Gymnastics Trials on Sunday. “I feel like we all have more to give.

“I knew I wasn’t done after Tokyo,” Biles added. “Getting back to the gym, trusting the process, I knew I’d be back.”

Biles spent much of the Tokyo Olympics on the sidelines after getting the Twisties. Lee went on to win Olympic gold in the all-around, but has struggled in the last year with kidney disease. She was emotional Sunday, telling reporters she “didn’t think I’d be here.”

“I’m so, so glad I kept going,” she said. “There were so many times I thought about quitting and walking away from this sport.”

Joscelyn Roberson and Leanne Wong were named alternates, while leading contenders Shilese Jones, Skye Blakely, and Kayla DiCello all exited with injuries.

At 27 years old, Biles is Team USA’s oldest Olympic gymnast since 1952. And as a whole, this year’s squad is the oldest to ever represent the US at the Olympics, with Carey (24), Chiles (23), and Lee (21) all over the age of 20.

With 2016 all-around gold medalist Biles and defending champion Lee, the roster will be the first from any country in Olympic history to have two Olympic all-around champions on the mat as the quartet hopes to improve on their 2021 silver-medal team finish.

“Of course, gold is the goal,” Chiles said. “But this redemption tour is not about that. It’s about us. We all went through so much in Tokyo, and to be back, I’m so proud of all of us.”

Biles, however, is taking things one step at a time.

“I feel like success is just what I make it,” she said. “I feel like right now I’ve been successful of competing at Olympic trials and making the Paris Olympic team. So then we’ll see from there on out.”

In the summer of 2020, the entire world was in a state of stagnation and fear.

The COVID-19 pandemic was ravaging and there seemed to be no end in sight. As if that wasn’t enough, America, in particular, was in the thick of a long-overdue racial reckoning following the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery by police. Not to mention, it was a contentious election year.

With everything shut down, everybody masked up and with very little to do, athletes took on the task of getting involved politically in a way that hadn’t been seen since the 1960s and 1970s, when the likes of Muhammad Ali, Curt Flood, Billie Jean King, Bill Russell and Arthur Ashe defined athlete activism. In 2020, athletes were in the streets leading marches, regularly using social media to call for justice, encouraging fans to vote and willingly sacrificing a pay day to take a stand.

Such activism was embodied by the 144 players in the WNBA, as captured in the new Prime Video documentary Power of the Dream, directed by Dawn Porter and produced by Sue Bird’s production company, TOGETHXR. The film features WNBA players Bird, Elizabeth Williams, Layshia Clarendon and Nneka Ogwumike, along with social and cultural commentator Jemele Hill, ESPN reporter Holly Rowe, WNBPA executive director Terri Jackson and others.

The documentary explains how social justice has been woven into the fabric of the WNBA since the league’s inception in 1997, especially regarding issues of racial justice, gender equality, and LGBTQ+ rights. WNBA players were ahead of the curve in 2016 when they called for accountability in the aftermath of the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, one month before Colin Kaepernick took a knee. The documentary then shows how 2020 was the culminating moment, when the players were galvanized into action by the likes of Natasha Cloud, Renee Montgomery and Angel McCoughtry, all of whom chose to pause their playing careers and focus on activism.

But the league’s social and political engagement went into overdrive due to the comments made by then-Atlanta Dream owner and appointed GOP senator Kelly Loeffler. She heavily criticized the Black Lives Matter movement, saying that it was a movement rooted in “Marxism,” was “anti-Semitic” and promoted the “destruction of the nuclear family,” among other things. The players didn’t take those comments lying down. As they were transitioning to life in the bubble in Orlando, they decided to use the COVID-restricted season not just to play, but to play with a purpose.

They teamed up with the Say Her Name campaign founded by scholar/activist Dr. Kimberlee Williams Crenshaw to put the spotlight on Breonna Taylor and other Black women and girls killed by law enforcement. They walked off the court before the playing of the national anthem in a statement of protest. They joined with the Orlando Magic and Milwaukee Bucks of the NBA by not playing scheduled games after Jacob Blake was shot by police in Kenosha, WI, a risky move for many of the players considering that they would have lost a huge chunk of money.

Still not forgetting the comments made by Loeffler, who, in turn, further criticized the league for its social justice stances, the players decided to get involved in Georgia run-off election, which would determine the party that would control of the US Senate.

The Democratic primary field was crowded with 21 candidates. Amongst those was Rev. Raphael Warnock, the pastor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. After a thorough vetting process, the players decided as a collective to endorse Rev. Warnock’s candidacy. The players, including the Dream, came into the arena in Orlando wearing shirts reading “Vote Warnock,” met with him on Zoom calls and promoted get out the vote efforts on social media.

Photo by Ned Dishman/NBAE via Getty Images

The impact was almost immediate. Before the players got involved, Warnock was polling at nine percent; after their involvement, he became the Democratic nominee. On Jan. 5, 2021, Rev. Warnock defeated Loeffler in the run-off to become Georgia’s first Black senator, and along with the victory by Democrat Jon Ossoff, the Democrats controlled the Senate, in addition to the House and the White House with the election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Shortly thereafter, Loeffler relinquished her Dream ownership shares and a new ownership group, led by former Dream player Renee Montgomery, took control of the franchise.

The film makes a point to highlight that it was the actions of the WNBA that made political history.

In an interview with Swish Appeal, TOGETHXR co-founder Jessica Robinson shares everything that went into the making of the film and the impact it hopes to generate.

What went into TOGETHXR wanting to tell this story? And why now?

TOGETHXR wanted to tell the story about how a group of women, in this case all 144 players in the WNBA took on a team owner who happened to be a US Senator and in turned flipped a Georgia seat and saved democracy in 2020. This, in my opinion, will go down as one of the most powerful examples of athlete activism that exists throughout the history of our culture, certainly throughout the history of sports. It is an incredibly relevant story. We are going into an election year where once again, in particular, voters’ rights, women’s rights, Trans rights and LGBTQIA+ rights are in peril.

What does this story say about the power of athletes?

This is a story about power, who is traditionally considered powerful. This is about celebrating and centering and pulling from the margins those who we don’t necessarily deem powerful and give power to. And in this case, we’re talking about Black women, we’re talking about queer women, which largely both of those communities comprise the WNBA. This also, as Terri Jackson says in the film, is a civics lesson. This is an example, a model of mobilization. This is an example for all of us who believe in democracy tomorrow.

This story not only gives power back to these women and out of the hands of a team owner who happened to be a US Senator, who at the time we would have considered more powerful than them. That’s not true. This story also speaks to the power of athletes as a collective. Athletes are massive cultural icons. They shape our culture and, in particular, female athletes move our culture forward. It is impossible to talk about women’s sports without also addressing and recognizing and acknowledging all of the cultural -isms and intersections in which women’s sports exist. You can’t talk about women’s sports without talking about intersections of race, gender, sexuality, class and so on.

These women cannot wake up and just go do their job. They can’t just play their sport. When they wake up their very existence is political. It has been politicized, governed. They wake up every single day and their existence is one that has to navigate those cultural intersections: undue inequity, undue bias and, in some cases, undue legislation that has purposely disempowered them.

I can think of no better example of the power of athletes, but, in particular, the power of female athletes, the power of women and the power of women as a collective than what you see in Power of the Dream. The director Dawn Porter did an incredible job tracing history of activism throughout the course of the WNBA and layering—step by step, example by example—that these women have been about this. They’ve had to be about this.

The past week was a slower—but no less significant—news week in the women’s hoops world:

Hamby replaces Brink on 3×3 Olympic team

She already got a contract extension. Is a gold medal next?

Dearica Hamby is the newest member of USA Basketball’s 3×3 Women’s National Team for the 2024 Olympic Games. Hamby replaces her Los Angeles Sparks teammate Cameron Brink, who suffered an ACL injury on June 18. Hamby joins Rhyne Howard, Hailey Van Lith and Cierra Burdick in the quest to keep the 3×3 gold in the Americans’ hands.

Hamby participated in the 2024 USA 3×3 Women’s National Team training camp, after which she represented Team Springfield at the FIBA 3×3 Women’s Series Springfield Stop. In 2023, Hamby was a member of the American squad for the FIBA 3×3 AmeriCup, not only winning gold but also tournament MVP honors.

Swin named SVP in NOLA

UConn great and WNBA legend Swin Cash is rising up the NBA executive ranks, with the New Orleans Pelicans promoting her to Senior Vice President of Basketball Operations on Tuesday. The position makes her one of the highest-ranking women working in an NBA front office. Cash had been the organization’s Vice President of Basketball Operations and Team Development since 2019.

Fever-Sky III sets viewership record

A peak of 3.3 million viewers tuned into this season’s third matchup between the Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky on Sunday, June 24, with an average of 2.3 million witnessing the epic clash that ended with the Sky overcoming a 15-point deficit to secure the victory.

It was the most-watched WNBA games in 23 years across all major networks, topping the Sunday, June 17 game between the two teams.

Sunday will feature three games in the WNBA, with the highlight undoubtedly being the matchup between the Phoenix Mercury (9-8) and the Indiana Fever (7-12) at 3 p.m. ET on ESPN.

Why? I’ll give you two chances to guess, but you’ll probably only need one: Caitlin Clark and Diana Taurasi.

When Clark was leading Iowa through the 2024 NCAA Tournament, SportsCenter’s Scott Van Pelt asked Taursai what’s in store for players like Clark in the WNBA, and the White Mamba responded like a Mamba should, asserting, “Reality is coming….you look superhuman playing against some 18 years olds, but you’re going to come play with some grown women that have been playing professional basketball for a long time.”

And reality has come for Clark. Yes, she’s put up phenomenal numbers, averaging 16.2 points, 5.5 rebounds and 6.6 assists per game, but it hasn’t led to much winning, with the Fever currently at 7-12. As the two prepare to face each other for the first time in the W, their comments have been relatively tame. Clark stated, “It’s kind of like a dream come true,” when asked during media availability about playing the legend, and Taursai kept it short and sweet, saying, “Yeah, it’ll be fun.”

Those quotations may not indicate much of anything, but it will be interesting to see how much Clark talks when she hits shots and how the competitor in Taurasi responds. I can’t wait to see the jawing, hard fouls and great basketball.

Liberty, Lynx favored in Sunday’s other showdowns

The meeting between the Fever and the Mercury might be the main event, but first, we have the Atlanta Dream (7-9) taking on the the New York Liberty (15-3) at 1 p.m. ET on ESPN. Excluding the Commissioner’s Cup Championship game (which does not count towards a team’s regular-season record), the Liberty are on a three-game winning streak, sitting atop the standings and at home versus the Dream. So, obviously, they will be favored to win.

An already uphill battle for Atlanta is even tougher with Rhyne Howard still out with a left ankle injury. A win will only happen if Allisha Gray has a monster game.

At the same time as the Fever-Mercury game, the Chicago Sky (6-10) will play the Minnesota Lynx (13-4) on ESPN3. This contest will feature a Lynx team fresh off a defeat against the Dallas Wings and a Sky team fighting to protect their home court and their eighth spot in the standings. Minnesota will be favored in this matchup, but with Angel Reese and Chennedy Carter on the other side and the Sky at home, expect it to be a tough matchup for the Lynx.

Game information

New York Liberty (15-3) vs. Atlanta Dream (7-9)

When: Sunday, June 30 at 1 p.m. ET

Where: Barclays Center in Brooklyn, NY

How to watch: ESPN

Liberty injury report: Nyara Sabally (out; back)

Dream injury report: Rhyne Howard (out; left ankle)

Chicago Sky (6-10) vs. Minnesota Lynx (13-4)

When: Sunday, June 30 at 3 p.m. ET

Where: Wintrust Arena in Chicago, IL

How to watch: ESPN 3

Sky injury report: Elizabeth Williams (out; knee)

Lynx injury report: Napheesa Collier (probable; right wrist)

Phoenix Mercury (9-8) vs. Indiana Fever (7-12)

When: Sunday, June 30 at 3 p.m. ET

Where: Footprint Center in Phoenix, AZ

How to watch: ESPN

Mercury injury report: none

Fever injury report: Temi Fagbenle (questionable; right thumb)