Breaking down the ‘gentrification’ of WNBA head coaches — Hear from DeWanna Bonner, Satou Sabally

Basketball Wednesday

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Most obviously, both the Las Vegas Aces and Phoenix Mercury are franchises that have developed reputations for investing in themselves, with practice facilities resulting in the ability to attract free agents with some of the best amenities in the league.

But more notable to me is who is coaching both the Aces and the Mercury and how they got here. I’m not talking about the fact that Becky Hammon and Nate Tibbetts are both from South Dakota, although that’s a fun coincidence. 

But Hammon and Tibbetts are the top-two paid head coaches in the league. They reached the WNBA as longtime NBA assistants who were overlooked for head coaching roles in the W’s brother league. 

Tibbetts reminisced about what this two-year journey in the WNBA has been like on the night he beat the Minnesota Lynx in Game 4 of the WNBA semifinals. 

“We took a chance coming to this league, coming to this organization,” he said, referring to himself and his family. “And I had been living the NBA dream, and it was awesome. [I] had kind of gotten overlooked [for] some NBA jobs over the years.”

Hammon, who many believed was on the path to becoming the first woman NBA head coach, decided to pivot once the Aces (and also the New York Liberty) believed that she was ready to be a  head coach over three years ago after missing out on so many NBA head coaching jobs that she lost count. 

Tibbetts and Hammon represent an evolving trend in the WNBA, one that is moving toward thought leaders and teachers that have NBA backgrounds rather than WNBA lifers or mainstays. To be clear, this isn’t the first time the WNBA employed NBA coaches and mostly men from the NBA. 

History repeats itself and that history was the WNBA’s reality in the mid-2000s when 11 of the 14 head coaches were men and all 11 of them came from the NBA either as players or coaches. This included Bill Laimbeer and Mike Thibault, two people who without looking at their resumes appeared to be WNBA lifers, people who invested a lot of time and energy into transforming the professional women’s game. (Editor’s note: it also included folks like Muggsy Bogues, Dave Cowens and Nolan Richardson.)

The NBA/WNBA crossover isn’t purely an exercise in hiring men: of the four employed WNBA head coaches with NBA experience, two of them are women, Becky Hammon along with WNBA Coach of the Year Natalie Nakase of the Golden State Valkyries. Tibbetts and Sky head coach Tyler Marsh are the other two.

But this number seems destined to go up. Liberty general manager Jonathan Kolb expressed how much the WNBA had changed since Hammon chose the Aces and he hired proven winner and now former head coach Sandy Brondello. 

“The game is quicker,” A’ja Wilson told reporters on October 4 prior to Game 2 of the WNBA Finals. “The game is…positionless now versus probably coming in you kind of had your two posts and your three guards, but now everyone can play the different positions on the court. I mean, that’s what makes the NBA so great. It’s like, you got seven footers that can dribble the ball up the floor and do crazy things.

“And I think when it came from [Hammon], I think she kind of took her style that she saw in the NBA and under [Gregg Popovich] and implemented it to us. It wasn’t like we were the Spurs, but she saw the potential that we had with the talent that we had, and just implemented it into our system.”

When Hammon was hired in 2022, she accelerated the WNBA’s move away from the slower more cut and dry styles of play and instead what the league is moving to is not just space, pace and shooting, but more switching on ball screens, more intentionality to hunt mismatches and more “random” play triggered by players reading and reacting. 

“Playing differently versus the same old floppy stuff, or the flex action or Princeton stuff that we kind of grew up in,” Mercury associate head coach Kristi Toliver told The IX Sports. “Now it’s space, pace, move the basketball and shoot the three, especially.”

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For this reason is exactly why Atlanta Dream general manager Dan Padover cut ties with longtime colleague and collaborator Tanisha Wright, a former player whose three years with the Dream were cut short over her strategy’s offensive limitations. Notably, Wright, now an assistant with the Sky, has been spotted at an NBA training camp in the past week. 

After the firings of Noelle Quinn, Brondello, and even Curt Miller from the Sparks a year ago —three coaches regarded as WNBA lifers — there’s some concern around the league circles about how front offices are now chasing a shinier, more modern approach to coaching, and in doing so, pushing out the very people who helped build the league’s foundation. There’s also a concern that with the stakes so high for success in the WNBA, younger coaches won’t have a proper path to grow and find stable jobs in the league. 

Just as WNBA ownership has shifted back toward being majority-NBA owned following multiple rounds of league expansion, coaching and in particular head coaching could be headed for a similar gentrification.  

“I mean, that’s what it looks like,” Toliver said. “That’s what is happening and that’s where like for us we have to as women in general in this world, we have to be each other’s greatest supporters, and cheerleaders.” 

Tibbetts and Hammon represent two different ways that front offices have returned to favoring NBA talent. And it’s one that resulted in creating jobs for a Black man in Marsh and an Asian-American woman in Nakase.

Should it matter that someone like Tibbetts got a job in the WNBA without ever coaching or playing alongside women before? It’s complicated. His hire opened a door for Toliver, who also noted that her years as an assistant coach for the Dallas Mavericks while she finished her playing career was akin to “four years in college” when it came to learning modern schemes and principles. 

But the question remains will someone like Toliver, Briann January or Lindsey Harding (the person I believe should be the Liberty’s front-runner) be granted a season like Tibbetts had where a flawed roster in 2024 resulted in an early playoff exit?

Otherwise, especially after Miller’s mentee in Chris Koclanes was given just a season himself, even high level college coaches might stay away from the WNBA. The money being right could lure back former WNBA Coach of the Year and current Baylor head coach Nicki Collen, or entice former USA Basketball head coach and current South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley, two names that have been floating around across different candidate lists for the New York job.

But here in the WNBA of 2025, there’s a lot more to consider.

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Five at The IX: DeWanna Bonner and Satou Sabally Before WNBA Finals Game 3