Swish City: Starting Up 2026

 



We're doing it! After an inaugural season of trying out WNBA fantasy last season, we got hooked! We played an eight and ten-teamer using ESPN and also a six-teamer using the sports.ws site. How was it? It was so fun! Playing fantasy WNBA was a lovely complement to playing fantasy MNBA, and in some ways better, because the season was shorter, the players all new (to me), and the fandom and energy were so wonderful!

The only caveat to fantasy WNBA was that it seemingly all points leagues and no 9Cat. All along, the plan had been to eventually create a 9Cat WNBA league modeled after our long time MNBA fantasy league, Slam Nation—running for over twenty years now—and now it’s time to make that dream come true!

The problem is, there currently aren’t any WNBA 9Cat fantasy platforms on the market…so I guess we gotta do it ourselves. It's back to spreadsheets and hand calculations! While this may seem like a chore, I see it instead as an opportunity to try out some new stuff, we love Google Sheets!

Each week we’ll play on ESPN as normal, ignoring the point totals but focusing on the categories—which is pretty easily seen on ESPN—and then at the end of the week we’ll calculate the percentage categories and then find out who won the 9Cat matchups. Sound good?

In addition, similar to our MNBA league, we'll be using FAAB for free agent acquisitions and also turning on the ESPN setting for “Games Played Limits (Maximums).” I’ll link to an explainer on that below, but the idea of having a weekly games limit cap is to minimize streaming free agents and instead focus more on a starters plus bench format.
"ESPN fantasy leagues utilize a 'soft cap' games limit rule, capping total games played in a matchup, but allowing a team to exceed the cap on the final day if they start it under the limit. Once the cap is hit, players in subsequent days (or the rest of the match) do not earn points."