USA Sports has the honor―and responsibility―of calling the WNBA Finals in its first year of coverage.
Olivia Miles isn't the only rookie looking to leave a mark on the 2026 WNBA playoffs.
Also joining the fray is USA Sports, whose latest endeavor centers on the upcoming postseason on the hardwood. USA leaped into the broadcasting paint amidst the highly publicized new WNBA media deal, which gives the basic cable network coverage of a first-round playoff series and most of the upcoming Finals, which it will share with NBC.
Hours off the air and before a packed finale slate provided a day off in name only earlier this summer. Members of the broadcast team took to the floor at the Madison Square Navy Yard in New York, running a clinic before calling a New York Liberty game at Barclays Center.
USA talents spoke with Ballislife about their literal star-spangled work in between play calls with local youths.
"If you want to call it a challenge, call it a challenge, but it's part of our job," analyst Amy Audibert, who has also doubled as a Miami Heat and Toronto Tempo commentator, said of the increasing responsibilities of latching onto the W in its 30th season. "It's part of our job and it's part of our responsibility. I'm not really perceiving that as a challenge ... hoops is hoops, I love it. This game is just going to continue to grow. The stars, the rookie classes, they're incredible. Where this game is going to go is just super fascinating."
USA's work with the Finals marks the first time that the WNBA championship series will air on a network beyond the Walt Disney Company-controlled ABC or ESPN since 2002.
🚨 WNBA hoops are BACK 🚨
— USA Sports (@usasports) September 17, 2026
A doubleheader on tap as the regular season winds down ⏳
• @LASparks vs @DallasWings 8 p.m. ET
• @LVAces vs @seattlestorm 10 p.m. ET pic.twitter.com/5YLCfgJw3p
Red, White, and Hoop
Under the new $3.1 billion television deal (whose profit share served as a frequently cited sticking point in the recent collective bargaining agreement negotiations), USA joined the fold for the next 11 years alongside the Disney duo, NBC, Amazon Prime Video, CBS, and Ion.
The primary output to date has been weeknight doubleheaders with a flurry of activity scheduled for the final hours of the regular season: with eight days left on the calendar, the WNBA's characters will be welcomed to USA's airwaves on nine occasions, beginning with a couple on Thursday night. Down the road, USA has the lion's share of the best-of-seven Finals not only this year but in 2030 and 2034 as well.
Leaping into the fray at this point on the WNBA timeline is quite the endeavor for USA, which also carries NASCAR, the English Premier League, WWE, and various college conferences in its portfolio since being spun-off from NBC into a new entity known as Versant. Its well-seasoned hardwood talents have embraced the timely duties, especially with how much the game has changed in such rapid succession.
"You can tell there's an investment in a priority into women's basketball for the W," said sideline reporter/game analyst Edona Thaqi, who enjoys a metropolitan homecoming after previously repping Fordham basketball in the Bronx. "I think getting too big too quickly can never be a problem. I think it's always a great thing. You want the league to continue growing.
"I think that what has made this year so unique: you're seeing all these teams, like the Golden State Valkyries. They were an expansion team last year and it's not a fluke, right?" Thaqi continued, speaking of the league's broadcasting evolution. "They're here to ball out and win. You see Minnesota at the top, the New York Liberty obviously is still fighting for those those higher placements. You've got such great teams when you look at places like the five through eight [seeds] ... When I first began, there was a lot of local TV [coverage], but maybe not the TV times where people could watch games or you could pick which games were being aired. Now, it's like you could watch all of the teams, you could watch majority of the games, they're on national networks."
Despite the pressures that inevitably came with it, engaging in such a jump ball was a relative no-brainer in the eyes of the new narrators, some of whom have been tracking the pulse of the W since its infancy, such as analyst Chamique Holdsclaw. The Washington Mystics legend made an appearance in New York shortly before her Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame induction.
Those involved noted not only their own investment but the effort from up above as they get ready to call the biggest games on the active W ledgers.
"I think there's just the respect of getting it right, not skipping steps, not undermining the level of talent that there is in this league, giving them the right level of coverage that they deserve," said veteran play-by-play woman Meghan McPeak when addressing USA's championship readiness. "What's been really fun and really enjoyable and encouraging about USA is the fact that, when they're unsure, they come to us. We had a seminar before the season started in April and we had great conversations about what you can expect from the league, its players, how to handle certain situations, how certain situations look ... because some people didn't understand that going into it.
"They've been very welcoming to the point of asking how can we continue to elevate this league and elevate the game from where it is right now. Coming in year one, what can we do to make it even better in our coverage? I think you're seeing that not only from USA but from everyone as a whole this season as we celebrate the 30th year."
With Great Power Comes ...
There's no doubt a brand of fun in telling the stories of burgeoning household names like Miles, Paige Bueckers, Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and more while latching onto the league as it reaches unprecedented marks in popularity. With that, however, comes an undeniable sense of matching responsibility that USA broadcasters have not ignored.
"There's a challenge in integrating casual fan who might you know might watch a Law & Order marathon on USA, and then all of a sudden the W pops up, and just you know educating them from that standpoint," McPeak said of the broadcast challenges. "But then, also too, there's reminding and keeping the respect for the OG fans who are here since '97 or the early 2000s and helped grow this league to where it was, in, let's say 2019, so like pre-pandemic, where it had really great growth and really great momentum."
Whether through the pointed activism of its own players or being drawn in by the talking points of well-intentioned and bad-faith debaters alike, consuming and covering WNBA affairs makes off-court knowledge required reading before coming to the arena.
This landmark 30th season, of course, began with contentious CBA negotiations that yielded a buzzer-beating collaboration while fan behavior, player participation, and on-floor encounters have likewise created talking points that bury historic outputs on the scoreboard, stat sheet, and trophy room. USA broadcasters carried faith that their audience would be more than happy to let basketball do the talking ... and unveiling.
"I think with like the bad faith quote unquote fans, if you will, I think they kind of tell on themselves, depending on what they're saying, how they're saying it, how they're approaching you, in the way that they're bringing themselves into the avenue that is the WNBA," McPeak noted, hinting that the league's most in-tune fans seem to know the game far better than their detractors. "It makes it a little bit easier to kind of pick and choose how you're going to handle who you're going to talk to ... it's hard to argue or have an educational conversation about the game and the W with someone who doesn't necessarily want to hear you, or at least respect your willingness to have that conversation."
Catch USA Sports in action on Thursday night, when the Los Angeles Sparks face the Dallas Wings at 8 p.m. ET before the Las Vegas Aces and Seattle Storm tip off afterward.
Geoff Magliocchetti is on X @GeoffJMags
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