WNBA
Emotional Landscape
TOTAL ARTICLES
0
INTERNAL (VISITED)
0
EST. VISITS
~353K
Executive Summary
Five things this data is telling you

WNBA coverage this week spans two largely separate storylines: on-court performance (Caitlin Clark's historic run, the trade deadline, playoff races) and an ongoing trans-athlete-eligibility and league-culture controversy involving Sophie Cunningham and others.

02Admiration leads at 2.71× baseline (41.8% of coverage) — across this much larger, whole-document sample, the league's overall emotional signature is positive and admiration-dominant, not anger-driven.
03But by raw volume, anger (20.7% of coverage) is the largest single non-admiration emotion — its lift (0.79×) sits just under baseline, meaning it's proportionally represented, not suppressed, in a league whose default register should skew more positive.
04The 20.5% not-safe-garm share is real and concentrated: 'hate'-category flags dominate it, driven almost entirely by the trans-eligibility debate rather than on-court violence or injury.
05Co-occurrence confirms these are two separate narratives, not one blended story: admiration's top ally is excitement (on-court performance), while anger's top ally is disgust (moral-outrage register around the controversy) — they rarely occupy the same article.
Top Emotions vs. Baseline
Fear stays suppressed at
at 0.16× baseline

This is the week's most editorially complex story: a genuinely positive, admiration-dominant overall signature sits alongside a real, sizeable anger/disgust-driven controversy thread. The two rarely overlap in the same article (per the co-occurrence data below), meaning a reader following the 'good news' angle and a reader following the 'controversy' angle are largely reading different pieces of coverage entirely.

Each emotion's share within this event's articles compared to its share across the country's network. Lift > 1.5× = over-represented; lift < 0.5× = suppressed — same "×" convention as every weekly card.

Admiration
6.2K imps
2.71×
Surprise
1.77×
Excitement
1.47×
Neutral
1.41×
Amusement
0.72×
Love
0.47×
Fear
0.16×
Inside each emotion, what stories are being told

A single "excitement" number hides very different stories underneath it. This breaks each of Step 0's top emotions into the specific angles actually driving it within WNBA coverage — read by an LLM across the top 100 articles for that emotion, not a fixed taxonomy.

Top internal articles per emotion grouped into nuanced sub-shades anchored in actual article titles and editorial angles.

1,823 internal · sampled top 100
~40Articles
On-Court Performance & Records

Caitlin Clark's triple-double, All-Star Weekend performances, rookie rankings, record-setting shooting nights — the clean 'good news' half of WNBA coverage.

Almost exclusively paired with excitement and joy — this cluster barely touches anger.

~25Articles
Trade Deadline & Roster Moves

Kelsey Plum to the Mercury and its ripple effects across the league — genuine excitement-driven business-of-basketball coverage.

Excitement-forward, admiration for the players involved rather than the league itself.

Strategic Read
What this means for brands

The sections above describe what WNBA coverage actually feels like. This is what to do with that read: which emotional registers to lean into, which to avoid, and where the coverage is genuinely under-bought for a brand activating around it.

Lean into
Activate here
  • On-court performance content (admiration+excitement, 2.7×/1.2×): Caitlin Clark's record run, trade-deadline coverage, All-Star performances — clean, positive, high-admiration inventory.
  • Rookie & record-setting storylines: Consistently positive, low-controversy-risk sub-narrative within the admiration cluster.
Avoid
Do not activate here
  • Trans-athlete eligibility debate coverage: The single largest source of both anger and not-safe-garm flags (hate category) — excludable by a defined keyword set (Cunningham, trans-athlete, eligibility).
  • Coach/league conduct incidents: Brondello suspension, Carrington ejection controversy — disgust-driven, real reputational adjacency risk.
Optimal combination
Recommended activation

For a brand-safe WNBA buy that still captures this season's real momentum:

  • Target: admiration+excitement co-tagged on-court performance and trade-deadline coverage
  • Exclude: trans-eligibility-debate and coach/league-conduct-incident articles by keyword
  • Watch for: the admiration/anger split holding steady week to week — a sustained convergence of the two threads into the same articles would be a real signal worth re-measuring

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