Dear Kelsey,
You are having a season too loud for small words. Yet the headlines keep reaching for them. They could call this season historic. Elite. Ruthlessly efficient. Dominant. Instead, they keep choosing language that makes the extraordinary feel ordinary.
You’re having the best season of your career — and one of the finest seasons by any guard in the WNBA. But the words surrounding your game haven’t grown with it. The headlines keep shrinking to fit you instead of stretching to meet your greatness.
You are quiet and steady. Does the media coverage have to match your personality? Quiet is a personality trait. It isn’t a basketball statistic.
“Steadying influence.”
That’s the phrase.
“Steady’ describes reliability, not dominance.
The Associated Press chose it. Yahoo Sports repeated it. Dozens of outlets syndicated it until “steady” became the accepted shorthand for your season. It is a compliment, but it is also strangely incomplete. “Steady” suggests reliability, not dominance. It describes consistency, not a player leading the league in total points while putting together one of the greatest scoring stretches in franchise history.
You dropped 33, a season high, against New York; 30 against Seattle; 29 in Phoenix; 29 in Los Angeles; and 27 in Las Vegas on the champions’ floor, going 8 for 8 from the free throw line. The only thing quieter than the crowd afterward was the coverage. The media passes the silence off on us and onto you. Your stat sheet is shouting. The adjectives keep whispering.
“Steady” cannot contain the depth of this season: 41 consecutive games in double figures, unmatched in Fever history. 10 straight 20-point games, the longest in Fever history and the eighth time in the history of the WNBA. You are averaging more than 23 points per game and leading the league in total points. Six consecutive games of at least 25 points — among the longest scoring streaks in league history. More than 5,000 career points. A first All-Star starting nod in your ninth season. These are not the numbers of a player quietly keeping things together. Your numbers are rewriting the expectations for a ninth-year guard.
We see you.
The failure isn’t that they called you steady. It’s that they thought one word could hold you. It can’t. This season is too big for one adjective.
Sports writers know that language does more than describe a season; it frames one.
Sports writers know that language does more than describe a season; it frames one. The adjectives attached to athletes become the shorthand that survives long after the box scores are forgotten. A player called fearless is remembered differently from one called dependable. A player described as transcendent enters a different place in basketball memory than one repeatedly described as steady.
A word repeated long enough stops describing a player and starts deciding what she is allowed to be. You know how this works. The word choices aren’t trivial — they shape awards, public perception, and ultimately legacy. That’s why this matters. The words should be proportionate to the performance.
The Fever entered this season reminding everyone that you had already finished as an MVP finalist in 2025. Instead of validating that trajectory, much of the conversation has somehow become more restrained even as your production has become more explosive. It’s a strange contradiction: the season gets louder, and the descriptions get quiet on the creek.
Your body of work deserves more.
Eight years. Nine seasons. More than 300 games. A career average of 17.9 points. Last year, you posted 20.2 points per game and finished as an MVP finalist. Now you are at 23.3 points per game, playing among the WNBA’s elite scorers. Players don’t accidentally become this good in year nine. Seasons like this are built over time. That’s what makes the vocabulary surrounding your season feel so strangely inadequate.
The headlines may have settled for “steady,” but the numbers are shouting MVP.
History has always preferred more precise language. Long after this season ends, they’ll remember the points, the streaks, the efficiency and the wins. The headlines may have settled for “steady,” but the numbers are shouting MVP.
We see you.
— Tasha Jones
LaTASHA BOYD JONES
Tasha Jones is a poet, writer, researcher, and educator whose work explores language as a tool for liberation and resistance. She hosts In the Beginning: The Spoken Word Podcast, the #1 spoken word podcast on Apple and Spotify. Tasha is also the Poems & Parables Literary Journal editor and is currently writing Pyramids. Plantations. Projects. Penitentiaries. You can follow her on social media: @iamtashajones, @itbspokenwordpod, and @poemsandparables.
