The WNBA regular season wrapped up: Minnesota clinched the No. 1 seed, Caitlin Clark set a new record in a win over the Lynx, and the playoff bracket took shape. Admiration ran 2.76× above baseline across 1,187 articles.
Two emotions share the top: admiration for individual achievements (Clark, the rookie race) and sadness for the Fever's collective slide. Compared with August's WNBA coverage, anger has turned into sadness.
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.
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 Playoff Race 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.
Caitlin Clark's record night against the Lynx, and the Clark vs. Olivia Miles rookie-record debate.
The purest admiration in the set; very little sadness mixed in.
'WNBA world reacts' pieces built around Sophie Cunningham and Fever rotation decisions.
Tagged admiration and sadness together: the headlines are harsh, but the emotional read is not angry.
The sections above describe what WNBA Playoff Race 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.
A small but high-attention story (1.20× the week's average impressions per article). Align with the individual storylines, not the team drama.
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