The Fever and Aces went to a winner-take-all Game 3 after a record-setting Caitlin Clark night in Game 2; A'ja Wilson's 36 points then eliminated Indiana. Admiration ran 3.60× above baseline across 720 articles.
Admiration and sadness share the top, exactly as they did last week, and both rose. Coverage stays Clark-centred: she appears in nearly half of all titles.
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 Playoffs 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 Game 2, the technical and the foul-out, and her final game.
Admiration and sadness together; the most emotionally mixed thread.
Other series: the Lynx's elimination, Liberty, Mercury and the winners-and-losers roundups.
Mostly admiration and excitement; little sadness.
The sections above describe what WNBA Playoffs 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.
Admiration and sadness arrive together, so messaging about effort, grit and coming back fits the mood better than pure victory.
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