The real fun of Olympic women's basketball is in catching up with old friends. We can watch A'ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart dominate any old time. There's a better kind of familiar face at this tournament: the international WNBA veteran who hasn't logged a single minute of WNBA action this year. In the city of Lille, where the group stage games have all taken place, they've been a sight for sore eyes.
This is a common predicament for WNBA players on their national teams in Olympic years. Not every international player forgoes the WNBA season—all of Australia's starters, for instance, will return stateside when the games are over—but some players prefer to train at home in the months leading up to the Olympics, and others don't have much choice. “If a player leaves for the WNBA before the Olympics, she will not be part of the team,” French Basketball Federation president Jean-Pierre Siutat said in 2023.
Glimpses of these players must be treasured. Han Xu? Still tall. Rui Machida? Still passing her teammates open. Marine Johánnes? Still a no-look hero. Gabby Williams? No longer concussed, still incredibly clutch. But the player whose WNBA absence looms largest is Belgium's Emma Meesseman. With a 24-point performance against the U.S. on Thursday and a 30-point, 11-rebound game against Japan on Sunday, the 6-foot-4 team captain left no doubt that she'd be one of the 10 best players in the WNBA right now if she wanted to return.
With some help from 31-year-old Washington Mystics rookie point guard Julie Vanloo, Meesseman anchors an unflashy but interesting Belgian Cats team. She's currently riding a seven-game 20-plus point streak at the Olympics stretching back to Tokyo, the longest such scoring streak. That it didn't end against the U.S., even with the long-limbed likes of Stewart, Wilson, Brittney Griner and Napheesa Collier flung her way, is a testament to Meesseman's pretty much perfect footwork. She finished 11-of-16 from two, but poor outside shooting doomed Belgium in the end: They went a haunting 5-of-27 from three, and fell 87-74 to the U.S., whom they'd nearly beaten at the Olympic qualifiers in February.
Having already lost to Germany in their opening game, the Cats were left in need of a big win against Japan yesterday to advance from the group stage. Literally big, because the tournament uses a point differential tiebreaker; Belgium needed at least a 27-point margin of victory to stay alive. Led again by Meesseman, whose size and skill were a matchup nightmare for the undersized Japanese roster, Belgium pulled it off, defeating the reigning Olympic silver medalists, 87-58.
Since winning Finals MVP off the Mystics' bench in 2019, Meesseman has only played two WNBA seasons: one with the Mystics in the COVID-shortened 2020 season, and another with the Chicago Sky in 2022. She told reporter Maggie Hendricks in February that while she hadn't ruled out a WNBA return, she felt an obligation to grow the game in Belgium. “My childhood, I never went to a national team game because there were none, or it was not advertised. There were no jerseys that you could buy,” Meesseman said. “I've had kids in the last year saying ‘I want to be better than you.’ I want to be part of building bigger things. I'm all for that.”
The location of the games blessed the Cats with near home-court advantage; Lille is right on the Franco-Belgian border. At Thursday's USA-Belgium game, the AP's longtime women's basketball reporter, Doug Feinberg, said he couldn't remember Team USA ever playing in such a hostile environment. NBC color analyst LaChina Robinson estimated a 95 percent Cats crowd. It might not be the rosy image Meesseman alluded to when she spoke of growing the game, but she could surely feel proud of what she'd built when Sabrina Ionescu hit a long three to beat the shot clock in the final seconds, shushed the crowd, and everyone booed.
