The short answer to the Angel Reese rebounding question is that it was never about height, and the people who kept waiting for gravity to solve the problem have been waiting a long time now. She is not the tallest player in the WNBA. She is not its best leaper. She is grabbing rebounds at a pace no one in this league has ever sustained, and the reporting that dug into it this morning lands where anyone who has watched her closely already suspected: this is a skill, practiced and repeatable, not an accident of wingspan.

Rebounding gets treated like a physical trait because it is easy to measure a player and hard to measure a habit. But the board is won before the ball comes off. It is won by reading the shooter's release and knowing which side of the rim the miss is going to favor. It is won by getting a forearm into a hip a half second before the other player thinks to establish position. It is won by the second effort, and then by the third, when the ball is tipped and everyone else is watching it instead of moving toward it. Reese does all of that at a volume that borders on rude.

The part that gets undersold is the offensive glass, where pursuit is a choice. Most bigs in most possessions have permission to leak back. She goes. Every time. That is a conditioning story as much as a technique story, and it is why the pace has held rather than spiked and faded.

Checked the almanac: Dennis Rodman stood six foot seven, undersized for the position he played, and led the NBA in rebounding seven straight seasons from 1992 through 1998. Same lesson, different league. The glass belongs to whoever wants it most and knows where it is going.

Reese has been building toward this since LSU, since the 2023 national title, since Chicago took her seventh overall in 2024 and she immediately rewrote what a rookie could do on the boards. What comes next is Sunday in Seattle, where the Storm will put size and a physical front line in front of her and she will go get eleven of them anyway.

I'm watching whether anyone in this league finds a scheme that actually bothers her. Nobody has yet.