Happy Basketball Wednesday, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. Sitting at Tuesday night’s game between the New York Liberty and Washington Mystics, I was struck by just how clearly the 2025 WNBA season has already provided clear winners and losers, even with the playoffs still to come. This is especially true of the non-playoff teams.
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Basketball Wednesday
As we discussed back in January, this season promised a one-year commitment no matter what happened. The success or failure of this year, then, relied on teams to self-scout better than they ever had before. The ramifications will reverberate for years to come, either over a closed window for a title, or from the wasting of future assets.
I was mostly right on the teams who were right to pull out all the stops to win this season. New York, Minnesota, Indiana and Las Vegas all had clear win-now rosters. Injuries have limited New York’s regular season and all-but-destroyed Indiana’s postseason chances, but both front offices were right to judge their teams as title contenders. This is evident in both making the playoffs despite numerous injuries to their most significant players or, in Indiana’s case, everyone but Freddy Fever.
New York faces a fascinating challenge ahead: a roster built of WNBA champions, including both the core from last year’s title team from the Liberty and a pair of 2019 winners with the Mystics in Emma Meesseman and Natasha Cloud, finally experienced their first fully-intact game in months on Tuesday night. By Sunday, they’ll be playing postseason basketball. That’s not a long time to figure it out!
“You’ve just got to trust the your identity of the team, that it will show through,” Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello said when I asked her about this task. “… I’ve always said: One, I’m confident in our full team. I really am. That’s why we’ve been built. We’ve been built, obviously the players that we have, I think it’s we won last year, but it’s how do we add to what we did last year to be better? We haven’t seen that this year, but I’m excited about seeing it, and hopefully my vision comes to real life, and we can have a great playoff series.”
Two teams who have exceeded what should have been possible in one-year windows, Atlanta and Phoenix, did so without giving up much in the way of future value while building contenders. I don’t have a vote for Executive of the Year, but if I did, my two choices would be either Dan Padover or Nick U’Ren.
Similarly, Golden State and Seattle are both playoff teams, but did that despite building for the future. That three-way trade Seattle engineered meant Las Vegas ended up with Jewell Loyd, Los Angeles with Kelsey Plum, and the only one with a major asset under contract beyond 2025 in the deal is Seattle with Domonique Malonga, who looks scary good in her age-19 season. Sure, a lottery pick would be nice, but teams don’t try to lose intentionally, nor should they, and that is the price Seattle paid for keeping its veteran core of stars, and the ramifications of Golden State hiring a generational coaching talent in Natalie Nakase.
Seattle loses points for trading a 2026 first rounder at the deadline, however, in a deal for Brittney Sykes. Giving up a first rounder in what will be a loaded draft for the chance to face Minnesota or Las Vegas in a best-of-three is not looking like a good move for now or later.
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But you know who that move does look great for? That’s right, the Washington Mystics, who are the clear 2025 winners among the non-playoff teams. The Mystics flirted with a playoff bid, but have now lost 10 straight games. That’s fine, of course: this was not a contending season.
As with all the non-title run teams, what matters is how the players signed for beyond 2025 develop, and the Mystics managed to develop not one, but two all-stars in Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen, both secured through at least 2028 if the Mystics choose and critically, with the most minutes of any two-person lineup combo in DC this season by far. Held their own, too: a -2.4 net rating is strong by itself for two rookies, but especially so with the changing cast around them.
The duo walked into postgame alongside Sydney Johnson and proceeded, in the postgame following the 44th contest, to pass one of the critical tests I use to evaluate chemistry on a team: do the players and coach sound alike? Do they echo one another in their views of the season and their aspirations? This trio was locked in.
“I would say it’s bittersweet,” Iriafen said when I asked her to reflect on the 2025 season, just minutes after the Mystics’ season ended Tuesday night. “Our rookie year has come to an end… we’ve grown so much, just thinking about how we started and coming into the league and holding our own and showing up every single night. This is just the beginning for us. We have so much that we can grow in. But yeah, I wouldn’t try to change my rookie year for anything.”
How many other non-playoff teams can credibly say that?
Los Angeles went for it, dealing the pick that became Malonga for Kelsey Plum, who is now a free agent. Despite some clear improvement during the latter part of the season and a record that usually means reaching the postseason (nearly .500 is typically a playoff team), the Sparks’ season ends this week, and they’d previously sacrificed their 2026 first-round pick for Rickea Jackson and Kia Nurse, limiting their ability to improve in the draft this coming offseason as well.
The Connecticut Sun are in a difficult situation largely beyond the capacity of basketball operations to deal with. A trio of rookies showed promise in Laila Lacan, Saniya Rivers and Aneesah Morrow, but will any free agents sign with a team unless there is a clear direction on not only ownership but where that team will play? Moreover, Connecticut’s most-used two-person lineup was Marina Mabrey and Tina Charles, a pair of veterans, free agents and in Mabrey’s case, someone who asked to be traded last offseason. Not the most efficient use of their 2025 rebuilding season.
The good in Dallas? Paige Bueckers is, indeed, Her, and Maddy Siegrist continued to show the Wings were right to view her as a potential franchise anchor long-term. The bad? Well, between injuries and free agency, Curt Miller’s going to have to largely start over building, relying on Bueckers as a magnet and hoping the Wings have built their off-court reputation (and practice facility) in time to bring other stars into Dallas and to convince Bueckers that Dallas should be her long-term home.
And Chicago? Deep sigh. The franchise has two primary pieces under contract past 2025: Angel Reese and Kamilla Cardoso. The duo played 528 minutes together with a net rating of -9.7, a year after playing 642 minutes with a net rating of 0.4. This is not progress.
But wait, there’s more! Chicago traded multiple first-round picks to Washington — one in 2025 used to select Citron, another a pick-swap in 2027 — in exchange for Ariel Atkins, a win-now move. The Sky traded their first-round pick in 2026 to Minnesota for the chance to draft Hailey Van Lith, who struggled to crack the team’s rotation. Chicago is 10-33. A Lynx “win the title, grab the top 2026 pick” sequence is still on the table. You make the call on who won that trade.
And, however you feel about Reese’s comments last week concerning the Sky’s roster doesn’t really matter. They bothered her teammates, and they are hard to dispute, given the record of the team. Reese took the high road and apologized.
But the front office, supposed to be the ones making long-term decisions for the good of the franchise, suspended her for a half game. Who did this benefit? If the players needed this for closure, well, those players aren’t even under contract in 2026. If this is to defend the honor of Courtney Vandersloot, if Vandersloot was really that aggrieved, then two other things are true: the Sky really are planning to build with Vandersloot next season, and the relationship between Vandersloot and Reese might well be irreparable. That would seem to leave Reese out of the plans.
But one of two things just happened, no matter what: either the Sky, having decided to move on from Angel Reese, just devalued their best remaining trade asset, or the Sky, having suspended Reese, just made it likelier she will ask out of Chicago.
It is worth noting that this is not a Jeff Pagliocca issue. Asking to be traded out of Chicago is a rich WNBA tradition predating his tenure by many years, from Sylvia Fowles to Elena Delle Donne to Kahleah Copper. It cannot have been lost on Reese that the same weekend she was navigating the befuddling complexities of Michael Alter’s Chicago Sky, Fowles was getting inducted into the Naismith Hall of Fame.
Copper is part of a Phoenix team that’s a legitimate threat to win it all. Delle Donne, of course, works for the Mystics — the same team she left Chicago for and, in 2019, led to a WNBA title.
Ultimately, only one team is going to win the 2025 WNBA title. The 2025 Mystics were never going to be that team. But with the season they just had, plus three first-round picks in 2025 (including their own second-round pick, four of the first 19 selections), the 2027 Mystics just might. That’s why the losing team in New York Tuesday night carried the air of a team that also won.
Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the group that owns the Washington Mystics, holds a minority stake in The IX Sports. The IX’s editorial operations are entirely independent of Monumental and all other business partners.
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This week in women’s basketball
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Five at The IX: Stefanie Dolson, Washington Mystics
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