The trade deadline has come and gone, and Seattle is still lacking a backup four. So they did the only reasonable thing available: they signed their starting small forward’s shorter sister.
The Storm signed wing Karlie Samuelson to a rest-of-season deal on Monday worth $17,304, per Her Hoop Stats. The 6′ wing played 11 games for Los Angeles this year and averaged a healthy per-36-minutes of 47.8 percent from three on 4.8 attempts, 5.2 rebounds and 1.4 steals for the Sparks. That did come in a small sample size of just 174 minutes, though, and she’s attempted barely more than 50 threes in her stop-start career.
Seattle came out of the trade deadline on Saturday night as a team that had clear holes only at backup power forward and small-wing creator. Karlie Samuelson’s signing adds depth at spacing wing to a rotation that features her sister, Katie Lou Samuelson; Stephanie Talbot; and Epiphanny Prince. This will be the first time since high school that the Samuelson sisters will play together in the United States.
When asked about the team’s power forward rotation and post-deadline roster after Seattle’s Sunday win over Washington, head coach Noelle Quinn said:
“I feel very good about it. Katie Lou has done an excellent job in Chicago and New York without Sue and Stewie. She was able to show her versatility in that aspect… I look at it as — I’m not comparing our team, I don’t want to compare our team to an NBA team — but you see a lot of small-ball, and that’s kind of the evolution of our game. And ‘how do teams match up with us’ is how I see our roster right now.”
With Karlie Samuelson’s contract added to the cap sheet, per Her Hoop Stats, the Storm are left with $2,633. That’s an amount functionally equivalent to zero.
The Storm take on the Minnesota Lynx Tuesday evening at 7 PM ET, in Samuelson’s first opportunity to play with Seattle.
