Welcome to Basketball Insider, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. Farhan Zaidi, Special Advisor to Los Angeles Sparks ownership, has been operating in a capacity, and at a time, that is as complicated as it is vital to the future of the organization.
It’s part of why, as he acknowledged in a wide-ranging phone interview with The IX Sports on Monday, there have been no press conferences held by Zaidi or interim general managers Zach Knowlton and Nate Nielsen, since general manager Raegan Pebley was fired on July 12. Nor did anyone in Sparks leadership speak publicly or answer questions after the team traded Kelsey Plum to the Phoenix Mercury.
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“We haven’t necessarily had that right spokesperson, so I’ll take responsibility for that,” Zaidi said. “I could have been more out front and center. Not that this is necessarily my role. Not that I have the WNBA experience to be the point person on this stuff. But having somebody be in that role, I think, is important, and it’s important to our relationship with our fans.”
That communication is important, but it will only matter to fans if the Sparks can exit the decade-long treadmill they’ve been on since pushing the 2017 WNBA Finals to a fifth and deciding game, turn the organization into a destination rather than a place stars like Candace Parker, Chelsea Gray and now Kelsey Plum choose to leave, and provide clear lines of support for all involved.
As one WNBA executive put it to me: “If Sparks ever figure it out, they’ll be great again.”
Zaidi’s bona fides are unconventional, and he is transparent about that. Frequently during our discussion, he referenced his newness to the WNBA: 2025 was the first draft he connected with the Sparks on, ramping up his involvement over the course of last season. By the time Pebley was dismissed, the basketball operations team was operating under a triumvirate of oversight: Zaidi as liaison to ownership, Knowton (who joined LA in December 2025) and Nielsen (hired by LA in April 2026) navigating the day-to-day.
But if Zaidi’s inexperience is front and center, don’t lose sight of his strengths. He graduated from MIT, then earned a PhD in economics from Berkeley, before reading the book “Moneyball” and, like so many of us, dedicating himself to the application of analytics in sports. His success doing so with the Oakland Athletics, Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants may not seem specifically relevant to the building of a WNBA team, but his understanding of the variable, inefficient markets sports teams operate within and across, is likely to translate. The WNBA in 2026, analytics-wise, looks a lot like Major League Baseball circa 2001.
“One thing I can maybe provide to our front office and to our organization is some of the best practices that I’ve seen in baseball, and areas where I think there’s potentially opportunity,” Zaidi said, after acknowledging that he is still listening and learning from people steeped in the women’s basketball world for a long time. “So I have a lot of excitement about the W in general, where the league is headed, where the Sparks as an organization are headed. I think there’s a lot of opportunity in the space. To your point, we’ve seen a lot of investment and sophistication in player evaluation, in the draft, in how coaches prep for games. So it’s been really impressive to me, and I just think there’s even more to do there.”
It is generally acknowledged across the league, in fact, that Zaidi’s ability to spot opportunities has already paid dividends with the trade of Plum. This is no slight toward Plum’s value in the abstract. But in exchange for a player on an expiring contract, and one whom Zaidi said Monday had made it clear she would not commit to the Sparks following the season’s end, Zaidi and Los Angeles received a young, cost-controlled Monique Akoa Makani, a first round draft pick in 2027 that is now set to fall in the lottery and a 2028 second round pick.
“I feel like I personally had a great relationship with KP, as a lot of people in the organization did,” Zaidi said. “And I actually have a lot of appreciation for the candor from her camp that she was probably going to go into free agency this offseason and want to explore her options because again, it allowed us to get out in front of this a little bit and not just get surprised when we got down to the wire at the end of the season. … And around the time that the math around our playoff odds started sinking, and then getting that word from her camp … I think that’s when we realized this was the best course.”
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As a result, the Los Angeles Sparks have become a study in contrasts in the waning days of the 2026 season. Young, building-block players like Cameron Brink and Rae Burrell are playing alongside vets like Dearica Hamby, Ariel Atkins and the ageless Nneka Ogwumike, who is producing so well since announcing her retirement that Zaidi joked he might just “sneak her onto the roster next year and see if she notices.”
Zaidi did not definitively commit to a longer-term rebuild, as opposed to a short-term fix, pointing out that so many of the league’s stars signed short-term deals during this past winter’s Final Jeopardy of an offseason. But he insisted that ownership was willing to see through a 2027 season built around younger players with a long-term destination in mind.
“We are not going to be under an absolute mandate to win more than 22 games next year, or finish over .500, or even make the playoffs,” Zaidi said. “There’s certainly a path where that is where we wind up. But whether we go this younger path, whether we have a chance to accelerate things, we want it to be something where our our our our fan base, our really loyal, awesome fan base can think along with us and be enthusiastic about what we’re doing, right? And not be sending mixed signals about, where are we? We want a clarity of path.”
About that path: an active search for a new general manager is already in motion, Zaidi said. He pointed out that while the WNBA season is ongoing, if on hiatus, the NBA is in the midst of its quietest period of the calendar year. Now is a time when permissions to speak with executives are granted most easily. And the permeable line between NBA and WNBA is more porous than ever, if only operating primarily in one direction at the moment.
Zaidi said that while both Knowlton and Nielsen will be candidates, he hopes to ultimately “add to the group” through an external search that will avoid needing to backfill positions, should the Sparks simply promote one of their two assistant GMs. It is also worth noting that both Knowlton and Nielsen have limited WNBA experience, which serves as less of a complement to Zaidi’s strengths.
That matters, because Zaidi isn’t interested in stepping away from the Sparks, a team owned by Mark Walter, anytime soon. Dodgers president Stan Kasten said last month that Walter is not exploring a sale of the Sparks, which is what everyone except Jim Dolan tends to say right up to the point a sale happens. But at least for now, this provides some assurance that the Sparks’ ownership will remain in place, as will Zaidi.
“I’ve grown to really love this league and this organization,” he said. “… I try to toe the line between ‘I’m here to help’ and ‘I don’t want to, like, be in your hair.’ Whether it’s Zach or Nate or an incoming GM, to [make them] feel empowered. So I view my longer-term role as just however I can best support our our lead executives in place. Try to make myself available any way I can.”
That includes availability to the public. For the past seven weeks, head coach Lynne Roberts has been left to explain decisions far above her paygrade. Zaidi praised Roberts’ effort, but agreed with the idea that typically, a new general manager will have the opportunity to choose whether or not to keep the incumbent head coach. Zaidi expects that hire to also be a public face of accountability for the team. That was a responsibility Pebley took seriously.
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Ultimately, will this franchise stick to its new path? That matters more than any decision Zaidi makes. It’s easy to squint at the game plan for the Sparks in September 2026 and see the youth-driven, analytics-friendly regime of Curt Miller and assistant GM Eli Horowitz (now with the Toronto Tempo), one that was short-circuited by what multiple league sources told me was a demand by ownership to win now. It is hard to blame Pebley for deals trading the future for the present when they stemmed from an organizational directive. As damaging as some of their decisions may have seemed (like trading the lottery pick that became Dominique Malonga in the deal to add Plum, or dealing the pick that became Awa Fam for Rickea Jackson and Kia Nurse before turning around and dealing Jackson for Ariel Atkins), Pebley was taking orders from above and was scapegoated for it.
Continuity, in Los Angeles Sparks land, has been in short supply, and I don’t just mean because there have been more Sparks team presidents over the past seven years than Defense Against the Dark Arts professors at Hogwarts. This is a franchise that needs to exhibit patience and let an organizational process both undo mistakes of the past and chart a new course forward. Meanwhile, the WNBA keeps getting bigger and smarter, reducing the market inefficiencies that a better-run Sparks team with an earlier start on its practice facility that’s now nearly finished, could have been exploiting all decade long.
There’s a vision now, a chance to make the Los Angeles Sparks the destination they should have been all along. The franchise has empowered someone who understands this. The GM hire will be critical — “they need real credibility from the GM spot,” one WNBA team executive told me, echoing sentiment I encountered repeatedly from other teams. “I think they need to hire an established leader in the league.” And the Sparks simply have to take their public responsibilities in how they are covered, and thus how informed their fans are, more seriously.
But as I asked this WNBA executive: without ownership stability, will it matter?
“Probably not.”
This week in women’s basketball
Rebecca Lobo in US Magazine talking about Geno Auriemma. WNBA stars: just like us!
Our Annie Peterson caught up with Portland Fire president Claire Hamill.
Our Rob Knox was live for the first-ever Upshot League championship.
How DeWanna Bonner ended up in Atlanta.
And do not miss Michael Waterloo going long on Allisha Gray.
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