Role Players, Ring Chasers, And A Shadow GM: Your Guide To The 2026 WNBA Season

The WNBA season begins tonight. Rather than preview each team, I’ve decided to look at some storylines I’ll be following through some of the league’s best characters. This has nothing to do with the fact that I only came back from book leave on Thursday and didn’t have a lot of time to write a preview. In fact, working on a book has merely pushed me to consider alternative narrative dimensions and explore new modes of storytelling, such as this.

When we last saw Napheesa Collier, she was scootering away from the site of her team’s shocking semifinal loss to the Phoenix Mercury. When we last heard from her, she was excoriating the WNBA’s “worst leadership in the world” at a season-end press conference, where she brought up the league’s indifference to officiating issues. In May, both moments still loom large. Collier will miss at least the first month of the season while she rehabs the left ankle that she injured back in September, a challenge for a Minnesota Lynx team whose rotation players on bargain contracts all finally got paid: Jessica Shepard and co-Defensive Player of the Year Alanna Smith signed with the Dallas Wings, Bridget Carleton was picked up by the Portland Fire in the expansion draft, and Sixth Player of the Year candidate Natisha Hiedeman signed with the Seattle Storm.

Collier told NPR’s Steve Inskeep in a recent interview that the injury and eventual surgery were why she only signed a one-year deal with Minnesota this offseason. “I think just like not looking too far into the future in that way, and that I want to be able to stay focused on my recovery,” she said, when pressed on the contract issue. “This is new for me, and I wanted to be able to give it my all and focus on the now.” Rookie point guard Olivia Miles notwithstanding, the team around Collier is certainly getting thin. 

Collier’s other last impression—at the microphone—could tell us something about the league she’ll return to. After that press conference, commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced that the league would form a task force to evaluate officiating. The WNBA will fine players more harshly for technical fouls and flagrant fouls this year, and per Aces head coach Becky Hammon, freedom of movement was among the officiating “points of emphasis” set by the league this year.

A perk of working for a subscription site, unaccountable to search engines and traffic metrics, is that you can devote hours to writing a WNBA season preview and then select Kiah Stokes as one of its featured players. The buzziest news in the Golden State Valkyries’ final roster drop on Thursday was that Kate Martin had been waived—likely thing for a guard shooting under 32 percent from the field in her career to be—but the more meaningful announcement was that Iliana Rupert will miss the season due to pregnancy. Already undersized, the Valkyries are now down their starting center, a stretch big at that. Free-agent signing Kiah Stokes looks like the next woman up. 

Readers sometimes tell me they use this preview to pick players for their fantasy teams. In this instance, absolutely do not do that, unless you’re playing in an “open looks passed up” category league. Stokes, most recently of the Las Vegas Aces, is a genuine offensive cipher these days, averaging just 1.1 points per game in 40 games last year—just over two points per game in the 18 games she started for the champs. Her coaches and teammates in Vegas were often quick to note her defensive value, and Valks head coach Natalie Nakase (a onetime Aces assistant) no doubt believes in it, too. But if Golden State can’t get some interior scoring from Stokes, their offense could look dire. Rupert, a 44.2 percent three-point shooter last year, really opened things up for the Valkyries when she joined the team midseason, and she was crucial to their playoff push. Without her on the floor, it’ll be tougher to come by the halfcourt slashing opportunities the team imagined when they signed Gabby Williams—a big-fish free agent, but not much of a floor spacer herself, and someone whose driving and finishing skills would only be maximized by real space around her. A lesson for the brand-new Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo: Sometimes the expansion-team magic does run out.

The New York Liberty, a team that drove all their fans insane with their special blend of obvious talent and inconsistency, signed Sabally, a player that drives all of her fans insane with her special blend of obvious talent and inconsistency. She is also injured and will miss the first game of the season, as will like half of her teammates. I am sick of this team’s bullshit, so we’ll check on them again in July.

There’s something kind of charming about the theory that Courtney Vandersloot has assumed the role of Chicago Sky shadow general manager. Some of that charm lies in her general deal: short, chill-seeming, 37 years old, decidedly un-Machiavellian. But also, if the team’s real GM were working under the influence of a second GM, that actually would help explain the Sky’s weird, contradictory and extremely active offseason.

It began when the team sent draft picks to the Toronto and Portland expansion teams, in exchange for the Tempo and Fire agreeing not to select any of Chicago’s unprotected players in the expansion draft. But the Sky ended up trading or cutting many of its young players anyway. Angel Reese, who’d mentioned Vandersloot’s advanced age in an unpopular Chicago Tribune interview last season, was shipped off to Atlanta on the first day of free agency. The Los Angeles Sparks’ Rickea Jackson, also on her rookie deal, came to Chicago in a separate trade.

Among VanderGM’s supposed major signings were two that would seem to make her redundant, or at least call her role into question: Skylar Diggins and Natasha Cloud, a pair of shooting-challenged starting point guards around the same age as Vandersloot, both of whom joined the Sky in free agency. Diggins could plausibly play the two position alongside one of the others—Sky head coach Tyler Marsh said as much in a media appearance after the Cloud signing—and in her introductory press conference, Diggins mentioned Vandersloot being a reason she signed with the team. But if you factor in free-agent signings DiJonai Carrington and Rachel Banham, first-round pick Gabriela Jaquez, and trade acquisition Jacy Sheldon, this guard group is quite crowded (and quite old at point guard). These old ladies, respectfully, are all going to have to lock the fuck in on defense to help what should be one of the weaker defensive frontcourts in the league.

And then there was Ezi. In free agency, four of last year’s Storm starters left for other cities, leaving only Magbegor behind. The 26-year-old center always made her bones on the defensive end, but 2025 was a tough offensive season for her, one that even featured a baffling cold spell at the free-throw line. This year, having signed an extension that keeps her in Seattle for another three seasons, she’ll be asked to put that all behind her and assume the new role of grizzled veteran.

The team around Magbegor has gotten younger—and honestly, more interesting, even if they’re not eyeing a top playoff seed this year the way they did in the era of Skylar Diggins and Nneka Ogwumike. The bet the Storm’s front office is making is on internal growth from a young core. Dominique Malonga, the 6-foot-6 French center with a freakish first step, should be able to shine in more minutes, no longer dealing with the logjam of veteran forwards in front of her. Seattle’s first-round draft selections make for an intriguing rookie duo; they’ll determine just how far this team might go in the coming years. Flau’jae Johnson, the speedy guard out of LSU, sort of fell into Seattle’s lap when she was still available on draft night, after a pre-draft trade between the Storm and Valkyries. Teenaged Spanish center Awa Fam was considered the draft prospect with the highest ceiling, and when she joins the Storm after her overseas commitments, she should benefit from both the team’s low expectations and its potential frontcourt partners for her. New head coach Sonia Raman, a former assistant with the Liberty and Memphis Grizzlies, has some fun tools to work with on this young, athletic roster. I dare her to play some Triplet Towers lineups.

She’s back! She’s back in the WNBA! And she’ll have a chance to redeem herself under the tutelage of the league’s kindest and most forgiving coach: Becky Hammon. Carter has enough of a reputation as a locker-room issue—and the league is small enough—that she had no takers as a free agent last offseason. But if you don’t have to spend lots of time near her, Carter has always been an easy player to talk yourself into. Hammon did this offseason, anyway, telling reporters she was looking for a downhill scoring threat and that she remembered her teams having some trouble guarding Carter in the past.

An elite driver and one of the league’s best athletes, Carter averaged 20.7 points a game as a starter when she played for Chicago in 2024. Understandably, she’ll come off the bench in Vegas: This starting backcourt has a pretty good thing going on with reigning champs Jackie Young and Chelsea Gray and all. But Carter’s role will be an interesting one to keep an eye on. With the WNBA schedule now at 44 games and slated to increase to 52 over the life of the next CBA, coaches and teams will have to think more seriously about how to manage their stars and how best to build their benches for the regular season. A team whose superstar, A’ja Wilson, is chasing her fifth MVP award and fourth championship in five years feels due for a real challenge: If they end the season with those things won and a well-adjusted Chennedy Carter, go ahead and call them the greatest team of all time. 

Good teams borrow; great teams steal. General manager Curt Miller and the Dallas Wings, entreated to be great by the presence of Paige Bueckers, simply stole Minnesota’s frontcourt this offseason by signing last year’s co-DPOY Alanna Smith and her Lynx teammate Jessica Shepard. Not a bad strategy, to be honest. The Wings frontcourt has been shambolic in some form or other for the better part of a decade, and while the “surround your generationally gifted No. 1 pick with a bunch of nothing” strategy always proves captivating in the narrative sense, it was nice to see the Wings just identify the things they were really bad at and specifically fix them. Bueckers’s impressive rookie season was often lost in the muck of the bad Dallas defense.

The Smith signing, a three-year deal, could end up feeling like the turning point for the Bueckers-era Wings. I mentioned in last year’s preview that what a team’s bigs can do on defense generally tells me what I need to know about that team’s chances to contend, but it’s also true that the league’s next era is being driven by a wave of elite guards. Wings fans might just enjoy the best of both worlds. 

Every media member, wittingly or unwittingly, keeps an eye out for potential quotable guys and gals. We need them to live. New head coaches are naturally prime candidates. This was not quite the same wild WNBA coaching carousel as last offseason, but there are still some new faces in head coaching jobs. There’s Raman in Seattle, Chris DeMarco (previously with the Golden State Warriors) in New York, and Jose Fernandez (previously the head coach at USF) in Dallas. (Sandy Brondello was fired by the Liberty but did end up getting a fresh start in Toronto.) As WNBA jobs get cushier—better salaries, better accommodations, better facilities—they’re a lot more attractive to outsiders.

I was intrigued when the Portland Fire announced they’d hired Alex Sarama as head coach. His background is in NBA player development, and much of what had been written about him included fancy-sounding coaching lingo. For instance, his is a “constraints-led approach,” which makes players train under certain restrictions, like having to use a heavier ball or only being able to take a certain number of steps. I guess the constraint he has chosen for himself is to have possibly the worst basketball roster ever. That team is going to be so bad. The defense! Eek!

OK, sorry to be that guy, but are you really not going to say anything in this preview about—

Lol no, I was just kidding, here you go:

Ever heard of her? Maybe you started watching the WNBA last year and actually haven’t. Between injuries, Clark played just 13 games in 2025, and she looked less than fully healthy in most of the games she did play. In her absence, the Indiana Fever continued to rack up injuries but then made a scrappy run to the playoffs, even taking the eventual champion Aces to the brink, OT in a semifinal Game 5. It was clear that without healthy players last year, Fever head coach Stephanie White didn’t get a chance to run the kind of offense she’d hoped to run when she took this job coaching the league’s most electric offensive engine. Word from Fever training camp isn’t all that different than it was last year: White still wants Clark to work more off the ball, as she often did at Iowa, giving her some easier scoring looks and reducing the wear that accrues when a player has the ball in their hands as much as she does.

Indiana’s offseason seemed designed with that goal in mind. The Fever drafted South Carolina point guard Raven Johnson (who has been both tormentor of and tormented by Clark in college) and signed the ever-competent vet guard Ty Harris to give the team some extra ball-handling. It’s also on Clark to move, find open space, and set screens for her teammates. If you want to see what happens when a thrilling player becomes a little less predictable, you are in luck: Every single one of her games will be on national television. 

Thanks. “National television,” eh? Where can I watch WNBA games, and which games should I watch?

The WNBA has national broadcast deals with ABC/ESPN, NBC/Peacock, CBS, Amazon Prime, USA Network, and ION. Non-nationally televised games are all available on WNBA League Pass, which is $39 for the season or $14 a month. (Gee, I remember when it was $14 for the whole season.) Just check your team’s broadcast schedule to see which games might be blacked out: Most nationally televised games are not on League Pass, but the ION games are. When I’m flipping around League Pass, I seek out the Mystics, Sun, Fever, and Sky broadcast crews. If you don’t mind comical levels of homerism, Dick Fain in Seattle can also be fun. 

The best matchups tend to be on ESPN or ABC on Sunday afternoons. NBC has a few of those Sunday afternoon games now, and the Monday games on Peacock also look like some pretty good matchups. 

Here’s a rough weekly schedule that might be helpful. Think of it like this: If you’re looking for a nationally televised WNBA game to watch on a certain day of the week, here’s where it should be:

Monday: Peacock, USA Network

Tuesday: n/a

Wednesday: USA Network

Thursday: Prime Video

Friday: ION

Saturday: CBS

Sunday: ESPN/ABC, NBC

Usually I skim the WNBA’s partnership press releases, roll my eyes at whatever “platform” is going to “elevate” “fan engagement,” and move on with my day, but if you have a Roku, the league did send out a release this week saying WNBA games are finally going to be in the Roku menu, so you can just go directly to a game without having to look up the channel or streaming service. Sorry to be a SELLOUT, I just thought it was HELPFUL. 

The collective bargaining agreement … what ever happened with that thing?

After months of negotiations, including a week of all-night marathon bargaining sessions at the very end, the players walked away from the bargaining table with dramatic pay increases. The league’s minimum salary ($300,000) is now higher than what the highest-paid player earned last year, and this season, the WNBA has its first $1 million players. This CBA will also be the first to use league revenues to determine its salary cap, as the NBA does; this was a big sticking point in negotiations, and a real win for the players. Other player wins included standardized requirements for facilities and team training staffs, expanded retirement benefits, new performance bonuses, and “recognition” payments for retired players, 

Say, got any more of those expansion teams?

Not next year—the league will hold steady at an odd 15 next season. But another mini round begins the year after that: Cleveland joins the league in 2028, Detroit in 2029, Philadelphia in 2030. Then in 2031, the Detroit Shock will have won so many games and championships that the other owners will force us out of the league for being too good and winning too much, at which point a new expansion bid process may begin. We’ll see.