Tankathon Check-in
To be clear, no one in the WNBA is currently tanking on purpose (at least, the players aren’t). That being said, let’s see where the teams are right now in the lottery standings and where they project to end up (chart vaguely organized by rightmost column):
| Team: | Games back in lottery: | Games back of No. 8 seed: | Strength of schedule remaining (out of 13)1: | Likely finish: |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dallas Wings | — | 9.5 | 3rd-strongest (12th-easiest) | No. 1 lottery odds |
| Chicago Sky3 | 5 | 8.5 | 5 | No. 2 lottery odds |
| Los Angeles Sparks2 | 8 | 0.5 | 4 | No. 3 lottery odds |
| Washington Mystics | 12.5 | 2 | 1 | No. 4 lottery odds |
| Connecticut Sun4 | 19 | 9.5 | 6 | Worst lottery odds |
| Golden State Valkyries | 10 | — | 7 | Low playoff seed |
| Seattle Storm5 | 21.5 | -0.5 | 9 | Low playoff seed |
| Indiana Fever | 26 | -1 | 2 | Low playoff seed |
2. Minnesota owns Chicago’s pick
3. Seattle owns Los Angeles’ pick
4. Chicago owns the rights to Connecticut’s pick if the Sun finish worse than the Mercury
5. Washington owns Seattle’s pick
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Las Vegas Aces
The Aces are currently on a nine-game winning streak, and given their schedule through the end of the regular season, they may very well close 2025 winning 17 or 18 of their last 19. It’s a remarkable turnaround that has required Chelsea Gray returning to the level she’d been at in previous seasons, using unorthodox lineups and not starting their best five, and A’ja Wilson having one of the best stretches of her career.
What this means for Vegas in the playoffs isn’t clear. Is it better to play like Atlanta has all season long, or to underwhelm early before running roughshod over a relatively light schedule at the end? Seven teams have finished their regular seasons winning at least 17 of their last 19 games, per Sports Reference. Four went on to win the title, one was a runner-up and two were eliminated by the eventual champion in an earlier round. If the Aces win their remaining six games against projected lottery teams, they’ll join that group but with a win percentage over 20 points lower than any of the previous seven teams.
It seems most reasonable to think about this Vegas team mostly in the way it was projected in the preseason: a diminished but still very good version of the teams that excelled in the last few years.
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New York Liberty
Among every Liberty player to see the court this season, only Jaylyn Sherrod and Stephanie Talbot have significantly negative on-off net ratings. Sherrod almost exclusively played garbage time minutes before being cut for Emma Meesseman. Talbot, however, continues to receive minutes in competitive games.
Relying on Talbot was a good strategy in the first part of her WNBA career, especially in Seattle, where she was one of the better backups in the league. But that hasn’t been the case since an ACL tear before the 2023 season. Outside of a hot stretch in mid-2024, Talbot has been one of the least-effective scorers in the league and gets her diminished athleticism regularly taken advantage of on the defensive end.
What makes playing Talbot inexplicable is that a significant portion of her minutes come at the 3, where New York has a better option in Rebekah Gardner. Gardner is worse on the boards and is a less-capable passer, but has otherwise been better in every other aspect this season.
For all her strengths as a coach, Sandy Brondello is poor at managing rotations and substitutions. She was arguably the proximate cause of the Liberty’s loss in Minnesota last weekend. She benched Meesseman for foul trouble despite only 2:30 remaining, kept Natasha Cloud on the court over Leonie Fiebich for an offense-only possession, and went for two while down three with 20 seconds left.
Brondello again left Cloud in for an offense-only possession in the final minute of the loss to Chicago on Thursday. Opting to keep Cloud on the court, to eventually miss a layup, instead of subbing in Marine Johannès, was an especially egregious decision considering New York was down by three. Brondello made that very substitution on the next offensive possession, by which point the team trailed by multiple possessions.
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Seattle Storm
Seattle has two of the best young centers in the league in Ezi Magbegor and Dominique Malonga. The former is a perennial First Team All-Defense contender and an efficient play-finisher. The latter is a 19-year-old who has averaged 12.7 points on 63.3% true-shooting, 7.4 rebounds and 1.2 blocks in 20.5 minutes over her last 13 games. Malonga has developed so quickly over the past two and a half years that her ceiling may be one of the best players in the league.
The problem is that neither function well at the 4. Neither is a consistently decent 3-point shooter, nor can they create their own shot from outside the paint as something other than a change-of-pace offering (though in Malonga’s case, developing both skills is entirely within the realm of possibility). Magbegor is a capable defender in space, but it’s suboptimal to have her defending at the 4. So what does the Storm front office do?
For once, that’s not a rhetorical question. I have no idea how you approach this. Magbegor, by far the longest-tenured member of the team but an impending free agent, is too good to simply let walk, but Malonga is good enough already that she should have the runway to earn the starting center nod next year. Nneka Ogwumike might be interested in re-signing, in which case a pairing with either of the two options at center works well. Though if Ogwumike wants the next (last?) chapter of her career to happen elsewhere, Seattle has options in free agency that would be better fits at the 4 next to Malonga. However, striking out on those players and failing to re-sign Magbegor likely lands the lineup in a worse place than if it had both Magbegor and Malonga starting next to each other.
Other teams face similarly difficult decisions. Los Angeles, for example, should not be trying to enter 2026 with a starting frontcourt duo of Dearica Hamby and Azurá Stevens on account of their defensive woes. Also, paying either their presumptive market price to come off the bench would be a misallocation of resources. But the Storm’s situation has stood out because of Malonga’s midseason breakout.
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