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You can find previous installments in the WNBA season preview series here: New York Liberty, Minnesota Lynx, Connecticut Sun, Las Vegas Aces
Seattle returned to the playoffs last year after a losing season in 2023, winning its most games in a season since one of its recent championship seasons.
The Storm’s 25 wins last season were their most since going 26-8 in the regular season en route to the 2018 WNBA title. It was the fourth time Seattle has won at least 60% of its games in the last five seasons dating back to an 18-4 (.818) campaign in the Wubble on its way to another WNBA title.
Seattle’s four titles are tied for the most in WNBA history, but it’s the only one of the three four-time champs that never had what I’d call a dynasty. The closest Seattle came was winning a pair of titles during its Sue Bird/Breanna Stewart era in 2018 and 2020, but those are its only two Finals appearances in the last 14 seasons. Its previous two titles were six years apart in 2004 and 2010. Dynasties aren’t everything, though, and Seattle can at least claim the best Finals record among active franchises (tied with the Houston Comets for the best ever at 4-0).
Seattle is a proud and historically successful franchise in a sports-crazed city, but one that’s clearly in a transitional phase if not a full rebuild. It should be a playoff team and always has one of the strongest fan bases in the league, but I can’t say I’d bet on much of the Storm’s present being part of its future, and that appears to be by design.
The Storm is without question Seattle’s most successful sports franchise as the NFL’s Seahawks (one Super Bowl win), MLB’s Mariners (no World Series appearances), NBA’s dearly departed SuperSonics (one championship) and NHL’s young Kraken (founded in 2021) have brought the city only two championships between them.
The franchise is five years removed from its last championship and WNBA Finals appearance and just traded away that team’s last remaining star for the No. 2 pick in the draft, which it spent on 19-year-old Dominique Malonga, so there’s really no question that the Storm’s eyes are turned towards the future. As I’ll get into after the paywall, there’s a rotation’s worth of solid veterans here, but they’re all set to be free agents after the season and generally trending towards the end of their careers. The roster should be filled out by some young players with upside, but no one you’d be stunned to see Seattle let go of when reassembling the team for 2026 and beyond. Everyone but Malonga seems to be embarking on a season-long audition for the entire league.
Seattle finished last season eighth in the WNBA in offensive rating but had most of the components of a good offense if it just could’ve made some shots.
The Storm had the second-lowest turnover rate (14.2%), the lowest opponent steal rate (10.1%), the lowest opponent block rate (11.0%) and the third-lowest foul rate (17.9%) in the league last season, so it’s fair to say they were among the best at avoiding wasted possessions. Unfortunately, more than their fair share of possessions ended with missed shots as Seattle finished eighth in field-goal percentage (43.5%) and had the worst 3-point percentage in the league (28.8%).
Seattle finished 2023 averaging the league’s fewest points per play and points per scoring attempt while also having the worst effective field-goal percentage in 2023 and improved to seventh, ninth and ninth in those categories last season, so there was at least some movement in the right direction. The drop off has been precipitous from the team’s golden years, though, as the Storm finished in the top three in each of those categories every year from 2016 through 2022 except for 2019, the season Breanna Stewart missed due to an Achilles injury.
