On Friday night, the Dallas Wings lost guard Carla Leite to the Golden State Valkyries in the 2025 WNBA Expansion Draft. Leite, a 5’9” French guard, is just 20 years old. She’s been playing professionally in Ligue Féminine de Basketball since she was 18 and has become one of the league’s top players.
Dallas invested a top-10 pick in Leite, selecting her ninth overall in 2024. And when you watch her play, you can see why— Leite is an incredible scorer and playmaker. She excels in the pick and roll, possesses incredible live-dribble passing ability, draws fouls at a high rate, and can hit pull-up jumpers. Her poise, basketball IQ, and tenacity on the court are far beyond her years.
Shockingly, Dallas did not protect Leite in the expansion draft. And this writer cannot possibly understand why. 2024 was a deep draft class; there were quality players on the board when Dallas selected Leite. Fellow French guard Leila Lacan was considered the better prospect by many, and she was selected by the Sun one spot after Leite. Connecticut protected Lacan in the expansion draft despite similar concerns about French players prioritizing WNBA basketball. By letting Leite go before she ever plays a second for Dallas, the Wings might as well have traded that pick for thin air.
Wasting high draft picks is nothing new for the Wings. Since 2020, Dallas has drafted 13 players in the first round. Just five of these were on the active roster in 2024: Satou Sabally, Maddy Siegrist, Lou Lopez Senechal, Stephanie Soares, and Jacy Sheldon. If you remove Sabally’s half-season of production, the other four players combined to average 16.8 total points per game. And that number is carried by Siegrist’s 9.4 average. While Sabally was drafted in 2020, the rest of this group consists of either rookie or sophomore players. Every other first-round pick over the last five years has been wasted. Two of the remaining picks were middling in Dallas and found success elsewhere (Ty Harris and Veronica Burton), and five are out of the league entirely. And now, they’ve given up on Carla Leite before she ever got a chance.
It would be one thing if the Wings’ roster were just too jam-packed with talent and Leite got squeezed out. I’m a big believer in her game, so I likely still would have disagreed with that, but it could have been understandable. But this Dallas roster is littered with expendable players. There’s a reason they were bad enough to win the Paige Bueckers sweepstakes! We’ll never know which six players were protected, but if we assume Sabally, Arike Ogunbowale, Siegrist, Sheldon, and Teaira McCowan are locks, that means the front office chose to protect one of Soares, Lopez Senechal, Sevgi Uzun, Kalani Brown, Jaelyn Brown, or Awak Kuier over Leite. And no disrespect to any of those players, but none of them come close to Leite’s upside.
It seems like the front office didn’t protect Leite because she hasn’t been on the team yet and it was easier to let her go than deal with losing someone the organization already knows. And I’m sorry, but that is stupid. You’re a professional basketball team, you should not prioritize personal relationships over talent accumulation.
I can almost sympathize with how hard it is to choose between a vast collection of former high-draft picks for one, final protected spot. Maybe new GM Curt Miller wasn’t ready to give up on Stephanie Soares or Lou Lopez Senechal after neither player got to play much in their rookie seasons. Maybe Awak Kuier will return next year, ready to take a massive leap. But Golden State can’t draft all those players, and it’s unfathomable that Leite wasn’t considered the most valuable of the group.
And why is Teaira McCowan, a player the entire industry projected as certain to be protected, valued over that same group of young players? McCowan can score inside and grab some rebounds, but she is one of the worst defensive bigs in basketball. Her effort level and intensity on the court come and go. Her offensive game is limited, and she can’t shoot. She is 6’7” but can’t guard the rim effectively. She is also 28 years old and is what she is: a net negative player on a max contract. She’s untouchable in the expansion draft, but Carla Leite is not? It doesn’t make sense from both an asset management and basketball perspective. Golden State probably wouldn’t even have selected her.
There’s a chance Leite doesn’t ever succeed in the WNBA and none of this matters at all. Hell, that could be the most likely outcome based on historical precedent. But she was one of my favorite prospects. I watched every game she played after she was drafted to Dallas and the upside is so tantalizing. The WNBA is short on dynamic, playmaking point guards, and Leite could fill that void in Golden State. She’s a high-ceiling, low-floor player due to some bad habits and lack of off-ball game, but the talent is undeniable. Letting her go in this expansion draft is unacceptable with the state of Dallas’s roster. This new front office was supposed to turn things around and start making smart decisions for a change. They failed their first big test, and I can only hope it isn’t a sign of things to come.
