We Got A Real WNBA Trade, With Stars And Everything

There was a trade—a big splashy one, which is rare in the WNBA! The stars of this three-team deal, teased by Annie Costabile of the Chicago Sun-Times on Saturday before ESPN’s Shams Charania announced it Sunday night, are Jewell Loyd and Kelsey Plum, both of whom were looking to move on from the teams that drafted them.

Here are the details:

The Aces get: Jewell Loyd from Seattle, the No. 13 pick in 2025 from Los Angeles

The Storm get: The No. 2 pick in 2025 from Los Angeles, Li Yueru from Los Angeles, a 2026 first-round pick from Las Vegas

The Sparks get: Kelsey Plum from Las Vegas, the No. 9 pick in 2025 from Seattle, a 2026 second-round pick from Seattle

How the Aces fared in this trade depends on what you make of Loyd. Until last season, I’d been pretty forgiving of her least efficient years. They coincided with the years she had to shoot a lot more, like 2019, when both Breanna Stewart and Sue Bird were injured, or 2023, after both had left. But last season, the Storm put Nneka Ogwumike and Skylar Diggins-Smith around her, and Loyd still had an awful shooting season. The Aces hope they’re getting the 36 percent three-point shooter she was up until last year, when she shot 36 percent from the field and 27.4 percent from three.

A locked-in Loyd is tons of fun to watch. On a visit to Seattle in 2024, I was lucky enough to catch her 23-point first half against the Indiana Fever. But locked-in Loyd is so elusive that I wonder whether the defensive upgrade is worth it for the Aces. At 31, Loyd’s also old enough that her best shooting days might just be behind her now. But, the optimist says, maybe they aren’t! The optimist watched the Liberty too-small the Aces last year in the playoffs and thinks the 5-foot-11 Loyd offers more of the size Las Vegas needed. On a team with A’ja Wilson and Jackie Young, Loyd doesn’t figure as a primary option, which might be better for her.

The basketball part aside, it’ll be sad for Aces fans to say goodbye to a player who has been with the franchise since before they moved to Vegas. Plum dug herself out of some early-career muck to become a pillar of back-to-back championship teams. The same goes for fans in Seattle, where Loyd won two titles and set a single-season WNBA scoring record.

The Storm entered these trade talks with the least leverage, but made out well. Li Yueru is … whatever, serviceable. To get a No. 2 pick for a 31-year-old star who asked out after a career-worst season is a tidy piece of business. The pick should be useful whether Seattle flips it again or keeps it. Most mock drafts like Notre Dame’s excellent point guard Olivia Miles in this slot. The Storm’s own future is up in the air: A bunch of their players are unrestricted free agents, and their cap situation might have prevented a straight Plum-for-Loyd swap. Plum had trade veto rights because of her “core designation,” so she may have prevented that herself.

To me, there’s no real question that the Sparks got the best player in the deal. Even accounting for the Kelsey Prune moments on defense, Plum’s outside shot makes her a top shooting guard in the league. On this PG-needy Sparks team, she’s a capable enough playmaker that she could even spend some time there, too. Plum, like Loyd, joins her new team on a one-year deal. The Sparks, The Next’s Howard Megdal reports, get “a chance to show Kelsey Plum what a long-term partnership would look like.” ESPN’s Alexa Philippou went as far as to say that Plum hopes to be a Spark past 2025.

In general, I’m sympathetic to the proud tradition of “Fuck them picks” in Los Angeles sports. Some WNBA teams are so bad at scouting and developing that trading for actual players is a much better use of their picks. I know Kelsey Plum is a good WNBA player; I don’t know anything about the second overall pick. If Miles’s career turned out like Plum’s, that would be a pretty fantastic outcome.

But this is still an odd move to make right before The Big Bang of 2026, when all but two of the league’s veteran players hit free agency and the new Portland and Toronto teams expand the WNBA universe. For the Sparks, a franchise whose dysfunction and lagging facilities have made it unappealing to free agents, a player they can trap and Mark Safe from The Big Bang (say, the second overall pick on her rookie contract) is extra valuable. Because they do not own their pick in the 2026 draft, 2025’s is extra extra valuable. That Plum might stick around for a while makes this easier to process at first glance. At second glance, why not just sign her in free agency next year and keep the pick? The Sparks would have to think they can contend now. As fun as Plum, Cameron Brink, Rickea Jackson, and Dearica Hamby should be together, I have trouble seeing it.

Philippou added that the Sparks felt OK parting with the pick because they weren’t sure who’d be declaring for the draft this year. The past few drafts have prompted people to ask whether college stars shouldn’t all take their extra COVID years to make more NIL money. For players at the top of the draft, I tend to think this overstates the difference in college NIL earnings and pro endorsement earnings, and understates the value of a salaried union job. But it’s true that rookies drafted this year are getting a crummy deal. Theirs will be the last rookie contracts signed under the 2020 CBA, and salaries are expected to go up dramatically in the next agreement. There’s another reason everyone is watching that 2025 No. 2 pick; it could very well end up being the cheapest “value contract” in the league.

It might make sense for a player to wait in college for another year. She has to weigh her own finances, health, and sense of urgency—remember that great athletes like to be challenged. But when this trade news hit, it was hard to resist trying to read it for clues. After the Dallas Wings won the draft lottery in November, at least some people around the league thought Paige Bueckers might try to force a pre-draft trade, even before Satou Sabally asked out. The Sparks front office might know that’s not happening. They might know that is happening, but not for Los Angeles. They might know that Bueckers plans to play a fifth season. They might know that Olivia Miles plans to play another season. They might know something we don’t, or they might just not really know how to run a team. The fun of the WNBA is that I’d believe any of the above.

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