WNBA Dissected 2023 Week 10: Deals that might happen, and why they probably won't
Another look at interesting topics from around the WNBA this week, including examining the trade possibilities with the deadline less than two weeks away
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Let's make a deal?
The news this week that Candace Parker has had surgery on her foot and is out indefinitely took me back to 2008. The Detroit Shock were 16-8 and one of the favorites for the title when key rebounder and defender Cheryl Ford blew out her knee with 10 games left in the regular season. The Washington Mystics were 9-14 and going nowhere. The deal was so obvious that a lot of fans suggested it long before the teams consummated a trade three weeks later, Detroit sending promising young rookie Tasha Humphrey with Shay Murphy and a second-round pick to Washington for veteran big Taj McWilliams-Franklin. She slid smoothly into Ford's spot and played an important role in Detroit winning that year's championship. So big deals for key replacement players can be made during the season. But it says something that my go-to example is from 15 years ago by a franchise that's changed city twice since it happened.
This year's trade deadline is 11 days away, hitting on August 7 at 8 p.m. ET. As we saw a few weeks ago with the Queen Egbo/Amanda Zahui B trade between Indiana and Washington, in-season trades are still possible in the modern WNBA, but they're difficult. As I detailed at the time, Washington had to release multiple hardship players and make the deal by that specific day in order to fit a scant few dollars under the salary cap. They immediately added a hardship player back, and have added more since, taking them right back over the cap. This is the key complication with making in-season deals. Both teams have to end a trade under the salary cap, but as it stands right now, seven of the league's 12 teams are already over the cap. Only one - the Indiana Fever - has the space left to swallow an entire extra player salary.
There are plenty more complications on top. Now that we've passed the midpoint of the regular season, non-guaranteed salaries have become guaranteed for the remainder of the season. So teams can't just cut players to create extra cap or roster space - those players can still be waived, but they would have to be paid out in full (and the team would need enough space remaining to be able to get back to a legal roster). There's also the rule that teams can only have a maximum of six contracts with any protected money on them at the same time. Las Vegas, for example, already have six - A'ja Wilson, Kelsey Plum, Chelsea Gray, Jackie Young, Alysha Clark and, bizarrely, Cayla George - so they can't trade for another protected contract unless one is going out the other way. There's a reason I only write crazy trade idea columns during the offseason.
But this is the time of year when you expect teams to at least be considering these options. Good teams have had time to work out how good they are, what their holes are, and whether injuries have created enough issues that they need to make a move to fix them. Bad teams have had time to realize how bad they are, and recognise that they might be better off cashing in on players now rather than watching them leave after the end of a fruitless regular season. Trading away good players might even help them lose a little more to improve their draft prospects. In other U.S. sports leagues, this would be the height of rumor-season.
So who could, at least theoretically, be moved? Jewell Loyd's name has been thrown around plenty, especially because she will be an uncoreable unrestricted free agent at the end of the season due to having already reached the limit of the number of seasons where she can be cored. Might as well trade her for some kind of value now rather than watching her leave for nothing in the offseason, right? It's actually the same situation with Brittney Griner in Phoenix, Nneka Ogwumike in Los Angeles, and Kahleah Copper in Chicago too - although your views on whether they're all 'bad teams' may vary. But even beyond all the complications discussed above, I don't think Seattle will move Loyd. As with the other three mentioned above, Loyd is viewed as a key piece of the franchise, and the return from a deal likely couldn't match the value of keeping her in-house and away from the experience of playing for anyone else. Unless they were going to sign a contract extension as part of the trade, any other team dealing for one of these players would be acquiring them as a rental, knowing they could walk away for nothing at the end of the year. That inevitably would keep the value of offers down. Teams who would want players in those situations would also likely be those who consider themselves championship contenders - which means their 2024 first-round picks aren't likely to be too high, so would be less valuable to the team giving up their star. Would teams like Washington or Connecticut think about a deal for Loyd if they could make the math work? Maybe. But that supermax contract and the team cap situations make it hard to fit the numbers together and would require multiple pieces to be involved. It all looks too complicated and too difficult to come up with something that would make it worthwhile to Seattle. I don't see it.
So what about smaller deals? Las Vegas seems an obvious place to start, having looked thin all season even before this week's news about Parker and the developing Riquna Williams situation. However, their two recent seven-day hardship contracts with Ashley Joens have taken them just over the cap, so they'd have to save money in a trade to make it legal, and it would have to be for someone better than Joens or whoever else they could sign in that hardship spot. The Aces also have no first-round picks to trade, after giving up their 2024 pick to Los Angeles in the Dearica Hamby deal and the league taking away their 2025 pick after the investigation into promises of impermissible benefits in Hamby's contract extension. Someone like Emma Cannon from Indiana would make sense to me except that her deal is guaranteed, so Cayla George would have to go the other way, and then more pieces would have to be involved to make the money work. It's hard to find a sensible deal, especially when at least five other teams in the league won't want to help Vegas out because they have postseason ambitions of their own. Maybe they just sign Emily Engstler in that hardship spot now that Minnesota have had to release her, as a slightly more WNBA-seasoned option than Joens.
New York have looked like they needed perimeter defensive help all season, but a deal would be pointless unless it was for someone who would actually play. Without making the kind of major changes that you don't want to be working through with a month left in the regular season, it's virtually impossible to find a deal that's better than what they could already do from within. If they were to decide that playing two of Courtney Vandersloot, Sabrina Ionescu and Marine Johannès virtually all the time is too damaging to their defense, they could slide Betnijah Laney to the 2 more and play bigger lineups with Kayla Thornton or Jocelyn Willoughby on the wing.
Connecticut just added Bernadett Határ to help in the paint, and that's probably as much as we'll see from them. Their big moves were made in the offseason and took them so close to the cap that additional deals became difficult. Similarly, Dallas have already done all their re-shaping, so they likely won't be doing any more. Although if either Lou Lopez Sénéchal or Diamond DeShields were to return and force the release of Kalani Brown, a few teams might try to finagle a way to add Brown themselves.
So essentially this was a lot of words to say I'm not expecting much movement over the next 11 days. I'm sure there'll be a few phone calls floating around just to test the waters - and as the only team with cap space the Fever should absolutely be keeping their phones charged, even if it's just to gain value from helping facilitate a deal between other teams - but that's a long way from calling in a completed deal to the league office. Here's hoping the next CBA sees a few tweaks to the rules and the cap math that make more deals viable and can keep the rumor mill turning with genuine possibilities.
Wade out, Wade in
I didn't get to talk about this last week due to the unusual format of the column, but I wanted to address Dwyane Wade joining the ownership group of the Chicago Sky and the importance of that move. We've seen so many NBA players and former players pay lip service to the WNBA over the years, and there's value to that. Showing up at games, wearing those orange hoodies, or talking about how good the WNBA players are does aid in building the legitimacy of the league. But the number of ex-players or minor celebrities who've said or tweeted "we should buy a WNBA team!", or 'shown interest' in joining an ownership group, only to disappear into the ether afterwards, has grown very tiresome over the years. Show me who you are and what you're about, don't just tell me.
Wade is showing us. He's putting his money where his mouth is and genuinely stepping into the fold. Having a recent NBA superstar who's respected by fans and players, and beloved by his city, actually get involved is important. It makes it real, might make a few more people take the league seriously, and might help the Sky take that next step towards competing on an infrastructure level with the teams who've recently been taken over by billionaires willing to keep spending. And all of that is without knowing what his actual outlay was. For all I know, Wade might've paid Michael Alter $1 for 0.000001% of the Sky. It doesn't really matter. It's about being a visible part of the fabric of the league, showing his belief in the WNBA and its future, and potentially opening doors for the next wave of people to follow him.
And if it makes Kahleah Copper slightly more likely to stick around in the offseason, or some other free agents more likely to join her, then whatever the percentage involved was, Alter will consider it a very worthwhile transaction.
Lineup Minutiae
Cheyenne Parker is back in the starting lineup for Atlanta, but it doesn't seem like everything is entirely back to normal just yet. For those who weren't following the saga, Parker returned from appearing in her first All-Star Game and was summarily benched, with no explanation offered by the team beyond calling it a "matchup decision" (or "coach's decision", depending on the conversation). Parker continued to play off the bench, albeit in limited minutes, and didn't appear injured. It lasted two games, before she returned to the starting lineup she had been part of all season, including through the six-game winning streak that led into the break. The whole thing was baffling, and felt like a cover-up for something where we still don't know the full story.
It's only been two games, but Parker hasn't looked like quite the same player since returning to her regular spot. She was 3-for-12 from the floor in a loss against Connecticut, then only played 18 minutes while going 2-for-7 against Phoenix. The Dream have still looked pretty good in general and haven't lost to anyone apart from Connecticut since June, but they need Parker going forward. They have lots of complementary posts, but she's the only one they can really toss the ball to in the low post and watch her go to work. Hopefully, this is a momentary blip and everything will return to normal shortly. The Dream have been a fun team this year and she's been an important part of that. I really didn't want to include her in the earlier potential trade commentary section of this column, but I certainly considered it.
Over in Dallas, a mainstay of this section of the column for many years, the Wings finally seem to have settled on a lineup. Whether their recent surge has been a result of that continuity, or the continuity has been a result of the recent success, is something of a chicken/egg argument. But regardless, whatever they're doing appears to be working. Crystal Dangerfield has made the starting point guard spot her own and isn't going anywhere, but Latricia Trammell has shown her willingness to go to either Odyssey Sims or Veronica Burton as Dangerfield’s backup depending on matchup and performance. The other four starting spots pick themselves now that Arike Ogunbowale, Satou Sabally, Natasha Howard and Teaira McCowan have actually all been healthy and available for an extended stretch of games. The bench is still something of a crapshoot, with Trammell unsure what she's going to get from anyone on any given night, but this all feels like progress.
For the first time in years you feel like you know which faces are going to be there for Dallas in every game, likely for 30+ minutes apiece, and you're relatively confident of the level of performance you're going to get from them. Health has been hugely important, especially in terms of finally receiving the full Satou Sabally experience, but Trammell also has to be given plenty of credit. The opening weeks were messy, but once they made some minor moves, got everyone back and made some decisions, the Wings have begun to look like one of the scariest teams in the league. If they're in one piece come the postseason, no one's going to look forward to facing this group in a playoff series.
Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. If you like our work, be sure to check out our stats site, our podcast, and our social media accounts on Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.
fantastic work here Richard