What the Jewell Loyd-Kelsey Plum trade tells us about Paige Bueckers — Alissa Pili, Bria Hartley talk Athletes Unlimited

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What does someone who isn’t even in the league have to do with a three-team trade involving veteran stars? Let’s break it down.

The decision to make this deal for Seattle and Las Vegas was an obvious one. For the Aces, the chance to add an elite scoring guard who can assure the Aces A’ja Wilson won’t have to carry the scoring load alone if Chelsea Gray has more 2024 season nights than the 2023 vintage in the year ahead carried more obvious win-now potential than any other move, keeping Kelsey Plum possibly excepted. Whether Plum wished to stay in Las Vegas, however, was a different question. An Aces team that thrives to an extent huge even by pro team standards on an us-against-the-world mentality needed everybody to be all-in.

For the Storm, the one-year experiment of pairing Loyd with Skylar Diggins-Smith and Nneka Ogwumike, let’s just say, has not worked out. Taking future assets heading into a period of great unknowns and an overwhelming majority of the WNBA headed for free agency and a new collective bargaining agreement was judged by Talisa Rhea, Pokey Chatman and company to be the higher-percentage play than taking a one-year gamble on a core of, say, Plum, Ogwumike and Diggins-Smith, had they attempted to simply negotiate a two-way deal.

All of which is where the Los Angeles Sparks come in. Los Angeles is considered an attractive option for Paige Bueckers should Bueckers elect to leverage her way to another team in the 2025 WNBA Draft (see my earlier reporting here for how and why she might do that) but ultimately decided the chance to add Plum to the Rickea Jackson/Cameron Brink mix was too attractive to pass up, and it is hard to blame them. Los Angeles was checking on Bueckers’ status as late as the day of the trade, multiple league sources tell The Next, and the Sparks would still love to add Bueckers even after the Plum deal, because Raegan Pebley knows generational talent when she sees it, but around the league it is believed that option is now closed to the Sparks.

But the Sparks deciding to take the Plum deal instead says everything about the choices in the months ahead for Bueckers. The idea that she might elect to avoid going to the Dallas Wings with the top overall pick has been treated in many quarters as entirely a referendum on the Dallas Wings, and while yes, it is absolutely partially that, the Sparks understood that there are many more elements at play here.

For one thing, the Sparks and Kelsey Plum will have a one-year deal in place. Yes, Los Angeles did speak at length to Plum about the long-term plan and got her buy-in for it before executing the trade, but a lot can change in a year — for reference, I will take you back to this Seattle Storm press conference way back in February 2024.

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But any player selected in the 2025 WNBA Draft will need to sign a four-year contract. Think about that: just by choosing to enter this particular draft, but not the next one, Bueckers or anyone else will be tied to the very rules that led the WNBA Players’ Association to opt out of its current collective bargaining agreement and begin negotiating a new one with the league. That CBA now expires after the 2025 season.

Choosing to enter the 2025 draft isn’t about loyalty to one team or another. It’s about loyalty to a set of rules that the players are actively working to change, and once they do, will only apply to those selected in the past few drafts, and no one for longer than those selected in the 2025 draft! In a world with overseas, seven-figure deals, Unrivaled and Athletes Unlimited at home, the concept of choice is one Bueckers has the ability to showcase for all who come after her. And if you’ll permit a personal observation: we haven’t heard anything like a backlash over male athletes who make similar calculations.

And if entering the 2025 draft is, indeed, the least-lucrative of Bueckers’ financial options, the reverse of this is also something to keep in mind: there is nothing more valuable to a WNBA team this offseason than a chance to get a franchise-altering player in the 2025 draft and sign her for four years at rookie-scale money. If your player personnel folks are telling you Bueckers is such a player, the value of four years of her is incalculably more valuable than any free agent. (If they aren’t, get new player personnel folks.)

No one, and I repeat no one, who is anywhere close to that level is signing for more than one year in free agency this year. Kelsey Plum and Jewell Loyd will absolutely help their teams immensely in 2025, and then they’ll have the ability to help anybody else in 2026, and at prices far beyond what even the max free agents are set to receive this coming month so long as the WNBPA does its job.

And the Dallas Wings, or the Seattle Storm, who now have an enviable collection of assets, or the Golden State Valkyries, whose debut paired with that of Paige Bueckers would supercharge the WNBA’s efforts in expansion, or anyone else with a professional basketball team should all be doing everything possible to acquire Bueckers, who still holds all the cards.

Plum to Los Angeles? Sure, a great acquisition for the Sparks, especially with an ownership group that is perhaps less patient than it should be. But make no mistake: figuring out a way to bring Paige Bueckers to a WNBA team in 2025 — under 2025 rules — is the biggest potential prize of this offseason. And the primary barrier to any team doing it may have nothing to do with the team itself.

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This week in women’s basketball

Obviously, first and foremost, keep up on the firehose of news over at The Next.

Maya Goldberg-Safir brings a literary voice to women’s basketball writing and I hope you’ll support her work.

Loved this from Jane Burns about Iowa trailblazer Mary Berdo.

Rachel Ullstrom from Richmond is having a special season.

Terrific piece on Maddy Siegrist here.

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Five at The IX: Bria Hartley, Alissa Pili

Locked On Women’s Basketball: Bria Hartley, Alissa Pili tell us why the future is Unlimited

Mondays: Soccer

By: Annie Peterson, @AnnieMPeterson, AP Women’s Soccer

Tuesdays: Tennis

By: Joey Dillon, @JoeyDillon, Freelance Tennis Writer

Wednesdays: Basketball

By: Howard Megdal, @HowardMegdal, The Next

Thursdays: Golf

By: Marin Dremock, @MDremock, The IX

Fridays: Hockey

By: @TheIceGarden, The Ice Garden

Saturdays: Gymnastics

By: Lela Moore, @runlelarun, Freelance Writer