🎙️ Layup Lines: Expansion draft

Happy Friday and welcome back to Layup Lines, your quick recap of what’s going on in the WNBA. Today’s big event: The expansion draft for the Toronto Tempo and Portland Fire starts at 3:30pm ET on ESPN.

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📋 How this draft works

To go deep on draft explainers, check out HerHoopStats, CBS or The Athletic. Here are the high-level details.

• Today’s expansion draft is two rounds, with Toronto and Portland each having up to six picks per round. After the Tempo won a coin toss and decided to pick 6th (not 7th) in the April 13 rookie draft and second (not first) in the expansion draft, the Fire pick first today.

• The 13 other WNBA teams have submitted a list of five of their own players they want to protect from this draft. Every other player is available to Toronto and Portland.

• To try and prevent a team from getting wiped out, each team can have a maximum of just two players swiped (one in each round), and each expansion team can only offer one $1.4 million supermax contract. So if Dallas is ready to move on from Arike Ogunbowale, for example, Portland could talk themselves into building their young roster around her max salary — but that’s the only max contract they can offer out of this expansion draft.

• Predictions: The media tried guessing the Golden State Valkyries’ expansion draft last year and from what I can tell, nobody predicted more than three players correctly. It’s a tough exercise when the list of players the non-expansion teams are protecting isn’t made public.

  • That said, I would expect several European stashes and talented-but-underperforming young players, as well as bigger veteran names like Ogunbowale, Azurá Stevens, Li Yueru and Julie Allemand, to be drafted.

📰 Other headlines from around the league

• Liberty stars Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu both say they're staying in New York (Yahoo!)

• Sky trade second-round picks with Fire and Tempo (Chicago Sun-Times)

• As Houston celebrates return of WNBA's Comets, Connecticut fans fume (Houston Chronicle)

• Houston Comets hire ex-ESPN NBA reporter Kevin Pelton (ESPN)

☄️ Hot take to go

• I think it’s good that the Connecticut Sun are moving from a casino in Uncasville to the Toyota Center and becoming the Houston Comets before the 2027 season. Yes, this really sucks for Connecticut fans and no, I don’t love new owner Tilman Fertitta, but post-lockout and mid growth boom, I care about the players more than any other entity. Houston’s existing history and stadium infrastructure is objectively better for the players than Connecticut, whose ownership group never really invested in their team before selling for a record $300M.

• Boston could’ve worked out (and still might in the future) but this map should make it clear why the league wanted to move back to Texas and not another East Coast market — remember that Cleveland (2028), Detroit (2029) and Philadelphia (2030) are right around the corner.

Layup Lines is written 100% by a human being. AI tools help with the visuals. Thanks for reading!

— Everett Cook, Founder & Editor