Angel Reese, Napheesa Collier among top players to watch this season
A face of the WNBA for two decades, Diana Taurasi, has retired. A new collective bargaining agreement between the league and its players union — one that could bring higher salaries — is under negotiation. And while the WNBA Finals in four of the last five years have featured either the Las Vegas Aces or the New York Liberty, that’s no guarantee their hold on the league will continue.
Into this moment of transition arrives a new WNBA season, which begins Friday with no shortage of intriguing players. NBC News breaks down who to watch.
Caitlin Clark, Indiana Fever
Having earned Rookie of the Year and led Indiana to the postseason, Clark has firmly established she can guide a high-powered offense. Now, Clark won’t have as heavy of an offensive burden to carry in her second season, with the offseason additions of DeWanna Bonner, Sophie Cunningham and Natasha Howard to an offense that was one of the league’s absolute best during the final half. With the ball constantly in her hands, Clark will have to sort out the best ways to involve her teammates while still playing her trademark aggressive style.
Arike Ogunbowale, Dallas Wings
The seventh-year guard has finished in the top 10 of MVP voting every season of her career but one and has never averaged less than 18 points per game. Criticized at times as an inefficient scorer, the career 39% shooter is nonetheless still a top option for creating her own shot off the dribble.
Her challenge this season is building chemistry with a new running mate after an offseason in which Dallas traded away Satou Sabally and drafted former Connecticut guard Paige Bueckers first overall. A backcourt of Ogunbowale and Bueckers is dangerous in theory. How will it work in practice?
Angel Reese, Chicago Sky
The league’s leading rebounder as a rookie (13.1 per game), Reese established last season that her star appeal in college could carry over to the WNBA. For her encore, can Reese diversify the offensive threat she poses? Thanks in part to her offensive rebounding prowess, 55% of all of Reese’s shots last season came within 3 feet of the basket. (Only four players who played at least 100 minutes took a higher percentage of their shots that close.) Yet Reese’s 49% accuracy at the rim also ranked among the league’s worst, and farther from the basket her accuracy dipped considerably.
Satou Sabally and Alyssa Thomas, Phoenix Mercury
For the first time since 2003, the Phoenix Mercury will start a season without both Taurasi, who retired, and Brittney Griner, who signed in free agency with Atlanta. How do you replace two franchise fixtures? Make a splashy offseason trade and hope it pays off. Phoenix has oriented its future around new stars Sabally and Alyssa Thomas, the former All-Star while with Connecticut, who were brought in to join Kahleah Copper as a star trio.
When Sabally, who missed 25 games to injury, was healthy last season, she joined Caitlin Clark as the only other player in the league to average at least 15.0 points, 5.0 rebounds and 5.0 assists. The Mercury hope she can remain that efficient while playing next to Thomas, a six-time member of the league’s all-defense team while finishing in the top five of MVP voting each of the last three years.
Marine Johannes, New York Liberty
The WNBA champions return stars Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu, the franchise pillars that support the team’s repeat championship aspirations. Yet don’t overlook the re-signing of Johannes, a career 39% 3-point shooter who can make it even more difficult for opponents to defend the Liberty by spreading the floor.
Johannes joined the Liberty as a rookie in 2019 and played for the club in 2022 and 2023, but didn’t play in the WNBA last season while focusing on preparing for the Olympics, where she helped lead France to the silver medal. Now, she is back and makes the Liberty even better.
Brittney Griner, Atlanta Dream
An experiment is happening in Atlanta, where the Dream hired a longtime college coach to implement an uptempo offense that emphasizes movement to create space. Intriguingly, within that offense, the 6-foot-9 Griner, who has attempted only 44 3-pointers in her entire career, said she has been given “the green light” to shoot more threes. In the preseason, she started 3-for-3 from deep — a small but noteworthy sample size. If the 34-year-old Griner can make deep shots consistently, it opens up a whole new side of her game late in her career, and with it potential for her team.
Napheesa Collier, Minnesota Lynx
After narrowly losing in last year’s WNBA Finals with Minnesota, Collier went to Unrivaled, the offseason league that she and New York’s Stewart co-founded, and averaged a league-high 25.7 points per game this winter. That should set up Collier, last season’s MVP runner-up and defensive player of the year, to start the season fast.