Valkyries Unlikely to Draft Paige Bueckers as WNBA Sets Draft Slot

The WNBA announced Thursday that the Golden State Valkyries will receive the No. 5 overall pick in the 2025 WNBA Draft, setting an operational precedent for the expansion teams set to join the league this decade.

Toronto and Portland, scheduled to enter the WNBA in 2026, can now expect to select just outside the lottery in their first draft, too. The WNBA has not had an expansion team since the Atlanta Dream received the No. 4 pick (and subsequently traded down) before they began play in 2008, and so it had been uncertain how the process would work.

As a result of Thursday’s announcement, Golden State fans who have pined for projected top pick Paige Bueckers of UConn will be disappointed, barring an extremely unlikely trade up involving the Valkyries’ selections from the separate expansion draft, where they will nab veterans from existing franchises to fill out their roster. Bueckers is a near certainty to be off the board well before Golden State is on the clock at No. 5.

In another top U.S. women’s sports league, the NWSL, the San Diego Wave received the No. 1 pick when they joined in 2022, allowing the soccer club to take generational talent Naomi Girma from Stanford.

Bueckers, who was eligible for this year’s WNBA Draft but chose to return to UConn, is widely considered the top prospect for 2025. But Stanford’s Kiki Iriafen—a breakout star of the last NCAA Tournament—and LSU’s Aneesah Morrow are also among a group of eligible players seen as potential high-level pros.

The Los Angeles Sparks have the best odds for the No. 1 overall pick, followed by the Dallas Wings and Washington Mystics. It’s impossible for the Chicago Sky to select first despite being in the lottery because they owe Dallas a pick swap.

The Valkyries entered the final stages of putting their staff together this week, announcing that Natalie Nakase would take over as their first head coach. The expansion draft is now scheduled for Nov. 17—a month earlier than the league originally announced.

In the expansion draft, Golden State will select from a designated pool of players left unprotected by the 12 other teams, who can each make a maximum of six players unavailable to the Valkyries. Then, with most of its roster assembled, Golden State will participate in next April’s standard entry draft for first-year WNBA players such as Bueckers.

(This story has been updated in the second paragraph to nix an editing error that misstated the Atlanta Dream’s original 2008 WNBA Draft position.)