For the past two seasons, the Storm’s roster has been very top-heavy. After losing Sue Bird to retirement and Breanna Stewart to the New York Liberty, the Storm retooled around Jewell Loyd, Nneka Ogwumike, Skylar Diggins, Gabby Williams, and Ezi Magebgor in the 2024 season. The rest of the roster was very thin—so thin, in fact, that the Valkyries didn’t even pick a Storm player in the expansion draft.
While the Storm underwent some big changes in the offseason when they traded Jewell Loyd to Las Vegas, the lack of depth on the roster didn’t change. The Storm essentially replaced Loyd with Erica Wheeler and later also brought in Brittney Sykes, but could do little to address the team’s depth. Jordan Horston, Nika Mühl, and Katie Lou Samuelson all had to miss the season with ACL injuries. Dominique Malonga was the only truly impactful addition to the team.
Due to that lack of depth, the Storm won’t struggle with the same tough questions the expansion draft for the Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo will pose for other teams. ESPN recently reported that teams are expected to be allowed to protect five players.
The Storm’s list of protected players should be done quickly
Seattle has the advantage that two of their most important players will be ineligible for the expansion draft, barring some big changes. Nneka Ogwumike and Skylar Diggins have both been cored twice, which would make them ineligible under the current CBA. It still remains to be seen if anything related to the core designation changes in a new CBA.
Even without Ogwumike and Diggins, four of the five spots are easily selected. The Storm will undoubtedly protect Gabby Williams, Ezi Magbegor, Dominique Malonga, and Jordan Horston. Malonga is the future of the franchise, and Horston also showed interesting two-way potential before her injury, but Williams and Magbegor can help the team win now if they choose to re-sign with the Storm.
That leaves one spot for Nika Mühl, Mackenzie Holmes, Erica Wheeler, Brittney Sykes, and Lexie Brown. Even if the Storm are eager to re-sign Wheeler in free agency, it seems unlikely that they will need to protect her. Wheeler is an unrestricted free agent, so, if either expansion team picked her, they would have to give her a max contract or hope that she’s willing to take a smaller deal, like Monique Billings did with the Valkyries. It’s unlikely that either team will want to use its sole core designation on Wheeler.
Meanwhile, Mühl and Brown are under contract, which would make them interesting targets for the Tempo and Fire, and Holmes is a reserved free agent. Protecting one of them and ensuring that they remain on the roster for the 2026 season would make more sense—more sense even than protecting Brittney Sykes. Sykes was an All-Star last season, but she also simply wasn’t a great fit with the Storm and didn’t improve the team’s lack of playoff success. If she felt the same way, she would walk in free agency anyway, which, in turn, would make protecting her pointless.
Between Holmes, Brown, and Mühl, the latter seems like the most fitting selection. Holmes is playing well in Australia this season, but she has also rarely gotten a chance to play WNBA minutes so far and would have to compete with a stacked frontcourt rotation. Brown shot the three incredibly well in the 2022 and 2023 seasons, but then never really cracked Noelle Quinn’s rotation in Seattle. She is also older than Mühl, who fits Malonga’s timeline better and is currently in the midst of a strong season in Hungary despite just returning from an ACL tear. Losing her in the expansion draft, which would undoubtedly happen if she were left unprotected, would hurt the Storm more than losing Brown or Holmes.
Projected list of protected players: Dominique Malonga, Gabby Williams, Ezi Magbegor, Jordan Horston, Nika Mühl