The WNBA and the WNBPA have locked in a verbal agreement for a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), and will begin the process of ratification, which can take several weeks, so that the 2026 WNBA season can begin on May 8.
As many are well aware, plenty has to happen before the season can begin. That list begins with the expansion draft for the Toronto Tempo and the Portland Fire. Both teams were announced in 2024, and likely intended to begin building their rosters in late 2025. (The team's 2025 expansion team, the Golden State Valkyries, held their own expansion draft in December 2024.)
It's likely the Tempo and the Fire have spent plenty of time it took to negotiate a new CBA putting together lists (and back up lists) of players they hope to draft ahead of this season. That will be useful, because the teams do not have a lot of time to do so now. And though the rules of the new CBA that relate to expansion drafts haven't yet been shared publicly, presumably their drafts will work similarly to the Valkyries'.
But unfortunately for both teams, the Tempo and the Fire will not get to take advantage of one key element that definitely helped Golden State: about half the league will simply be unavailable. This acocounts for the five (or six, depending on if the CBA changes the rules for this year's drafts — it's believed the new expansion drafts rules go into effect in 2027) players from each team that will be protected, as well as players that teams have rights to right now.
That number is somewhere around 90, and includes players under contract with a team right now, players that teams have negotiating rights with, restricted free agents, and players whose draft rights already belong to teams in the league. The rest of the league are unrestricted free agents, and the Tempo and Fire can draft as many as they'd like — but they can only core one (or that player could simply hop to another team during free agency).
With that in mind, it may serve both new teams to look at the list of players who have been drafted but not yet made their WNBA debuts, or to look more broadly at overseas players (which is a tactic the Valkyries used to great effect). One way or another, the Tempo and the Fire will get the draft done — but it might not look the way fans expect it to.