The WNBA Draft Lottery will be held tonight, and several teams have a shot at the No. 1 pick. The list includes the Portland Fire, the Houston Comets, the Toronto Tempo, the Washington Mystics (by way of the Chicago Sky), the Seattle Storm, and the Los Angeles Sparks.
USC's JuJu Watkins is the presumed No. 1 pick at this point in the season. It's worth pointing two things. First, Watkins, who missed the 2025-26 NCAA season after she tore her ACL, has the option to stay in college for one more year and could well take it. Second, the season is very young, and there's no way to know that any of these teams would 100% draft Watkins at the top spot (though the chances seem pretty good, they just might).
So with that out of the way, let's look at a third important point: drafting Watkins at the No. 1 pick isn't enough to dramatically rewrite things for the Sparks, and it's not entirely clear that ownership even deserves the chance to find out.
To say the Sparks organization is in a state of quiet disarray is putting it mildly. The team is actually up for sale right now; Mark Walter is hoping to get a massive $700 million for the franchise (the deal includes their practice facility, which is still under construction). Walter is currently ensnared in an FBI investigation into his financial dealings, and previously put his ownership stake in the Los Angeles Lakers up for sale. The investigation alone doesn't mean that Walter or his holding company TWG Global have actually committed any crimes.
(Walter is accused of engaging in or brokering deals despite any conflict of interest that may be present.)
Legal issues aside, drafting Watkins at the top spot would almost put a band-aid on what's been the result of years of mismanagement and poor draft decisions. Some of that's not their fault — there was no way to know Kelsey Plum, who the Sparks traded Dominique Malonga's pick for ahead of this season — would get injured and rule the team out of playoff contention. Nneka Ogwumike retired at the end of the 2026 season, and the Sparks are still suffering the results of the Ariel Atkins-Rickea Jackson trade (to be fair, Jackson sat out most of this season with an injury as well).
None of this is the fault of the players, who actually do deserve a shot at the kind of star power and potential rebuild Watkins could offer — but the organization needs to prove it could skillfully and meaningfully use Watkins in the first place, and right now, there's just not a lot of evidence to go on.
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