Storm Week 3: Two Wins and a Debut

It was a fun week to be a Storm fan as Seattle went 2-1 and raised their overall record to 3-4. It’s probably just a function of an easy schedule, but the Storm aren’t even healthy yet and it’s not too hard to squint and convince yourself that the rebuild is well underway already and it could accelerate into a playoff spot as soon as this season.

Wednesday: Storm lose a close one

The week did not start w

ell with Connecticut’s bench leading them to a 80-78 victory on Wednesday night. Natisha Hiedeman had two good looks to win it for Seattle in the closing seconds, but missed them both and the Sun finally had their first win of the season. T had her best game of the year despite missing at the buzzer and Mackenzie Holmes silenced any critics who might have been surprised that the Storm waived Grace VanSlooten instead of her by scoring her career high before the end of the second quarter. Connecticut’s 62 bench points were the headline (most in WNBA history per Richard Cohen) but from my seat the game was ultimately all about the paint. With Dom still concussed, Awa not yet here, and Ezi still injured the team just could not get rebounds or stop Connecticut from scoring inside. I was also surprised that Coach Raman went with Lexie Brown to close the game and never brought Flau’jae back into the game after the middle of the 3rd quarter. She said afterwards it was “just due to the flow of the game” but ok, sure, that still means you either liked something you saw from Lexie (who admittedly did have a couple of nice back door cuts for scores early in the 4th) or you did not like something you saw from Flau’jae.

Friday: Storm get revenge over Connecticut

With all 3 of their best bigs out yet again, the Storm signed Joyner Holmes to a hardship contract before Friday night’s rematch with the Sun. Her numbers weren’t gaudy but she did seem to make a difference. In the end it was a comfortable 77-59 win for Seattle, paced by a career high 25 points off the bench for Zia Cooke. Flau’jae also impressed with 17 points, 7 rebounds, 5 assists, and 3 blocks. She did have 5 turnovers as well, but I’m ok with her trying stuff and seeing what works and what doesn’t work at this level. Video gamers would call it “limit testing” and she got to do 31 minutes of that in this game after playing just 16 minutes in the last one. She led the team in rebounds for the 2nd time (which is two times more than I would have predicted before the season started) and those 3 blocks made her the fastest guard in history to get to 10 blocks. In an even more impressive testament to her defense, she somehow led the entire league, regardless of position, in “stocks” (aka steals plus blocks) after this game. The Storm defense overall was good too and held the Sun to just 7 points in the second quarter. The game never really got close after that.

Sunday: Awa Fam makes her debut

Sunday’s game against the Washington Mystics featured the debut of #3 overall draft pick Awa Fam. She looked good in her 20 minutes, scoring 10 points and playing very noticeably solid defense in the paint as well. According to ESPN she is the 14th person to play in the WNBA as a teenager, and only the 2nd to score 10+ points in her debut. (American players aren’t eligible to be drafted until they finish college or are 22, whereas international prospects are draft-eligible the year they turn 20.) While Fam is only 19, she does have a fair bit of professional experience playing in Spain already, where she was a starter on the Valencia team that won the Spanish title this year, and she has also been playing for the Spanish national team. Not the U19 team, but the full adult Spanish national team, which is ranked #6 in the world in the latest FIBA rankings. Fam was 5th in points and 2nd in rebounds for them at the recent qualifier tournament for this fall’s World Cup.

The final score of 97-85 does not do the game justice as the Storm defense was stout while they built a 26-point 3rd quarter lead before the Mystics got loose in garbage time to the tune of 31 4th quarter points. The best defender on the roster – Ezi Magbegor (who has been one of the 10 players on the WNBA All Defense team in each of the last 4 seasons) – hasn’t played yet, but the defense is already starting to come together. That has to be a testament to Sonia Raman and her staff (though we do still need to see how they match up against teams from the top half of the standings). The game plan for this one apparently came from assistant Natalie Achonwa and involved packing the paint to force Washington to shoot 3’s, which they aren’t particularly good at. I wasn’t sure they could pull that off without Dom or Ezi, but they did. Stef Dolson deserves a lot of credit for that and was a team-high +16.

On offense T stayed hot, tying her career high with 24 points. Flau’jae also tied her own career high with 17 and had the highlight moment of the game for me when she hit a 3 and then stared down Mystics coach Sydney Johnson. Was she saying “How dare you disrespect me by telling your team to go under screens against me” or was she saying “How dare you disrespect me by not drafting me at #4 overall”? Either way it’s truly a joy to root for a player with that level of swag. Makes the play, hits the shot, and then stares down the enemy COACH!

Player of the Week

I’m gonna go with Natisha Hiedeman as my player of the week. She led the team with 55 points this week, while also tying for the team lead in assists (13) and doing all that with just 4 turnovers across the 3 games. Hell, she had as many “stocks” as she did turnovers, which is pretty impressive for someone who has the ball in her hands as much as she does (and played the most minutes). Shout out also to Jordan Horston for having 6 steals this week. As she works her way back from the ACL tear that cost her last season her defense has been immediately excellent. We also might be starting to see a few good signs on the offensive end as well. And shout out to Zia Cooke, who put up 45 points off the bench this week (that’s fully 15 a game), as well as Mackenzie Holmes, who led the team in both rebounds and blocks.

Around the W

There are a LOT of European players making an impact around the W this season. The Storm are certainly part of this trend after adding teenagers Dominique Malonga and Awa Fam in the last two drafts. However, the part of the trend that I think is flying a little bit under the radar is all the free agency signings of players who have been playing in Europe for many years, but just have never been interested in playing in the W before. With a huge influx of TV money fueling a new salary structure thanks to the recent CBA, the rookie minimum salary in the WNBA is up to $270,000. Last year the rookie-scale money a W team could offer to a random European player was just $66,079. If you’re a 24-30 year old professional basketball player making a couple hundred thousand euros a year playing in your home country, would 66 grand be enough to get you to spend your summer playing more basketball on a new continent? A number of players who are plenty good enough to play in the W opted to enjoy their summer vacations instead. But now the W is offering 4.5 times as much money and suddenly a lot more players are interested.

We’ve seen a couple of teams specialize in scouting European players in recent years, and it has provided a huge advantage to them, in my opinion. The Phoenix Mercury in particular made the finals last year with a roster that spent all its money on 3 superstars but still managed to put an impressive amount of depth around them because of all the “rookies” they signed. They didn’t make a single draft pick in 2025, but nonetheless had 6 rookies on their roster! Those 6 rookies were ages 24, 25, 29, 23, 25, and 29 years old. A couple of those were American players who failed to make the W when they graduated college and have been plying their trade overseas while improving their games, but the best story was Monique Akoa Makani. She was born in Cameroon, moved to France at age 9, and started playing for ASVEL Feminin at 17 (that’s the French-league team owned by former San Antonio Spurs legend Tony Parker). The Mercury brought her in as an undrafted, 24-year old rookie last year and she immediately wowed them, not only making the team but grabbing a spot in the opening day starting lineup that she never relinquished. If people valued defense she probably would have made the all-rookie team last year (in a strong year), but as it is I suspect she finished 6th (the full vote totals were not released publicly).

This year Phoenix is at it again with 28-year old Serbian player Jovana (pronounced Yo-vana) Nogic being thrown straight into the starting lineup. She scored 19 points in their opening night beatdown of the Las Vegas Aces despite not even having a single practice under her belt as she missed most of the preseason finishing up her European obligations. She also scored 27 in their win against the Sky and is averaging 14.7 points per game while shooting a blistering 51% from 3-point range on high volume. (That puts her 2nd among all rookies, trailing Olivia Miles by just 0.3 points per game.) On top of all that, she has one of my new favorite nicknames in the W: they call her “Yo-yo.”

New York is the other team that has been unearthing European gems for a few seasons now. Leonie Fiebich (who is from Landsberg, Germany) was drafted in 2020 (by the Sparks) when she was 20 years old, but did not come over to play for them, or for Chicago when the Sparks traded her rights to the Sky. W teams get to keep draft rights to a player basically forever once they draft them, but there is a limit to how many of these “stashed” players you can hold onto from year to year (I believe the limit is 4 and gets checked when the league year rolls over from December to January). New York traded for Fiebich’s rights in early 2023 and then finally convinced her to try out the W in 2024. New York immediately won the title in her rookie year, with her ascension to the starting lineup considered a huge part of what put them over the top. Similarly, this year New York finally convinced Raquel Carrera to come play in the W after she was drafted by Atlanta in 2021 and New York traded for her rights in 2022. (For whatever it’s worth, Carrera and Fiebich both play their European ball for the same Valencia team as Awa Fam. Carrera was MVP of that league this year.) Meanwhile a different undrafted rookie – Pauline Astier from France – has been starting at point guard for the Liberty while Sabrina Ionescu was hurt, and is 3rd on the team in points.

I could tell a bunch more stories like that, including Maria Conde, who was drafted in 2019 by the Sky and then drafted in each of the last two expansion drafts before finally playing her first games in the W for the Toronto Tempo this season. Laura Juškaitė is also a 28-year old rookie for the Tempo. And Emma Čechová looked great as an undrafted rookie for the Lynx until she tore her ACL. My real point here is that the draft gets all the hype as the place where new talent enters the WNBA, but I think the salaries are now high enough that talented players from all over the world are a lot more interested in giving the W a try, and teams really ought to be investing in scouting all that potential international talent.