On April 15, the WNBA welcomed 36 of the best college and international Women’s basketball prospects to the league at the 2024 WNBA Draft. With only 144 total roster spots available across the league’s 12 teams, however, being selected on draft night marked the beginning rather than the end of those prospects’ paths to the WNBA.
Each year, the days leading up to the WNBA regular season prove to be upsetting and disheartening for the majority of the players who got drafted just weeks earlier. 58% of the players selected in last year’s WNBA draft fell victim to the roster cuts that reduced each team’s training camp roster to 12 or fewer players. Only 15 draftees made an opening-day roster. 21, including three first-round picks, did not.
Even though teams are allowed up to 12 players on their opening-day rosters, some teams go into the regular season with only 11—inhibited by the WNBA’s hard salary cap set at just under $1.5 million. Each team is required to have at least 11 players on its roster during the regular season and can only have more than 12 players or exceed the league’s salary cap with a hardship exception granted by the league in light of a player injury.
Expansion—long overdue—is imminent
The league, which had started with eight teams and expanded to as many as 16 teams at one point, has had only 12 teams since the 2010 season. In 2025, that is set to change. On October 5, 2023, the WNBA announced that an expansion team had been awarded to the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. The team—whose brand identify has yet to be revealed—will be headquartered in Oakland, where it will inherit the Warriors’ previous practice facility and front office. Like the Warriors, Golden State’s WNBA team will play its home games at Chase Center in San Francisco.
Further, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told reporters before the WNBA draft last week that the league plans to add three more teams following the introduction of Golden State’s new franchise. The league is engaged in discussions with city officials from Philadelphia, Toronto, Portland, Denver, Nashville, and South Florida, and it continues to field calls from additional cities. After the WNBA welcomes Golden State’s expansion team in 2025, the league aims to add another team in 2026. Engelbert voiced that she feels “pretty confident” the league will expand to 16 teams again by 2028.
For the 2025 season, there will be 156 total roster spots available across the WNBA to accommodate incoming and existing talent; and in the seasons afterward, three dozen more spaces will become available—signifying the completion of a four-team expansion that will ultimately add 48 new roster spots to a league that, for years, has been forced to abandon talent that has every basis for being there.
For one last year, players could face the same old fate
Established players and fresh faces around the league will begin reporting to training camp on April 28, to compete for the highly-coveted spots on their teams’ opening-day rosters. Training camp, during which each team plays up to two preseason games, is generally considered to be a player’s tryout for one of such spots. On May 13, one day before the regular season begins, teams are required to make the last of their roster cuts to finalize their opening-day rosters.
With one of the most anticipated draft classes in WNBA history, it will be especially interesting to see how opening-day rosters settle around the league. Could this be a draft class from which more than half of the players selected make a team’s opening-day roster? The talent in the WNBA and the competition around the league is certainly not getting any worse…