WNBA Draft: No. 1 pick intrigue, a UConn reunion and UCLA bonanza highlight league's kickoff of 30th season

NEW YORK — The faces of the 29 previous No. 1 overall WNBA draft picks, from Tina Thompson to Paige Bueckers, adorned stickers up the sides of the escalator at The Shed at Hudson Yards on Monday.

Azzi Fudd became No. 30 on the stage of the nearby draft floor, an honor that was not clear-cut until commissioner Cathy Engelbert called her name as the Dallas Wings’ selection. The nervous energy on the faces of all three potential top picks in the moments before Engelbert came back on the stage emanated from the screens on either side of the podium.

It is rare in the history of the WNBA that the No. 1 pick is not a clear and consensus one months ahead of draft day, let alone in the final hours. But Fudd, Spain’s Awa Fam Thiam and TCU’s Olivia Miles were all viable choices in the mix this year, trading spots in every mock draft.

The process became all the more complicated this year by a delayed free agency period that remains ongoing this week ahead of training camps opening on Sunday.

Fudd became the seventh No. 1 overall pick from Connecticut and will rejoin last year’s top pick, Paige Bueckers, a year after they won an NCAA national championship together.

The historic selection is a signal that her pure shooting ability, heralded early in her young career by Stephen Curry, outweighed any concerns over her injury history, which includes multiple ACL tears that limited her collegiate playing time. The Wings looked at the backcourt options after signing co-Defensive Player of the Year Alanna Smith to anchor their frontcourt.

The Lynx selected Miles at No. 2 with the pick they received from Chicago. The point guard delivers passes that few others can with a rare court vision. She’s a future building piece who can feed Napheesa Collier, should the MVP runner-up re-sign with Minnesota, as head coach and president of basketball operations Cheryl Reeve retools a broken-apart roster. It could also move Courtney Williams back over to more of a shooting guard after she took on ball-handling duties in Minnesota.

Fam, a 6-foot-4 center from Spain, went No. 3 to Seattle as a rebuilding piece with Dominique Malonga, last year’s second overall selection. The Storm are also rebuilding a roster that lost three veteran players in free agency this weekend. They’ll play their first season under first-time head coach Sonia Raman after underperforming since the 2020 championship team broke apart.

And at No. 4, reigning NCAA national champion Lauren Betts led a record five first-round selections from UCLA as the Washington Mystics’ pick. The 6-7 center will join a roster stockpiled quite possibly far too high with young talent, most of which is in the frontcourt. She will reunite in training camp with UCLA assistant coach Michaela Onyenwere, who signed with the Mystics on Sunday night. Washington also drafted UCLA’s Angela Dugalić at No. 9.

General managers and basketball operations teams came in over-prepared for the collegiate draft while the Board of Governors and WNBA Players Association negotiated a transformative collective bargaining agreement (CBA) this offseason.

Since the terms were not agreed upon until March 18, it condensed the offseason workflow into a chaotic few weeks of a two-team expansion draft and a free agency period that included most of the league.

Front offices entered last week with at best four or five players on their rosters. At worst, a singular rookie-scale player stood alone in a metaphorical practice facility. Neither was ideal for plotting a collegiate draft usually situated to fill immediate and future holes. It was difficult to project fit without sorting through whom they could land in free agency.

While most teams are in a good spot after locking in their starting rotation over the weekend, or at least are actively finagling the financial roster gymnastics (looks over the East River to Brooklyn), rosters are still being finalized after the signing period opened on Saturday. It was merely weeks ago that front offices learned of the 2026 salary cap number and the nuances of the CBA.

The league front office kept working behind the scenes during negotiations on the draft, the schedule and the 30th anniversary plans it unveiled this month.

“The planning never ends,” WNBA chief growth officer Colie Edison told a small group of reporters on Monday morning. “There was a little bit of hurry up and wait, as you guys know, and now it’s just hurry up and execute.”

The 70- to 80-page short-term document that the sides agreed upon is still being finalized into a long-form CBA that could stretch to 500 pages, and should be done in the “near-term,” Engelbert said in her pre-draft address.

It includes roster requirements and the introduction of up to two developmental spots per team, which bumped the total number of WNBA players per season to 210. For the first time in the history of the list of No. 1 picks, those selected throughout the rest of the draft — particularly beyond the first round — have a higher likelihood of sticking on a regular-season roster.