Here at “Sports for Dummies,” we are unequivocally feminists.

We watch women’s sports with the same fervor as finance bros watching the stock market — anxiously, obsessively and with the creeping suspicion that someone somewhere is being robbed. We believe in equal pay, equal coverage and the equal right to become completely unhinged watching a woman do something on a basketball court that makes the crowd lose their minds and makes you, a person who learned the rules 30 minutes ago, lose your mind too. 

Which brings us to the WNBA Draft — an annual event that, if you are not already watching, you should be. It is chaotic. It is joyful. And it is occasionally heartbreaking — in other words, it is everything sports are. 

How does the draft work?

The WNBA Draft is how professional women’s basketball teams acquire new players, duh — and per a 30-year USC and Purdue study published in 2021, it happens in a sports media landscape where women’s athletics receives approximately 5% of total television coverage. 

Five percent. Let’s sit with this for a second.

Three rounds. Fifteen teams — including two new expansion franchises this season, the Portland Fire and the Toronto Tempo, because the league is thriving and you should be paying attention. 

This year, in the WNBA’s historic 30th season, 45 players were drafted, the most since 2002. Teams pick in reverse order of their previous season’s record — the league’s polite way of telling struggling franchises, “Here’s your consolation prize, please do something with it.” 

The truly mysterious part is that being drafted is not the same as playing. Some players get selected in the first round with full confetti-cannon fanfare and then spend their rookie season warming a bench. Others slip through the draft entirely, get signed as free agents and become starters. 

Love in the air, the court

Lots of coverage on this draft led with the same name, and we are not above that. UConn guard Azzi Fudd was selected No. 1 overall by the Dallas Wings — and before you ask, yes, the same Dallas Wings that selected Paige Bueckers No. 1 overall last year.

Paige Bueckers and Azzi Fudd — the most glorious women-loving-women couple in the sports limelight. They are going to play together. Professionally. In actual televised games. 

Fudd shoots the ball the way some people parallel park — not either of us, though — with a calm, unhurried confidence that makes everyone watching question whether they have been taking life seriously enough. She shot 44.7% from 3-point range for the Huskies this past season — eclipsing the marks of most WNBA players from the field. 

Bueckers, meanwhile, had a WNBA rookie season so absurd it reads like an article from The Onion someone forgot to make believable — 19.2 points and 5.4 assists per game, a record-breaking 44-point performance shooting over 80% from the field and a Rookie of the Year award she won by a 70-2 vote, which raises the question of who those two people were and what they were thinking.

Putting them on the same court is either a stroke of organizational genius or a war crime against opposing defenses. Possibly both. But undeniably, this is the most romantic thing to happen in sports, possibly ever. The games are almost beside the point. 

The Kara Dunn situation, which we are not over

Let the record show that Kara Dunn — a Trojan, our Trojan — averaged 15.2 points and five rebounds per game this season, earned All-Big Ten Second Team honors, started every single one of USC’s 32 games and was not drafted.

That’s right. She was not drafted!

Forty-five players were selected. Dunn was not one of them. The “SFD” two-person editorial board has convened, deliberated and agreed unanimously that this is an injustice of the highest order, and whoever decided otherwise will have to live with that decision, and so will we.

However, the plot thickens — Dunn signed a training camp contract with the Phoenix Mercury, meaning the door is not closed, merely ajar, waiting for her to blow it open. Training camp is an audition, and if Dunn performs the way she is entirely capable of, she will be suiting up before the season has time to forget she exists.

We are watching, Ms. Dunn. Do not let the league sleep on you twice. 

Here’s the thing about the WNBA in the big 2026: The counterculture is already in motion, and you’re either on the plane or watching it take off. The 2025 season averaged 1.2 million viewers per game — the most-watched WNBA season in ESPN history, even without superstar Caitlin Clark suiting up for much of it. The league also just signed a $2.2 billion media deal.

The NBA, for reference, has been reheating its nachos since 1946. It’s had 80 years to figure out how to be interesting. The WNBA is 30, facing a trifling lack of media coverage, but still continues to break its own records and bring more women athletes into the male-dominated fold. We advise you to hop on the WNBA plane now while it is still in taxi. 

Julia Ho is a junior and an associate managing editor at the Daily Trojan. Heydy Vasquez is a senior and an Opinion editor at DT. Together, they write about sports for newcomers and skeptics alike in their column, “Sports for Dummies,” which runs every other Friday.