Seattle Storm Re-Sign Former WNBA MVP

With WNBA free agency opening up today, and players now free to sign wherever they please, the Seattle Storm are bringing back the biggest piece of their team from a year ago, with Nneka Ogwumike set to re-join the club as announced by her sister, Chiney Ogwumike live on ESPN. Both sisters are former Stanford Cardinal.

When your sister gets to break your news 🙌

Nneka Ogwumike is re-signing with the Storm, a source tells @chiney ❤️ pic.twitter.com/6r9YLy5Ngh
— ESPN (@espn) January 31, 2025

Nneka, 34, was the WNBA MVP in 2016 as a member of the Los Angeles Sparks, the team that she had spent her entire career with up until 2024 when she signed on with Seattle for the first time. That same year she helped guide L.A. to their WNBA championship since 2002. She was also the first overall pick back in 2012.

The Sparks are a team that has had a lot of star players, with two of the tops being Lisa Leslie and Candace Parker, but it's Ogwumike that is ranked as their No. 1 franchise player of all-time by Basketball-Reference. That's certainly a useful player for any team to have, but she's with Seattle now. With another season like the one that she had in 2024, she could vault into Seattle's top-10 as well.

Prior to her arrival with the Storm, Seattle had gone just 11-29 in 2023 following the departure of Breanna Stewart, who had been the team's top player since 2016. With Ogwuike on board, the Storm improved to 25-15 last year, good for a fifth seed entering the playoffs.

Unfortunately, the two-time defending WNBA champions, the Las Vegas Aces, held the No. 4 seed, and Seattle promptly lost two games on the road in the first round and were eliminated from the postseason.

In addition to bringing back Ogwumike, the Storm were also involved in a blockbuster trade last week, sending guard Jewell Loyd to the Aces, while Las Vegas sent Kelsey Plum to the Sparks. In return, Seattle received the No. 2 overall pick in the upcoming WNBA Draft, a 2026 first-round selection, and Li Yueru.

Yueru hasn't seen a ton of action in the WNBA, playing in 54 games across two seasons since she was drafted in 2019, but she is also 6-foot-7 and you can't teach size. It will be interesting to see how the Storm deploy her this upcoming season.

The most important part of the return will be the draft picks, specifically the one this year, since we already know which pick it is. There have been rumors floating around the internet that UConn's Paige Bueckers, the presumptive No. 1 overall pick in the upcoming draft, doesn't want to play for the Dallas Wings. How true those rumors are is up for debate, though after Dallas landed the No. 8 pick in another trade, some are thinking they did that to also land Bueckers' UConn teammate Azzi Fudd.

Yet, on the one hand, you could see Seattle perhaps having some knowledge of how Bueckers is thinking, and saying, to themselves "hey maybe we can get her at No. 2 instead!" That, or they could trade the No. 2 pick to Dallas, who wouldn't be getting Bueckers anyway.

That's one of the more exciting versions of how this all plays out, and adding Bueckers would certainly be a franchise-altering addition.

On the other hand, it's hard to see a team not wanting Bueckers for themselves, so Seattle landing the pick could mean that they end up with Notre Dame's Olivia Miles instead. Either way, they're going to be getting a solid draft prospect, and with Nneka Ogwumike on board, they'll have a former MVP and a WNBA champion to learn from.