With Kelsey Plum Traded to Mercury, Sparks Have to Start Over Yet Again

Patience is a virtue, a virtue that the Sparks will now be forced to appreciate.

Los Angeles’s short-lived bid for contender status has come to an end after trading Kelsey Plum to the Mercury for guard Monique Akoa Makani, a 2027 first-round pick and a 2028 second-rounder, according to ESPN. In the end, the gamble produced a 31–40 record over two seasons, a fired general manager and a coach seemingly headed for the exit. The Sparks went all-in for a title window that never truly opened.

How did they get to this point? Rewind to the fall of 2022, when four seasons under Derek Fisher—first as coach, then as coach and general manager—had left one of the WNBA’s flagship franchises in a slow-motion collapse. Candace Parker and Chelsea Gray had already departed and separately went on to win titles elsewhere in ’21 and ’22. Liz Cambage divorced the team that summer. (Literally.) Then, at last, the Sparks made their first sensible move of the decade: They hired Curt Miller, fresh off his second WNBA Finals appearance with the Sun in four years.

Miller wouldn’t get a clean first season, as the Sparks underwent trials that would’ve made Job blush. Already without Katie Lou Samuelson (who was expecting her first child) and Stephanie Talbot (torn ACL overseas), Los Angeles was without free agent additions Jasmine Thomas and Azurá Stevens for the first two weeks of the 2023 season due to lingering injuries. An illness swept through the team, forcing the Sparks to cancel practices and play a game in late May with eight players. (The Aces blew out the Sparks, 93–65.) Secondary ballhandler Layshia Clarendon sat out more than a month after partially tearing their right plantar fascia; Chiney Ogwumike missed the entire second half with an Achilles injury. Lexie Brown dealt with what was then undiagnosed Crohn’s disease. All told, the Sparks played 18 different starting lineups. They still managed to finish one game out of a playoff spot.

And so begins a series of decisions that made sense in a vacuum but less so with context. As it entered a new rebuilding phase, Los Angeles hired former TCU coach Raegan Pebley in 2024 to take over as general manager. (She had no previous executive experience.) Pebley traded Jordin Canada, a 28-year-old veteran at the time, for what ultimately amounted to Aari McDonald, Julie Allemand, Li Yueuru and Liatu King. (Canada had come off the best season in her career; McDonald, Allemand, Yueru and King would all play just one year in a Sparks uniform.) Nneka Ogwumike left and, with Cameron Brink and Rickea Jackson in tow as the No. 2 and No. 4 picks of the 2024 draft, respectively, a youth movement started in earnest.

That youth movement barely had time to begin. Brink tore her ACL 15 games into her rookie season, and a roster built to develop stumbled to a league-worst 8–32 record. Los Angeles missed the playoffs for a fourth consecutive year and responded by parting ways with Miller. Yet Miller had coaxed an injury-ravaged team into playoff contention in 2023 and entered ’24 with a stripped-down roster. A coach known for player development, with extensive playoff and Team USA experience, should have appeared unusually well suited to guide what came next. The Sparks thought differently.

Fate would not respond kindly. Dallas entered the 2025 draft with a 45.4% chance of landing the No. 1 pick—slightly better than Los Angeles’s 44.2% odds after taking into account the Wings’ right to swap picks with Chicago—and emerged with the right to draft Paige Bueckers. The Sparks were hardly left empty-handed. Even beyond Bueckers, the class featured high-end building blocks between Olivia Miles, Dominique Malonga, Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen. At the time, there was no public indication that Miles might forgo the draft and return for a fifth collegiate season.

Maybe the Sparks knew otherwise. That would help explain, though not justify entirely, Los Angeles’s decision to trade the 2025 No. 2 pick, a second-rounder and Yueru in a deal to acquire Plum, the Storm’s ’25 No. 9 pick (which became Sarah Ashlee Barker) and Seattle’s ’26 second-round selection (which became Chance Gray). At Plum’s introductory press conference, Pebley said, “We’re fully committed to winning now.”

There were three problems with that statement. One, with a new CBA on the horizon, there was no guarantee that Plum would stay in L.A. for more than one year. Two, the Sparks had replaced a veteran coach (Miller) with one who had no WNBA experience (Lynne Roberts). Three, the Sparks were not in a position to win right away. Even with Plum, oddsmakers gave L.A. the ninth-best odds to win the title in 2025. They were correct. The Sparks finished ninth and endured their fifth consecutive losing season that year.

They would lean even further into the present during this past offseason. Pebley traded Jackson, one of the team’s core young players on an affordable contract, for Ariel Atkins, an eight-year veteran who came with a hefty price tag. (L.A. signed Atkins, one of the league’s best defenders, to a three-year, $3.4 million deal.) The Sparks brought back Nneka Ogwumike on a one-year deal, and Plum stayed.

The Sparks are now reaping the impatience they’ve sown. They sit 10–17, 5.5 games outside the playoff picture. Despite adding Atkins and Ogwumike, their defense has still struggled. Pebley is gone, fired on July 12. Roberts may not be far behind. And with Plum traded, Los Angeles is back where it was two years ago—only now without Jackson, without the No. 2 pick it spent to accelerate its timeline and likely without the luxury of another top-two selection to jump-start whatever comes next. Patience is no longer a choice.

Ownership now appears to recognize the extent of the problem, one it helped create. At the end of the 2024 season, co-owner Magic Johnson acknowledged that the group had been too passive. “It’s probably been my fault that I’ve let [Sparks managing partner and governor] Eric Holoman make all the decisions and us as the owners, we’ve been sitting back a little,” Johnson then told the L.A. Times.

The franchise has since announced plans for a dedicated $150 million training facility, scheduled to open in 2027. There have been indications that the balance of decision-making power may be shifting, too. Farhan Zaidi, the former Dodgers and Giants executive who now serves as a special adviser to owner Mark Walter, emerged as the organization’s public voice after Pebley’s firing.

“We pushed in a lot of chips this year, and we had good reason to do that, but the reality is it hasn’t gone as we’d hoped or expected,” Zaidi told the Times on July 29. “Now we have to be open for anything. Everything has to be on the table for us. We have to take a long-term perspective rather than focusing on the rest of the season.”

He added: “We have to be realistic where we are. We don’t want to be that team stuck in the middle.”

Avoiding the middle will require more than another round of aggressive transactions, and assistant GMs Zach Knowlton and Nate Nielsen, who came to the Sparks after serving in NBA front office roles, will have their work cut out for them as they split GM duties in the interim. Under the new CBA, roster construction is an increasingly unforgiving exercise. To contend, teams need star players and depth. Signing three players to standard maximum contracts leaves roughly half the salary cap to distribute among the rest of the roster, and finding players capable of outperforming mid-tier contracts is difficult. It requires a sharp eye for international talent, as teams have demonstrated with players such as Pauline Astier and Akoa Makani, or projecting which undervalued veterans can thrive in a new environment. Toronto did the latter with Isabelle Harrison, who signed for $400,000 and has produced career-best numbers.

Surplus value may also be found in the draft. First-round picks cost 4% to 7% of the cap, allowing teams to add foundational players without paying market price for at least three years. The 2025 draft has offered several examples: Malonga, Citron and Iriafen have all played at an All-Star level less than two years into their career. If they don’t make an All-WNBA team or win MVP and trigger the CBA’s “EPIC” provision—which isn’t a certainty, given how hard it is to do so—then the Mystics and Storm won’t have to shell out sizable extensions until 2029. The Sparks had the opportunity to select one of them and take a swing in free agency at a later date. Instead, they exchanged that advantage for a shortcut that lasted barely two seasons.

The bill has come due. Not without hope: In Akoa Makani, they acquired a young two-way guard who started every game in Phoenix’s run to the finals last year. She will carry a minuscule $288,600 cap hit next season, after which L.A. can retain her exclusive negotiating rights. Phoenix’s first-round pick could also give the Sparks two lottery selections in a guard-rich 2027 draft. Farther out, another year near the bottom of the standings could place them in the Sarah Strong-Mikayla Blakes-Joyce Edwards sweepstakes in 2028. That’s a pathway forward to a foundation that will last for years to come.

Together, those assets offer Los Angeles a path toward a foundation built to last.

Provided, of course, that the Sparks stay the course.

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